The body in the City: A discourse on cyberscience. M.Christine Boyer

• • Title:The Body in Architecture
    
  • Published:Rotterdam : Uitgeverij 010 Publishers , 2006.
    
  • Physical description:379 p. : col. ill. ; 24cm.
    
  • ISBN:9064505683
    
  • Contributors:Graafland, Ad.
    Hauptmann, Deborah.
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• pp.27. The city and the body are both systems that function and malfunction, involving complex processes that remain invisible or unspecified. In both the city and the body there is a deep-seated network of pathways and interrelationships between layers and parts, which keep the city or the body functioning, delivering life or death. A highly complex system is one in which the observer does now have complete knowledge or information and can not make a complete structural or operational description of how the system works, or describe the casual connections between its parts, or explain how its behaviour is produced. Thus complexity is measured by the information the analyzer does not have and would need to specify the system in all of its details. It necessarily requires the construction of models that simulate the organized and behavior of the system.
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• pp.9 . In his A philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful, he remarks:
• I know that it has been said long since, and echoed backward and forward from one writer to another a thousand times, that the proportions of building have been taken from those of the human body. To make this forced analogy complete, they represent a man with his arms raised and extended at full length, and then describe a sort of squre, as it is formed by passing lines along the extremities of this strange figure. But it appears very clearly to me, that the human figure never supplied the architect with any of his ideas. For in the first place, men are very rarely seen in this strange posture; it is not natural to them; neither is it at all becoming . Secondly, the view of the human figureso disposed does not naturally suggest the idea of the square, but rather of a cross; as that large space between the arms and the ground, must be filled with something before it can make anybody think of a square. Thirdly, several buildings are by no means of the form of that particular square, which are notwithstanding planned by the best architects, and produce an effect all together as good, and perhaps a better. And certainly nothing could be more unaccountably whimsical than for an architect to model his performance by the human figure, since no two things can have less resemblance or analogy, than a man, and a house or temple.

• dealing with perspective as a conceptual framework that is implicit in the theory of perception and proportion. In other words, our theoretical notions of reality are formative for our experiences: thus, what we consider important for experience of architecture is intricately related to our conceptual frames.

pp.10 A body, in Deleuze, can be most anything; it can be an animal, a body of sounds, a linguistic corpus, a social body; yet, a body must be defined as a unity of parts, parts held together relationally and having a capacity to affect and be affected both internally and externally; further, in this reading, it is only kinetic and dynamic differences that mark the individual body and that along two axes; on the kinetic axis there will be a characteristic relation of speed, slowness, relative states of motion and rest that maintain the individual in existence - (hypokeimenon, substrate or perdurance ) - and on the dynamic axis degrees of power, bodies which affect are affected.

What can a body do>?

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