http://blog.dellmedschool.utexas.edu/2016/12/22/meeting-human-needs-architecture-medicine/

Throughout the beginning of the reading, I questioned why understanding medicine was important to understanding architecture... this quote makes the reason more clear. Vitruvius seems obsessed with "the perfect male body"... if architecture can embody or mimic God's perfect creation, it is seen as a success..?

But according to the link above as well as many other studies, the most prevalent similarity between medicine and architecture is that the doctors/architects need to understand the human body to successfully do their job.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/topologies

sometimes what is more important or significant about the body is what is happening on the inside, which is not shown in the model of the Vitruvius Man

Busbea, Larry. Typologies: The Urban Utopia in France, 1960–1970. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007.

Architect Paul Maymont: “the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts”

the body is not important as a body unless the whole is taken into consideration... it cannot be thought of just as the external, the limbs, the face, the symmetry, etc. the inside of the body - the organs, the smaller pieces, the "parts" is what comprises the "whole"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimbell_Art_Museum

"Approaching the main entrance past a lawn edged by pools with running water, the visitor enters a courtyard through a grove of Yaupon Holly trees. The sound of footsteps on the gravel walkway echoes from the walls on either side of the courtyard and is magnified under the curved ceiling of the entry porch. After that subtle preparation, the visitor enters the hushed museum with silvery light spread across its ceiling.[5]:354 Harriet Pattison played the lead role in the landscape design and is also the person who suggested that open porches flanking the entrance would create a good transition from the lawn and courtyard to the galleries inside."

If someone were to experience walking into this art museum without being able to see, it could be an entirely different experience.

How can we design for the disabled body without thinking about it as a lack of impairment? Some bodies that we consider disabled actually have more ability than a typical disabled body. A blind person is certainly more prone to feeling with their hands, and perhaps interpret texture in a different way than non-blind individuals would feel things. When we walk on surfaces, its hard to think about what we're experiencing because the visual stimuli take over our senses. Someone who cannot see would feel the difference in the way their feet move and perhaps take more careful notice of the shifting of balance from lets say, walking on pavement then walking on a bed of rocks because they don't have the same visual stimuli as a distraction during this phenomenological perception.

The author explains there is a problem with this "original way of being in the world," because it leaves little room for historical change.

Phenomenology does in fact create very personal experiences that could seem bias if using these experiences to create generalized notions about architecture and design.

For example, if a deaf person designed music hall based on his own personal phenomenological experience with sound, the acoustic quality of the space could be awful for most people whose hearing is not impaired.

But, if any designer (deaf or not) designed a music hall based on modern technology, knowledge, and scientific studies on sound, the music hall would be more successful and potentially be able to adapt with the times.

The concept of flipping the Vitruvian Man upside down doesn't seem to mean that Jones is literally suggesting we eat with our butt, but rather using an analogy to say that something we think is just natural, or our day to day way of life could be completely rediscovered when looked at with a new perspective.

(read whole sentence)

Ex) Matrix, Inception, Shutter Island

These examples all do exactly what the author describes: confuses and entangles the boundaries we impose on the world in order to make sense of that world.

On a similar note, we often like to separate the "maker" from what is being "created" rather than "entangling the generator of the system with the system..." For example, a movie producer is generally not an actor in a movie. An artist does not typically draw himself. However, we do have a form of creation, writing, in which authors are constantly writing about themselves.

Reverting back to Hayle's definition: Reflexivity is the movement whereby that which has been used to generate a system is made, through a changed perspective, to become part of the system it generates.

This definition could imply that writing about oneself is subversive, because upon being read, one person's perspective has the capability to influence another, becoming a part of another person's mind, or system.

Perfect example: shutters on houses that are in fact attached to the exterior wall and no longer need to serve the purpose of protecting windows which technology has advanced over time

Function vs aesthetics seems to be an ongoing contradictory conversation in architecture... why is it that these are always opposing each other? Modern architecture has begun to adapt the idea of merging these two features... function can be beautiful, and aesthetics can have a functional purpose.

Definition included in annotation below

Norbert Wiener defined cybernetics in 1948 as "the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine."

Author mentions Hobbes and Locke thoughts on state of nature.

Hobbes: a life without intervention of government, which would be nasty, brutish, and short

Locke: all men are free "to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature," law is reason

"a tangible or visible form of an idea, quality, or feeling"

"the representation or expression of something in a tangible or visible form"

These two definitions of embodiment are different in that one refers to a physical connection and the other as more of a metaphorical connection. Thinking about this difference in reference to the authors repulsion by the thought of "separating mind from body," it seems as though is may be thinking too literally. In a solely physical conversation, the human brain cannot be removed from a body without it dying, but is our brain actually our "mind"? Can the "mind" simply be a metaphorical representation of our brain, and can a "soul" be the metaphorical equivalent to our body? Maybe a human's mind can live on, separate from the body, at least for people who choose to believe that there is more to a human than our physical form.

Last statement reference to survey assignment... my subject automatically thought about her body as what she thinks, feels and believes in (mental emotional and spiritual), not only just physical.