BODY AND BUILDING

Description

Since Greek antiquity, the human body has been regarded as a microcosm of universal harmony. In this book, an international group of architects, architectural historians, and theorists examines the relation of the human body and architecture. The essays view well-known buildings, texts, paintings, ornaments, and landscapes from the perspective of the body’s physical, psychological, and spiritual needs and pleasures. Topics include Greek temples, the churches of Tadao Ando in Japan, Renaissance fortresses and paintings, the body, space, and dwelling in Wright’s and Schindler’s houses in North America, the corporeal dimension of Carlo Scarpa’s landscapes and gardens, theory from Vitruvius to the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and Freudian psychoanalysis. The essays are framed by an appreciation of architectural historian and theorist Joseph Rykwert’s influential work on the subject.

CONTENTS

• Introduction: “A Promise as Well as a Memory”: Toward an Intellectual Biography of Joseph Rykwert / George Baird
• The Architectonics of Embodiment / Dalibor Vesely
• Greek Temple and Greek Brain / John Onians
• Doric Figuration / Mark Wilson Jones
• Contemplating Perfection through Piero’s Eyes / Robert Tavernor
• Reclining Bodies: Figural Ornament in Renaissance Architecture /Alina Payne
• Body, Diagram, and Geometry in the Renaissance Fortress / Simon Pepper
• Dancing with Vitruvius: Corporeal Fantasies in Northern Classicism / Harry Francis Mallgrave
• On Inigo Jones and the Stuart Legal Body: “Justice and Equity… and Proportions Appertaining” / Vaughan Hart
• Sphere and Cross: Vitruvian Reflections on the Pantheon Type /Karsten Harries
• Charles-Etienne Briseux: The Musical Body and the Limits of Instrumentality in Architecture / Alberto Pérez-Gómez
• The Foreigner / Richard Sennett
• Vitruvius Crucifixus: Architecture, Mimesis, and the Death Instinct / Neil Leach
• Body and Building inside the Bauhaus’s Darker Side: On Oskar Schlemmer / Marcia F. Feuerstein
• Desiring Landscapes/Landscapes of Desire: Scopic and Somatic in the Brion Sanctuary / George Dodds
• A Tradition of Architectural Figures: A Search for Vita Beata / Marco Frascari
• Sitting in the City, or The Body in the World / David Leatherbarrow
• Upright or Flexible? Exercising Posture in Modern Architecture / William W. Braham and Paul Emmons
• Corporeal Experience in the Architecture of Tadao Ando / Kenneth Frampton
• Epilogue: Joseph Rykwert: An Anthropologist of Architectural History? / Vittorio Gregotti; Translated by George Dodds and Robert Tavernor

428 pages / 20,5 x 23 cm