Body Dwelling - Amassing An Interior - Architectural Review

18/10/21, 10:53 Body dwelling: amassing an interior - Architectural Review
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Body dwelling: amassing an interior

24 JUNE 2020 BY LILI ZARZYCKI
ESSAYS
The body moves within an affective interior landscape, the forms and textures of which are as
powerful as they appear mundane
Between body frontier and the city’s door there’s a whole dramatic scene. A domestic landscape flush full of curiosities
at every scale. The space is so familiar that it makes room for dreaming – so habitual that physical rhythms have
become unconscious, unconstrained: patterns of padding, tos and fros, tracts of wear, thinning and incremental
amassment building up to so much static matter of inhabitation. Streams of passage cut between furniture, between
hill and crag, jagged chasms slicing between chair and table, bed and desk. Hemmed in at the edge by the walls’
protective shell, this is not one room but an entire territory – a mountainous expanse for the trawling.
The shape of it has formed from an accumulated ergonomics, the weight of the body and its behaviours, its extending RELATED STORIES
habits, gradually breaking into every curve and each topographical line. The body is both the kernel around which this
scene has originated and the means by which it is experienced. In Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, the body is Private life: the line between
the hot core of the perceptual field: not a numb, lumpen physicality divorced from the keen gaze of a perceptive eye domesticity and publicness at
but a fully sensate solid. The skin a tense and tingling frontier, an unsmooth membrane of nerve clusters separating Kettle’s Yard
soft, fleshy sides from a ragged field of affective objects. It is in a constant state of perception, and the objects and 6 JANUARY 2020
BY ELEANOR BEAUMONT
textures that surround it have impact – consciously or unconsciously hitting, pressing, moulding the body even as it
exerts its influence back on them.
Make do and mend: care and
maintenance in Burkina Faso
24 JANUARY 2020 BY CARLOS QUINTÁNS
Proportional representation: the

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17 MARCH 2020 BY EDWIN HEATHCOTE
Binary code: technologies of

gender
18 MARCH 2020 BY POL ESTEVE
Masculinities: Liberation through

Photography at the Barbican
26 MARCH 2020 BY ELISE LIMON
Gio Ponti (1891-1979)

26 MAY 2020 BY CHIARA SPANGARO
AR June 2020 on Inside

1 JUNE 2020 BY AR EDITORS
Outrage: the problem with tiny

homes
10 JUNE 2020 BY JACK SELF
Desk job: a short study of the

surfaces on which we toil
18 JUNE 2020 BY ELISE LIMON
AR Reading List 014: Furniture

AR In Pictures: the making of

Specious Spaces
Poem: toward an architecture

25 JUNE 2020 BY TOM DE PAOR
Anni Albers (1899-1994)

29 JUNE 2020 BY JORDAN TROELLER
Living in a bubble: smooth

Source: © Bruce McLean
surfaces to shield
In Bruce McLean’s Pose Work for Plinths of 1971, he uses the contortions of his own body to reveal many possible relations to a seemingly simple
arrangement of forms ESSAYS
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BY
MAGAZINES MANON MOLLARD
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The design of furniture represents the crystallisation of these bodily forces into a replicable form. Particular postures
of recumbence, standing or sitting, are in turn encouraged or enforced by their formations; as certain habits or social
codes are set into timber and steel, so their replication is ensured for the future. The question arises of who these
structures are for, built, as they usually are, around the conception of a normative body – and there are many for whom
these shapes will knock and prod at the body, for whom commonly accepted standards of design present a grinding,
everyday difficulty.
‘There are those who incite such a shift

with their own body, who travel against
the grain’
Points of abrasion tend to come to light when things are put into shift. Such a shift might arise from an altered mental
or physical state: by an injury, an excess of sluggishness, or those uncanny hours in the dead of the night when the light
of the moon puts forth a new reality. So discovered poor Gregor Samsa, who found in his familiar bedroom an
environment entirely unsuited to the flailings of his new form. Kafka’s words tighten around the minutiae of Samsa’s
movements and the space he attempts to navigate, drawing a thick cloud around the room in which he is bolstered, and
elucidating in sharp detail the travails of his monstrous form. The narrowness of the doorway, the flat plane of the bed,
become alien in their sudden impossibility of passage.
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Source: Mark Lazenby

