new experiences of the body through space

7/27/2019 New Experiences of the Body Through Space

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Eva Mahdalickova

New Experiences Of The Body Through Space

In search of new experiences of the body th rough space:

The new issues in the relationship between subject and space

1. Introducti on

Experimenting space is one of the most essential and natural experiences of our existence. We tend toforget it because we consider it so obvious. However, the question of how we experiment space andhow we express this experience is still of interest for researchers, mainly philosophers and architects.Merleau-Ponty wrote that space is existential and that the existence is spatial[1].Human being is thusfundamentally related to space.

Following Merleau-Pontys thought, we would like to investigate the issues regarding the relationshipbetween Being and space in the contemporary architecture. More precisely, this paper aims at exploringthe new experiences of body that may emerge through space. Our research question is the following:

what are the characteristics of contemporary architectural expression and what will be the experience ofbeings in such spaces?

2. How do we inhabit space?

Before introducing these new spaces, we need to explain the role of body, which is at the origin of theexperience and the expression of space. How is the body intertwined with space?

According to Merleau-Ponty, the body inhabits space, it is not in space : "je ne suis pas dans lespaceet dans le temps, [] je suis lespace et au temps, mon corps sapplique eux et les embrasse"[2].We understand the world, things, others and oneself through our body. The body is at the origin of anysignification. As Merleau-Ponty says, our body is the very origin of any expression as it provides a placefor significations. "Notre corps nest pas seulement un espace expressif parmi tous les autres. Il est

lorigine de tous les autres, le mouvement mme dexpression, ce qui projette au-dehors lessignifications en leur donnant un lieu."[3] Therefore, by inhabiting space, we create a meaning of space,which is based on our capacity to perceive and on our body. The experience of body is a source ofexpression of space.

3. The notion ofFlesh

The experience of the body reveals an ambiguous mode of existence. The body is a notion that holds adouble meaning: it can be viewed and understood as an object (when we say avoir le corps - to have abody) and as a subject (when we say tre son corps vcu - to be a living body). An experience ofthe body should give us both at once. However, the reflection of the body only gives us the thought ofthe body and not the experience of it. Therefore, the two perspectives on the body, the object and thesubject, are separated when the individual only thinks of his body. This is why we have to put anemphasis on the experience. There is no other way to know the body than to live it in the whole, as a

subject and object, as the one who is perceived and who perceives. " Je suis donc mon corps "[4], I ammy body, says Merleau-Ponty and to live the body, it also is to live the space.

This perplexity of the object and the subject is what Merleau-Ponty calls the Flesh. The Flesh creates acommon world on the basis of a fundamental exchange of the perceptible, between the world and thebody. In other words, I draw my sense of the world, to which I give a sense by perceiving it. So thesensible is directly connected to intelligible. All ideas are given to us in the carnal experience. There isno idea without the body, without the sensitive. To perceive, it is exactly to make present something bymeans of the body.

The notion of flesh bursts the idea of subjectivity, because it brings to light the reciprocity and theinterlacing of the body and the world. The Flesh indicates at first the relation between the subject andthe world, the interiority expressing itself or the exteriority interiorizing. The flesh of the body participes

on the flesh of the world : " mon corps est fait de la mme chair que le monde (cest un peru), et quede plus cette chair de mon corps est participe par le monde, il la reflte, il empite sur elle et elleempite sur lui "[5].


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To walk in the space, is also to walk at the same time within the self. The thought is as the walkingwhich changes with the situation, but the situation changes with the walking. Such is also the nature ofthe relation between the space and the subject. Let us note that Bachelard described a human being asa spiral being.

4. Expressing space and architecture

Now, we look at this kind of relationship between the body and the space from the point of view of thearchitecture, which is a realization of the thought of the space. As explained previously, the body isintertwined with space. Therefore, the question is: what do we express exactly when creatingarchitectures? What does architecture reflect exactly? Does it reflect the way we consider space or theway we consider ourselves?

Anish Kapoor wrote that architecture is a reflection or a substitution for the self, a surrogate body[6]. Toexpress space thus becomes to express oneself, to realize the image of the self by the means of space.This image of self used to be recognizable, stable and fixed. So was space that reflected stability too.But the image of self has changed and become mostly fluctuating and instable. The self exceeds hislimits and goes out of his barriers by opening himself to outside. Architecture and space have gonethrough the same evolution: towards more opening.

Architecture is increasingly used as a tool to help people experience space as an open and variabledimension. Architecture is no longer considered as an object, but as a cognitive field, as an extension ofour capacity to perceive. Actually, there are no borders anymore between interior and exterior, there areno fixed partitions. Architecture opens to the outside.

