Campo obligatorio; no debe dejarse en blanco.

Since I watched a documentary on diagrams produced by the BBC, I have been obsessed with the idea of taking up the challenge of the Vitruvian Man or defining the bodies that inhabit architecture or defining our conception of the body as a carrier of a plethora of traits.

In thinking of this redefinition, I have thought of the psychological, the rational and the irrational, the conscious and the unconscious, of the more tangible like the  limbs and their reach and their implications in the psychological, the social in terms of the subject as a self-conceiving substance in continuous formation and reformation with an ability to interact, this is to reflect and absorb in relating to others and otherness. And, although I have thought of the political in the current climate of an apparent democracy, its power-domination relationships, its distribution of labour, or in short, its resources, I have never thought of the juridicial subject*1. This comes as a surprise to me, but nevertheless obvious, as we live in a regulated society, a perceptual distance (between ruled and ruler) that it is never been felt close enough. Like when we see a prison and we think of Convicts, or a tribunal an we think of the imputed or accused as the Guilty, as if there were a distance between this one-sided subject with no other life realms and us, that go trough the experience of a pure ascetic life/style.

In this realisation there is, we might argue, an overarching framework, that of regulatory codes and forms of law. The body is not subjective anymore and a relatively free moving entity, but an enclosed body within a regulatory practice; society.

Kant says that our world, which can only be subjective, goes as far as our consciousness or that that we are aware of. For so, the Vitruvian Man cannot be an all-reaching principle, but an intersubjective becoming. An aura shaped by forces that deterritorialise and territorialise in a game of push-pulling vectorial forces (yes, Deleuze and Guattari). Because the world is as we perceive it and as we know it, it can't be a shared one. It has to be personal, full of perceptual haecceities. Although haecceity might be a problematic concept-the variations between the idea and the particular or the differing between the ideal and the sensible (in the platonic sense)-we might stop thinking of a formulation that has or posits a base that can be gradually incremented or of an additive nature. The Vitruvian man is therefore all that the flowing substance comprehends and is familiar with.

Here the problem of the unconscious arises, as there is manifestation of the inexplicable or inapprehensible, for not everything that we don't know doesn't exist or part-take in our lives.

Finally there should be a system or a set of parameters that could be set in this endeavour, which could provide for a growing cell or ever-expanding conception. Also lets strip off of all naivety this enterprise, which is not the achievement of a descriptive model for the contemplation or erudition of the general public, but as the Le Corbusier's Modulor, to arrive at a substantial conception of the body, or better put, a conception of the inhabiting body for the generation of an all encompassing architecture, which not only deals with the phenomenological subject, but also with the physical, jurisdictional, historical(composed of memories), etc. subject. As Koolhaas' architecture of direction and promenade, of visual connection and positioning in relation to the urban or the BIG, the architect is not a unidirectional substance, it deals with it internal and external forces; gosh I have to shit or Oh gosh I have to speak, I have to relate or I have to inter-relate. For the subject cannot be conceived as a man in nature, with an out in the air hanging-willy (to follow the masculine conception of history and its representation, for which efforts are being made to challenge and also because a pendulum seems to be more graphically powerful than a static clam)*2 but as a subjected form, to the workings of the practice of architecture, in which physical inanimate substance shape their most direct environment, specifically within the urban context or the metropolis (not equivalent though).

It is important here to notice that the Vitruvian Man has to be conceived within society and not outside of it, for this position to arise will require a relocation or repositioning that I am in no condition to acquire; that of exile. For the rules of the times of Newton might have been those of nature or concededly of physics-hence the apple falling on to his head-for the contemporary man in the western world or more specifically in the Europe, is that of the from-above-falling-Constitution and the rules that govern what is acceptable or unacceptable. If the world of the Vitruvian Man was that of earth or the geocentric conception, currently we could argue we are more immersed in a dynamic heteromorphic constellation subjected to an apparent prevalence of contingency, wether this is real or apparent you will have to ask the market, he (yes He) will give you an answer.




*1 The Ledoux Effect: Emil Kaufmann and the Claims of Kantian Autonomy, from  Osman, M. et al. (eds) (2002) Perspecta 33, Mining Autonomy, The Yale Architectural Journal, Connecticut: Herlin Press. p.21 

*2 My own deviations