Body-subject’s Knowledge of the World in Architectural Representation

Abstract

The architectural tradition from Vitruvius, Alberti, Filarete, and Di Giorgio Martini to Le Corbusier can be characterized as anthropomorphic insofar as it consciously appeals to the human body as the standard of proportion and figure. However, the body has maintained an elusive relationship to the built environment, despite a long history of presuming the naturalness of this relationship and building simply as the image of man. Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and Invisible contribute to a relevant twentieth-century body image. This body image differs from that of early modernity. Early modern philosophers and architects conceived the body as a rational, symmetric whole, and they transferred this symmetry to their buildings. The twentieth century body image is not symmetrical and whole but fragmented and reincorporated. Therefore, it is not often reflected in our built world. Thinking with the body is merely another mode of inhabiting the world, and should be considered on equal footing with other modes of thought. Perception is neither a passive registering nor an active imposing of a meaning; it is “a living dialogue” between the body and things. Based on vision and experience, Scarpa used implicitly a conceptual body and the physical body of the visitor. By adopting the basic position of Merleau-Ponty about the primacy of perception, this study is intended to discuss how the structure of the phenomenological body implies the structure of the entire perceptual field, and identify how Scarpa in the Brion Cemetery conceives the method of architectural signification based upon the body and its physical relationship with the forms. © 2004, Architectural Institute of Japan. All rights reserved.