Mark Lazenby’s The Moon is a Heavy Body 47 splices bodies together in flattened photographic space, cutting through the filmy polished sheen of
normative domesticity
There are, nevertheless, those who incite such a shift with their own body, who travel against the grain. They who
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cannot sit ‘properly’, stretching the long heft of their limbs along the woven floor, or couching backwards, head hanging
under wriggling toes. They make an obstacle of themselves, rupturing the flows of cohabitants and resounding their
own bulk against the terrain. In 1944, Bruno Munari published a provocation in Domus entitled ‘Searching for Comfort
in an Uncomfortable Chair’. Equipped with a newspaper and stack of magazines, he has arranged himself into poses of
some extremity, subverting as he does so the foundational logic of the chair; its position, structure, design and
purpose.
His accompanying text considers a problem of comfort, that despite the great proliferation of novel furniture designs,
no matter how original, not one was as comfortable as a cheap and ordinary lounge chair. He puts forward the notion
of an ‘improved model’ of furniture, a perfected, ideal item that would solve all further issues if only people would stop
caring about differentiating themselves through design. The proposition extrapolates immediately into a broadly
ideological one. The idea of the perfect chair, mass-produced and made cheaply available for all, comes to bear with
concerns for personal taste and status: without the disruption of the goals of individualism that underlie the desires of
proliferating original designs, what role would such a perfect chair even play? Similar products have been produced in
the past, with the intention or at least the guise of the machine age’s accessibility, now dwelling only in the homes of
the wealthy or elevated on thick white slabs in Modern design exhibits around the world. And, considering again the
features of the everyman this chair would be designed for, can such an item be anything other than inevitably
totalitarian?
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Source: Veit Mette

Walking behind Louise Bourgeois’s Fée Couturière, a museum visitor appears enveloped by the biotic structure, built out from their head in fibrous thicket
like the nest of the weaver bird
Liberation is left, perhaps, in designing with a will towards adaptation, in surroundings that soften to be altered. There
is undeniable beauty produced by the great depths of attention paid to certain phenomena in architecture, from the
grip of the door handle to the rasp of gravel or echo of a certain tile. There’s an accompanying tendency, though, for
that agonisingly bespoke architecture to become also irresolute, authoritarian, for its precision to also preclude human
interaction. Machine living dictates a certain kind of life, a drive towards efficiency, the divinely curated home
enforcing certain patterns of propriety, of sitting up straight and other social strictures. These curations are
aspirational – bright and breezy and smelling of stainless steel, they are a signifier of moderate success, good clean
health, of an energetic life well put to order and robustly maintained. At the same time, scruff, mess, misaligned
objects, unkempt bodies and strange mannerisms become matter out of place. ‘We are pressed into lines’, as Sara
Ahmed puts it, bodies shaped by the objects that surround them and their surfaces rewritten by what is in reach. The
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organisation of the nuclear family is expressed in kitchens and across dining tables; its children pressed to reproduce
both the heterosexual line and accompanying divisions of labour.
What constructions of difference, of selfhood, could then be gained by the expressive exertion of the body on its
surroundings? Forgetting even structural interventions and other alterations set out of the reach of renters, the home
might still be a site of transformation or of self-formation. A living cabinet of personal curiosities, full of troughs and
furrows of far-too-large furniture handed on or found on street corners and crammed into the flat; partially
reupholstered by untrained hands and collated in an aesthetic of taking what you can get. Cushy and brimming with
soft surfaces and stacks of paper, books on books and folded bedding, these arrangements coil around and claim the
body as it moves through space. The space between them, the body and its surroundings, is reciprocal here, each acting
on, around, and into the other. Working into the walls of his family home in Hanover between 1923 and 1937, Kurt
Schwitters made this exchange most literal in his Merzbau: continuously grafting on and cutting away at the structure
of the walls, he incorporated materials found, gathered, stolen away from his friends and contemporaries or collected
from his own body. Mies van der Rohe lost a drawing pencil to the structure; Hannah Höch found a missing key of hers
that had been subsumed.
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Taken by Wilhelm Redemann in 1933, this is one of only three surviving photographs of the original structure
As the entire structure underwent constant transformation, the alcoves containing these objects could be closed off or
reopened at any time – as Hans Richter recorded, the niches these artists occupied by proxy were swallowed by the
monstrous growth of the structure. Schwitters explained that they were now housed ‘deep down inside’ the moving
morass. Thickened with living matter, the Merzbau was both a dwelling and an extension of Schwitters’ own self. He
eventually abandoned the project to flee to Norway in 1937, the original later destroyed by bombing – the only version
of it that now remains is a static and hollow replica, reconstructed from the few photographs taken in 1933: a shell
rather than a nest.
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Lead image: Yayoi Kusama leans against a chair in her New York studio in 1963, surrounded by the many bristling,
phallic protrusions that transform her space into a soft, if sickly fleshlike, cocoon. Image © Yayoi Kusama
This piece is featured in the AR June 2020 issue on Inside – click here to buy your copy today
JUNE 2020
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18/10/21, 10:53 Body dwelling: amassing an interior - Architectural Review

Body dwelling: amassing an interior

Proportional representation: the

Binary code: technologies of

Masculinities: Liberation through

Gio Ponti (1891-1979)

AR June 2020 on Inside

Outrage: the problem with tiny

Desk job: a short study of the

AR Reading List 014: Furniture

AR In Pictures: the making of

Poem: toward an architecture

Anni Albers (1899-1994)

Living in a bubble: smooth

‘There are those who incite such a shift

Source: Mark Lazenby

Source: Veit Mette

Join the conversation online

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