The way we express space conditions the way we experience space. Does the new architecture reflectin a certain sense the thought of Merleau-Ponty, namely the embodiment of the Flesh, as it interlacessubjects and space? What happens with human being?

We let these questions in suspense for this moment as we would like to show how our experience ofspace has changed.

5. The acceleration of the world: t he loss of space

The world, the body and the identity spread and fall to pieces. This hybridization of identity and the worldcreates a hybrid space. If we create new hybrid, changeable, floating forms, there must have somethinghappened with body and with our perception. Let us remind the words of Merleau-Ponty who makesassociation between the dislocation of the world and space and the dislocation of the body : Si lemonde se pulvrise ou se disloque, cest parce que le corps propre a cess dtre corps connaissant,denvelopper tous les objets dans une prise unique, et cette d gradation du corps en organisme doittre elle-mme rapporte laffaissement du temps qui ne se lve plus vers un avenir et retombe surlui-mme [7].

Such is a vision of the world of today. We live in a world where everything accelerates. Speeddominates since it has the absolute power. Speed also changes perception because it reduces theworld as well as the body. The virtual world and the virtual body make the real world and the physicalbody disappears.

Everything is stream, in constant liquefaction. As written by architect Lars Spuybroek (NOX): We areexperiencing an extreme liquidizing of the world, of our language []. We have entered a situationwhere everything becomes mediated, where all matter and space are fussed with their representationsin media[8]. Media are not perceived as a comfort creating service but as a force that accelerates anddestabilizes reality. We loose the direct relationship between the world and our body; all ways passthrough the representation. This experience turns the body into a body-machine or a body-prosthesis (corps-prothse, as it says Paul Virilio).

6. The liquid architecture: the hybrid space

The dissolution of borders occurs at different levels in our societies. For instance, frontiers betweenbody and machine, interior and exterior, virtual and real tend to diminish thanks to innovation and

technological progress. Nowadays, we can live at the same time in both real and virtual space. Even thecities are organized according to both physical and virtual activities. Therefore, one can wonder how tojoin these two extremes? How to keep the identity of place and body in such a fluctuating world? How


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can beings keep their identity and, at the same time, be connected to the world, be everywhere? Stableidentities as well as fixed space are no longer possible, because they do not correspond to the reality oftodays world. An interesting research issue is thus to find new ways to conceive oneself and space,without losing either of them. We should learn to think of both: local and global, the subject and theobject, the identity with its virtual spectres. This introduces a transformation of the real and mentalspace. Such a conversion asks for the invention of the new words and the new spaces.

The architect Mark Goulthorpe (Decoi) speaks about smetic to designate this duality and ambiguity thatexist in our world: So the smetic, caught between the solid and fluid, between the visual and chemicallogics seems a suitably ambiguous or fluctuating term to capture our present change of state as wepass from a scriptural to electronic paradigm. And our sense is that such a suspension will carry to themanner in which we think of practice, to all manner of creative process, to a reversal of the process ofour thought and drift or relative fluidity of consciousness[9].

The liquid architecture reflects the fluidity of the consciousness. It introduces the other modes of thecognitions, the new plastic and visceral environment which synthesizes the action, the perception andthe vision. This floating environment serves as an interface between public and private. It is also a goodillustration of the hybrid space which joins opposites, by leaning on both, physical body and virtuality.Hybrid space proposes an approach to architecture that creates new cultural codes and disruptionswithin the physical and electronic networks that connect our international and local cultures.

7. The interactive architecture and the intelli gent houses

How does architecture represent the culture of interactivity? Architecture can be transformed intocomplex intelligent system, capable of inherent transformations. Its a kind of mutant body whichinteracts with its context. Can we consider the visceral environment like the extension of the body ormore like the substitute of the body? It could be the both. There is a fusion between the body and thetechnology. Marcos Novak asserts that it is the brain itself and its activity that become source ofarchitectural expression. Previous sections discussed how the body interacts with space, we can nowwonder how does this interaction change within the new interactive spaces of today?

The interactive architecture is a recent phenomenon that is related to the development of newtechnologies. In 1994, NOX realized one of the first interactive architectures with the Pavillon de leaudouce in Netherlands, where the projections of water and light interfered with the visitors, exposing a

world in liquefaction. Such architecture transformed into stream of information, claims its continuousmetamorphosis in space and time.

Architecture also reflects our time, the world as a fluctuations and stream. However, it also reveals acondition of the being, the fluid space being the original space, is an echo of the chaos that contains allcreative forces. Merleau-Ponty speaks about the stream of experiences in the natural attitude, where theperception are not localized : je nai pas des perceptions, je ne pose pas cet objet ct de cet autreobjet et leurs relations objectives, jai un flux dexpriences qui simpliquent et sexpliquent lunelautre aussi bien dans le simultan que dans la succession [10].

