Architecture and the Body, Science and Culture (Routledge Research in Architecture)

The relationship of architecture to the human body is a centuries-long and complex one, but not always symmetrical. This book opens a space for historians of the visual arts, archaeologists, architects, and digital humanities professionals to reflect upon embodiment, spatiality, science, and architecture in premodern and modern cultural contexts. Architecture and the Body, Science and Culture poses one overarching question: How does a period’s understanding of bodies as objects of science impinge upon architectural thought and design? The answers are sophisticated, interdisciplinary explorations of theory, technology, symbolism, medicine, violence, psychology, deformity, and salvation, and they have unexpected and fascinating implications for architectural design and history. The new research published in this volume reinvigorates the Western survey-style trajectory from Archaic Greece to post‐war Europe with scientifically‐framed, body‐centred provocations. By adding the third factor―science―to the architecture and body equation, this book presents a nuanced appreciation for architectural creativity and its embeddedness in other sets of social, institutional and political relationships. In so doing, it spatializes body theory and ties it to the experience of the built environment in ways that disturb traditional boundaries between the architectural container and the corporeally contained. Cover 1 Half Title 2 Title Page 4 Copyright Page 5 Table of Contents 6 List of figures 8 List of contributors 11 Foreword 14 Introduction 20 1 Architecture before the body? Articulation and proportion in Archaic and Classical Greece 27 2 Healing in motion: locotherapy and the architecture of the Pergamene Asklepieion in the second century CE 46 3 The crafted bodies of Suger: reconsidering the matter of St-Denis 64 4 Gothic skins: penitents at the cathedral 86 5 Hybrid bodies move to center stage on a brothel in medieval Languedoc 105 6 Visceral space: dissection and Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel 125 7 Soaking in architecture: Montaigne, thermal baths and sixteenth-century medical treatises 144 8 Academic bodies and anatomical architecture in early modern Bologna 158 9 The eye of modernity: form, proportion and rhythm in German architectural history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries 176 10 Body and space, Gothic and Cubism: a Czech avant-garde between empathy, aesthetics and science 196 11 Rehabilitating the invalid body: architecture and citizenship in Jaap Bakema’s design for a Dutch postwar village for the disabled 215 12 Sacred fortresses: the church of Ste-Bernadette of Banlay and the mechanized body in postwar France 236 Epilogue 253 Bibliography 255 Index 274 The relationship of architecture to the human body is a centuries-long and complex one, but not always symmetrical. This book opens a space for historians of the visual arts, archaeologists, architects, and digital humanities professionals to reflect upon embodiment, spatiality, science, and architecture in pre-modern and modern cultural contexts. 'Architecture and the Body, Science and Culture' pose one overarching question: How does a period's understanding of bodies as objects of science impinge upon architectural thought and design? The answers are sophisticated, interdisciplinary explorations of theory, technology, symbolism, medicine, violence, psychology, deformity, and salvation, and they have unexpected and fascinating implications for architectural design and history. The new research published in this volume reinvigorates the Western survey-style trajectory from Archaic Greece to post-war Europe with scientifically-framed, body-centred provocations.0