week10 - development of spaces - program - audience

The Eyes of the Skin 

"I confront the city with my body; my legs measure the length of the arcade and the width of the square; my gaze unconsciously projects my body onto the facade of the cathedral, where it roams over the moudlings and contours, sensing the size of recesses and projections; my body weight meets the mass of the catherdral door; and my hand graps the door pull as i enter the dark void behind. I experience myself in the city, and the city exists through my embodied experience. The city and my body supplement and define each other."

"Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the orgamism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with if forms a system. Sensory experience is unstable, and alien to natural perception, which we achieve with our body all at once, and which opens on a world of inter-acting senses."

"In Okakuras description the present and the absent, the near and the distant, the sensed and the imagined fuse together. The body is not a mere physical entity; it is enriched by both memory and dream. The world is reflected in the body, and the body is projected on the world."

DAIDALOS

"The atmosphere of a building seems to be produced by the physical form. It is some kind of sensuous emission of sound, light, heat, smell, and moisture; a swirling climate of intangible effects generated by a stationary object."

"To enter a project is to enter an atmosphere. What is the atmosphere, not the objects as such."

"...Gottfried Semper insisted that the 'true atmosphere' of architecture is 'the haze of carnival candles'. Architecture is but a stage set that produces a sensuous atmosphere. Semper argued that the full force of architecture is to be found in tis outer surface, the decorative layer through which the atmosphere seemingly percolates. Architecture is indistinguishable from decor."

"Atmosphere occupies the space between a building and its context. Or, rather, it defines that space. Since the physical context has its own ambience, the building is a kind of device for producing a particular atmosphere within another one. To enter it is to pass from one atmosphere to another. Architecture is to be found in the relationship between atmospheres, the play between microclimates. The meeting of these seemingly ephemeral atmospheres can be as solid as any building."

THE CLOTHING OF SPACE

"Even where solid walls become necessary they remain only the inner and unseen structure for the true and legitimate representatives of the spatial idea: namely, the more or less artificially woven and seamed-together, textile walls... the visible spatial enclosure." The truth of architecture is now located in its visible outside rather than its hidden interior."

"To wear a building, by entering it, is to feel its weave. More precisely, to feel the surface is to enter. Occupying a soace does not involve passing through some kind of opening in the surface, like a door, to find an interior. To occupy is to wrap yourself in the sensuous surface."