Building Bodies

Throughout history architecture has used the measure of man as the key to spatial design. This idealization of a predominantly male human form has historically derived from a connected web of beliefs stemming from Antiquity throughout Modernity, and continues to form the mathematical and diagrammatic basis for generating architectural space today. Architects seem content to keep navigating on the mutable waters of the universality that these measures offer. By invoking the Vitruvian man, Le Corbusier’s Modulor or Neufert’s Bauentwurfslehre, architecture is less a container for the differentiated bodies which make up our global societies, than an aspect of that idealized image of one body transformed through space… the ideal European male body. Building bodies attempts to confront the arbitrariness of architecture’s continued proliferation, and the increasingly loosening threads, of a measure of universal design.