(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_nKTwJGa8s)

In all honesty, why? Perhaps an idea so radical is needed to change how we think about the body and architecture. In the link above, I connect a seen in the office I had though about when this subject was brought up in class. In the video, the office is trying to slow down the course of a woman going into the labor by doing the opposite of activities that speed up labor. One suggestion in this clip is to "stick spicy foods up her butt" as a means of inverting the suggestion to eat spicy food. But how would this relate to architecture? Are we so wound up in our perceptions around what the human body is, that we need to twist, turn, and invert these perceptions to think with a clear mind?

(http://letteraturaartistica.blogspot.com/2014/01/francesco-di-giorgio-martini-la.html)

This is such a strange way to look at architecture. I can understand that it tries to relate the body, but the plan does not really make sense in this translation. And for that matter, the translation seems too literal as well. Essentially, the plans break the church down to separating people into the head, legs, body, and arm. The head, seems to be a some-what resolved idea on this hierarchy, however the rest of the intention seems half though out. What does it mean to be in the arm of the church? What does it mean to be in the bowels of the church? It just seems strange to think that if someone were to walk down the plan of the church, they would start at the legs, motion up to the waist, through the torso, and end up at the head. It feels wrong and under-developed.

I would completely agree with this. The purpose of phenomenology is to feel connected with our surroundings, and perhaps, things that exist beyond our surroundings but are only experienced in being able to come into contact with something around us. Either way, if architecture were to hone in on the design of this spatial connection, the Vitruvius man needs to be update. In class, we had talked about the diagram not looking like any man, but an average depiction of man. This may have been fine to a hundred years ago, but our universal perceptions have changed. And thus, the universal base of design for phenomenology must change with it. Gender is more of a fluid subject, and is not defined/defining in how we operate. A reevaluation must include the groups left out by Vitruvius in order to seek this idea of the universal.

(https://books.google.com/books?id=t82XCwAAQBAJ&pg=PT46&lpg=PT46&dq=ds+r+brasserie+washroom+trans&source=bl&ots=Qcjq32Go8Y&sig=TaXsfskr0QVXwFp_830qleFF7Gw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwir4sLgjJjeAhWRTt8KHcMLBsIQ6AEwAnoECAcQAQ#v=onepage&q=ds%20r%20brasserie%20washroom%20trans&f=false)

In the DS + R project, the design takes the notion of the washroom as a means to distort our perceptions around comfort, hygiene, and privacy. The discussion of gender bathrooms, especially in recent years, revolve around the notion that some may feel uncomfortable with a person they would claim is a different gender using the same space as them. In the DS+R project, there is no distinction of gender in the bathrooms, nor is their "privacy" in the bathrooms. The wall journey the two bathroom are opaque, stall have peeking holes, etc. all to give the user a sense of being uncomfortable. Though it is not actively charged with advocating for a side on this argument, the project does open the perceptions around this "comfortability" in washrooms. Why do we have? Why do we have a need to preserve it around the scope of being comfortable around our gender? Wouldn't someone just be as uncomfortable if a person of the same gender played a closer role in these "private" times in the washroom.

(https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/698055)

I wonder what would happen if Palladio and Foster sat in a room together? Palladio seems to admire the objective sense to architecture, that when we look at it, we can appreciate the beauty by what is seen on the skin of a building's body. However, if we look at the Pompidou, this building speaks to more of the truth behind the building. It is the complete opposite of Palladio's intention to conceal the "less prestigious". For Foster, the Pompidou reveals the veins of the building's body. It shows the HVAC, mechanical systems, etc. to expose the life of buildings. I feel as though these two would have a debate on what is shown. Do we a.) push forth for the objective beauty of a building, or b.) show the beauty in a truth revealed?

I wonder what Hayles thinks of today, with so much of the youth culture being dependent on material things. I was just watching a video earlier to day which spoke about teens obsessed with Kanye West's new Calabasas line of clothing. The people standing in line had no idea what or where Calabasas is, but they were obsessed with the idea of new form of clothing they could add to their collection. This is just one example, of many, where we are consumed by products as they are becoming what defines our bodies. If this is what matters, and what drives how we dictate our decision making, is 201 Hayles' nightmare?

Not only is his mind not free, there is the sense the Robocop as a cop in general, is not free. His body is owned by the police, and does the bidding of justice. His actions are no longer his own, and are soley for the purpose of providing justice for the people. He is in an enslaved body that is far from being free.

Can freedom then be the possession of nothing?

