flesh At present, our human bodies, architectural bodies, and urban

This word, flesh, to what does it refer?
jonathan granke with ralph glor
department of architecture
faculty of architecture
university of manitoba
In everyday terms, it can refer to solely the skin; to the soft
substances of the body, including fat and muscle, which surround
the bones and organs and lie beneath the skin; to the body as
a whole, its physical nature; or to human beings as a whole, to
humankind. It can refer to matter – the flesh of a thing. It can
refer to the giving of substance to something, to the making of
something more full or more nearly complete – to flesh out. And
it can refer to being alive, embodied, in person, and present – to
being in the flesh.1 Conversely, in philosophical terms, and more
specifically, phenomenological terms, it frequently refers to Maurice
Merleau-Ponty’s coupled concepts of flesh – the intertwining of
body and mind – and the flesh of the world – the intertwining of self
and environment.2
At present, our human bodies, architectural bodies, and urban
bodies continue to suffer a series of ‘body modifications’ relative to
these notions of flesh. Today, augmented and enhanced through
their coupling with prosthetic technologies, our corporeal bodies
possess both physically and mentally extended capabilities, senses,
and experiential ranges.3 These prosthetic bodies – human bodies
of continuously reconstituted flesh – are now pervasively present.
Contemporaneously, the processes of making architectural bodies
and urban bodies – bodily fragments of the flesh of the world –
have in many ways been reduced to that which can be justified by
economically rational quantitative criteria. Within these processes,
even remotely arational qualitative conderations which might
engage human bodies – criteria of hapticity and sensuality, emotion
and experience, passion and pleasure – are seemingly always
deemed superfluous. The negligence of the most necessary of
these three body types in the making of much architecture and
many cities – our corporeal bodies and their sensory systems – has
contributed and will continue to contribute to what Marcos Cruz
has identified as a “pervasive body detachment,”4 assisting in the
creation of architectural bodies and urban bodies that are bland
and boring, disengaged and dull, experientially empty, monotonous
and uninteresting, sterile and superficial.5
As such, today it seems possible to posit that we live in our world
with a sense of loss, a loss of a sense of meaningful association
between our bodies, our architecture, and our cities. Moreover, it
now seems possible to postulate that architecture is increasingly
in a position of potentially losing its critical cultural and social
relevance and significance if it continues to abandon and neglect,
disregard and ignore its most important instrument – corporeal
bodies – and their active connection with both architectural bodies
and urban bodies.6
Dedicated to the examination and exploration of a new vision for
a future relationship between corporeal bodies and architectural
bodies, this thesis proposes to question in conceptual as well
as concrete terms who we are and how we might inhabit and
use the buildings we design: the ways in which contemporary
human flesh might relate to contemporary architectural flesh.7
As a methodology for reconsidering the relationship between
bodies and built environment, it will explore the idea of flesh and
its association with architecture through two differentiated yet
interrelated approaches: that of prosthetic architectural flesh and
that of architectural atmosphere. Recognizing the current state of
our bodies, our architecture, and our cities, this thesis will appeal
for an embracing of and engagement with the reality of these
contemporary conditions, working to discover and uncover exciting
new possibilities and potentialities in which architecture might come
to emphasize the very nature of our embodied existence – what it
is to be in the flesh.
Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, “Flesh,” Merriam-Webster, http://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/flesh (accessed 10 Jan, 2014).
2
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Intertwining - the Chiasm,” in The Visible and the
Invisible, followed by Working Notes [Le Visible et l’Invisible, suivi de Notes de Travail],
ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
1968), 136, 146.
3
Jonathan Hale, “Architecture, Technology and the Body: From the Prehuman to the
Posthuman,” in The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory, eds. C. Greig Crysler,
Stephen Cairns and Hilde Heynen (London ; Los Angeles, CA ; New Delhi ; Singapore
; Washington DC: Sage, 2012) 514.
4
Marcos Cruz, “Marcos Cruz Architect: The Inhabitable Flesh of Architecture,”
Marcos Cruz, http://marcoscruzarchitect.blogspot.ca/2009/03/inhabitable-flesh-ofarchitecture.html (accessed 12 Dec, 2013).
5
Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (Chichester, West
Sussex: Wiley, 2005), 17-19; Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City
in Western Civilization (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1994), 15.
6
Cruz, Marcos Cruz Architect: The Inhabitable Flesh of Architecture.
7
Cruz, Marcos Cruz Architect: The Inhabitable Flesh of Architecture; Marcos Cruz,
“Marcos Cruz Architect: Research Interests,” Marcos Cruz, http://marcoscruzarchitect.
blogspot.ca/2009/11/research-interests-my-research-is.html (accessed 12 Dec,
2013).
1