The interactive architecture transforms how people inhabit space. What happens when space reacts tothe body, when it is formed by means of the physical rhythm? People tend to react to mobileenvironment in a different way than they react to static environments. Their involvement with a buildingbecomes an interaction more than a simple reaction. The deformed space forces the individuals toreact. Architecture no more imposes an identity, it creates a change. Within the innovative andinteractive architecture, we create ourselves by crossing spaces which change as they react to ourbodies. Consequently, space and body are closely intertwined since space reacts to the body and thebody to space.

Such is a conception of Son-O-House, imagined by NOX. It is an interactive sound architecture whichreacts in real time to the movements of the visitors. These architectures to the bodyaffirm thepermeability between the body and the technology, between the subject and the space. This reminds usthe conception of the Flesh of Merleau-Ponty, as the interactive architecture effaces the border betweenobject and the subject. The body is considered as an interlacing of vision and of movement[11].

Were living in time of the beginning of new era of the artificial life. Many architects try to erase thedifference between architecture and organism by creating bio-artificial spaces.


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NOX presents the architecture which is swallowed up by technology so that it becomes completelycapable of absorbing and enhancing the bodys rhythm[12]. That means that the bodys rhythm willaffect the form. And conversely it means that the forms rhythmicality will in turn activate the body.Consequently, architectural identity evaporates and the natural body moves into a bio-technicalmutation. According to NOX, architecture of the future will evolve in the same way. Building will softenby becoming capable of acting and reacting to human behaviors and activities. In doing so, there will bea radical change in the way we inhabit and experiment space.

If we go further with this vision of architecture, we get to the organic and robotics houses. We think ofthem, but they too, think of us. If we live in such houses, it is also the houses, which live us, becausethey live thanks to us: their feed is the human activity and the behavior. This fact will surely influence thebody and the perception of the space. Expression of the body conditions our experience of the spaceand the expression of the space conditions the experience of the body. Merleau-Ponty explains that theFlesh means both: the experience and the expression. Are we going to perceive space as the body inthe body orthe flesh in the flesh (surrounded by the flesh of the intelligent space)?

Where will the life take place finally? Paul Virilio distinguishes three ways of living: the life in the livingroom, the life on oneself and the life inside oneself[13]. The life in the living room was typical of the 20th

century. During the 21st century, the life is on oneself because we wear all that we need on ourself:computers, ipods and cell phones. Finally, the future holds the life that will soon takeplace inside oneself. All the aforementioned accessories will be inseminated in the body. They will be anextension of the body, and they may even be its substitution. Moreover, the body will live inside of thebody of the organic house. Will we still say that we areat home, when the home will transform intoorganic living body capable of interacting with us?

8. Searching for the new balance

The acceleration of reality creates the sensation of being lost, as we lost the singularity of space, geniusloci. The centre is everywhere; the virtual body too, is everywhere.If we let go this tendency to itsextreme, to imagine will be more than to live, as asserted by Bachelard[14]. The issue is not in thevirtual, because there is no here in the virtual world, there is only now. The new virtual identities, namedthe body-specters, are traceable like objects and they have nothing to do with human organism, which is

situated now and here. The human being thus becomes an object and not an existing.


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Paul Virilio explains this phenomenon by the predominance of the virtual and the immaterial. Il y a lune menace considrable de perte de lautre, de dclin de la prsence physique au profit duneprsence immatrielle et fantomatique [15]. The fluidification of the reality and of the housingenvironment asks for a new balance. In order to live in a time of media and networks of communication,it is necessary to recover its consciousness of the physical world. The solution passes by the body andthe real space.

We feel more and more the necessity of returning to the real world, because we cannot separate thebody from the world. The body has existence only within the world. Lets imagine that a human has toleave the Earth to go to the cosmic space without any possibility of returning on the Earth. This imagecan be terrible even for an astronaut because the condition of the spatiality of the body consists in itsinherence to the world. There is no body "in itself". How to find the contact between the body and theworld?

9. Conclusion: The role of architecture for the existence: singularity and rhythm

Architecture can be a tool to intensify our senses and sharpen our consciousness of the reality whichtends to be erased under the influence of the speed and of the surfeit of information. Architecture canhelp us to find our physical body. Buildings owe a lot to the humanity. The body is scale and measure,as asserts Jean Nouvel. According to Virilio, architecture is the first measure of the Earth. La demeure

est le curseur des proportions et donc de mon rapport au monde [16]. It is thus the body and thearchitecture that are measures of the world.