If our society is built around the trade of taking ownership of objects, selling them, and then taking ownership of new things, then we are built into this rotating wheel of trading ownership. We are in this delusion that we are free because we have the capability to take ownership of things that we seek, but this possession mentality is what is chaining us down and limiting our freedom. So if society is telling me that I own my body, would it be freedom to say that this body is not my own. Is it freedom to reject my body because it serves the function of others and not myself?

What's Autopoiesis?

Autopoiesis in its simplest definition is the idea of self-production. As an exmaple, the cells in our bodies are vehicles in which they are able to reproduce themselves many times over. The cell is a body of many components, all of which are in constant reproduction themselves. As these components renew themselves in the body of the cell, the begin the cycle in of autopoiesis. The cell is still the original container of these changing characters, but the insides are the pieces which are in constant shift (Zeleny 1).

http://cepa.info/fulltexts/1194.pdf

In one of the conversations that arose from our Thesis Prep discussion, it was confirmed by the majority of the class that the mind and the body are one in the same. They have a symbiotic relationship in which one informs the other, and when combined, provide us with the tools of creating experiences in space. This discussions connects how the body, as a relay system from our senses, sends reactions to the mind as to how we perceive our environments. When touching something that is course, our bodies react to a space being un-pleasurable. Our lives are reliant on this dialogue between the body and the mind, and to think that we could live without one of these components would just be incomplete living.

Page 40:

“For disabled people many dimensions of the built environment are disruptive and violent precisely because they buildings are underpinned by the embodied ideal of a body which fails to conform with the complexities of bodily interactions of space.”

People aren’t disabled. Buildings are the devices that create the disabilities for people. (Marilyn Modinger quoting her friend from an institute driven on disability inclusion)

Page 35:

“The world is sick. A readjustment has become necessary. Readjustment? No, that is too tame. It is the possibility of a great adventure that lies before mankind: the building of a whole new world…because is not time to be lost.”

Does Corbu see himself as a God, or at least someone of equivalent power? It feels as though he is rejecting everything that has come before him. In the previous text, it describes how he has discontent towards the very idea of suburbs and that they are “fragments of cities” spread throughout areas. The way that he phrases this section makes it sound like he’s a cult leader trying to create this new belief that others must follow.

Page 32:

“…since man has been made out of the same mould from the earliest times known to us…the whole machine is there, the structure, the nervous system, the arterial system…”

On one hand, I can understand that he is trying to group our bodies through our evolved systems that make up our bodies. However, this only relates to a percentage of people. Even when born, people are born without pieces of this “system” that he proposes. And it’s not because they are defective systems, it’s because they contain less “pieces”. I do not accept that we were all built with the same mould. If we were, there wouldn’t be issues to solve, and architecture would have already been formulaic. If people were all similar, the places that we live in would more or less be similar too.

Page 30:

“...materiality of the designed body-spaces premised on conceptions of standard body sizes and shapes, that is, the body as objectification.”

Does this stigma of objectifying people in architecture have an influence of how objectification is a pressing issue today? I do realize that objectifying has always been an issue in the past, but does architecture further perpetuate this standard in the built form? In the discourse of our practices?

Page 29: “As Le Corbusier stated: ‘architecture is there, concerned with our home, our comfort, and our heart. Comfort and Proportion. Reason and aesthetics. Machine and plastic form. Calm and beauty’”.

If modernism was built around this idea of creating architecture from the reduction of man, then wouldn’t spaces be uncomfortable for people who didn’t fit the proportion of the “perfect man”? I am so puzzled by Corbu’s statement. Things built around the proportion of the modular man or even the Vitruvius man must surely be uncomfortable for someone who is much larger, or much smaller than a man.

Page 28: Looking at this representation of the Vitruvius Man in relation to the text so far, I can begin to imagine that the arms of this man look to be chained to the corners of this bounding box. These parameters for a machine-like man are placing a restraint on the human body, and our ability to create better design for human bodies. Maybe it’s from all of the action movies I’ve been watching lately, but the construction lines that cross though this drawing can certainly be seen as chains as well.

Page 27:

“Thus, such bodies are without sex, or gender, or class or culture. They are, in Ann Hall’s (1996) terms, objective entities to be dissected, manipulated, treated, and utilized as instruments and/or objects.”

This would a fascinated way of perceiving other people today. It would eliminate our growing issues revolving around the ideas of race and gender in equality. By reducing the human race to our physicality is a more practical means of understanding how we collectively function. Through this focused lens, better design can then be more easily achieved in the elimination of other factors.

Page 25: What’s an induction loop? Induction loops are designated zones that send signals to a person’s hearing aid, in order to hear more clearly in busy area. These loops eliminate enough of the busy sound, so that the person with a hearing disability can better focus one specific sound as opposed to many. https://www.ampetronic.co/How-do-loops-work