What is the real task of todays architecture? Let us remind the words of Maldiney who wrote thatarchitecture, as well as true art, "gives existence back to existence. The task of architecture is thusmore than to design and offer places where to live. We can see two ways of how architecture expressesthe existence.

Firstly, architecture presents the existence as singularity. The architecture includes in a creative way thesingularity of moment, of the space and of the existence. In other words, architecture creates a poeticsof the situation and makes that events happen. It focuses on singularity and not on homogeneity oruniformity. According to Merleau-Ponty there are as many spaces as there are distinct spatialexperiences "[17]. The function of architecture would be to create a unique relationsip between the bodyand the world, to anchor the body in the corporeity of space. That means faire le corps avec le

monde, because the body of the Earth relates to physical body and vise-versa.

Secondly, architecture affirms the existence as the rhythm. According to Maldiney, the rhythm revealsthe space. The rhythm is the articulation of the breath of life. It is articulation of the existence: rhythmarticulates the spatiality. The passage of chaos in the order passes by the means of the rhythm. Theonly adequate answer to the dizziness is rhythm because the latter protects against the loss of oneself,as writes it Maldiney[18].

The architecture establishes the place and in doing so, the rhythm of the space. It is to open theexistence to the universal rhythm, to harmonize it with the physical rhythm and to create a new type ofsubjectivity, more connected with the fluid and changeable nature. In nature there is no negation, noopposition of opposites, there is a harmony.

Therefore, the fact that we belong to both universes (to global and to local, to reality and to virtual) at thesame time turns out to be natural. It is possible to feel the eternity through moment, the global throughthe local. Rhythm arouses exactly the place where these constraints communicate. Once we need todwell, to be anchored in the place, to lock oneself into folds, at home (in a sense of the folds of Michauxand Deleuze, which inspires certain conception of the architecture, as "folding architecture" of SophiaVyzoviti). Once, we need the opening: to be connected to the world, to travel and to be enfolded by thestream of information. To live at the same time in the opening and in the folds, that is the essence of thevery existence, being half-opened (entrouverte, as writes it Bachelard[19]).

Finally, where is the last border of the body? Before wondering what will be the next border to exceed,lets see rather if we are ready enough to manage what will happen, without the risk of falling in theslavery of body-machine. We should not forget that we belong to both worlds, but that there is only onewhich is more essential and real. It can exist in parallel with the virtual worlds but it should not bedominated by them.


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We tend to try to exceed everything, to efface all the borders and to go always further. Architecture is anart of constraint and not only a free expression. Indeed, it is limited and it poses the limitations. Theliberation is not only made by the overtaking of the limits. Architecture may serve us best when it helpsus to organize the gaps, pauses and intervals of respite in an ever-accelerating world. Sometimes speedlimits us, sometimes limits set us free.

E. Mahdalickova

[1] Merleau-Ponty, Phnomnologie de la perception, Paris, Gallimard, 1945, p. 346.

[2] Ibid., p. 174.

[3] Ibid., p. 183.

[4] Ibid., p. 231.

[5] Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et linvisible, Paris, Gallimard, 1964, p. 302.

[6] Anish Kapoor, Taratantara, Actar/Baltic, 2001.

[7] Merleau-Ponty, Phnomnologie de la perception, op. cit., p. 334.

[8] Peter Zelner, Hybrid space, London, Thames & Hudson, 1999, p.112.

[9] Ibid., p. 60.

[10] Merleau-Ponty, Phnomnologie de la perception, op. cit., p. 332.

[11] Il faut retrouver le corps oprant et actuel, celui qui nest pas un morceau despace, un faisceau de

fonctions, qui est un entrelacs de vision et de mouvement , Merleau-Ponty, Lil et lEsprit, Paris,Gallimard, 1964, p.16.

[12] Ibid., p. 118.

[13] Conference of Paul Virilio and Jean Nouvel in Fondation Cartierin Paris, March 2009.

[14] Gaston Bachelard, La potique de lespace, PUF, Paris, 1957, p. 90. : Toujours imaginerseraplus que vivre .

[15] Paul Virilio, Cybermonde, La politique du pire, Paris, Textuel, 1996, p. 45.

[16] Ibid., p. 105.

[17] Merleau-Ponty, Phnomnologie de la perception, op. cit., p. 344. : il y a autant despaces quedexpriences spatiales distinctes .

[18] Henri Maldiney, LArt, Lclair de ltre, ditions Compact, Chambry, 2003.

[19] Gaston Bachelard, La potique de lespace, op. cit., p. 200.

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