Building & Human Body
The relationship between architecture and the human body delves deep into why those behaviors manifest in the first place, as it calls upon the experiential characteristics and qualities that spark when the two unite — impacting not only occupant behavior through the body, but also impacting occupants intellectually, emotionally, physiologically and even spiritually through the body as well.
Our body is the ultimate tool for discovering the environment. Human anatomy is considered to be nature’s peak of perfection and certain features serve as inspiration for many architects.
The human body provides us with amazing ratios of equivalent dimensions:
The hand covers the face exactly; multiplies, such as the foot which is one-sixth of the upright body; the face structured in three equal parts, the width of the hand measuring four thumbs. One of the most ample systems of proportion derived from the study of human proportions is Le Corbusier’s Modulor. It is the most important and innovative system of proportions ever developed by an architect.
In architecture, as such, to design is to establish the anthropometric distance between the human body and tactile objects, to orientate the proxemic interactions between one body and another, and to articulate something of the Divine Proportion of the human body. As a “matter”, the human body is subjectified in which the aesthetic experience of architecture is articulated in accordance with the phenomenological bodily contact with the ‘gesture’ of everyday buildings. The body, for instance, moves freely in the recreation park, becomes more cautious in the library, and merges with noise while waiting in the subway station.
Proportions and balance of the human body enter the field of architecture from the point of view of imitation, idealized allusion and the actual human use. Analogies between the form of the human body and certain architectural elements can easily be observed in Ancient Greece where columns took the shape of human figures – caryatides of the Acropolis or the colossus of the Odeon in the agora at Athens. If you’re into the poetic side of things, you can think of Corinthian column as a female with its decorated capital resembling curly human hair. However, these analogies must remain in the mind and not impose a literal representation.
Allusion to the human body is found without going as far as mimicry. Analogies appear in our vocabulary – skeleton, skin, façade. If we were to take a more poetic approach, we would consider windows as eyes and doors as mouths.
Architecture and the human body also come into contact a more concrete way at en ergonomic level. The relationship between size, form and movement are what essentially characterize the human scale, a rather vague term and no doubt charged with various ideological meanings.
Architecture allows subtle features of human body to be impressed, received and transmitted into the built environment. Buildings borrow features such as their structural flexibility from the human body using it as a way to resist unpredictable geological instabilities. We can now talk about the self-healing properties of materials that underpin the analogy of building as living structures.
FOR EXAMPLE,
The micro apartment is no stranger to cities where space is a premium, such as Tokyo and Hong Kong, although the concept has really taken off in the last decade when downsizing became trendy. Yet, the creation of smaller and smaller units continues to divide opinions.
THE STUDIO BY NICHOLAS GURNEY, SYDNEY
This redesign of a 27sqm studio apartment in Sydney’s Woolloomooloo involves a clean aesthetic and bold colour that is wiped away with the slide of a panel. Recent graduate, designer Nicholas Gurney, stripped out the existing apartment and removed the ceiling bulkheads, before inserting a joinery pod to address issues of privacy, storage and a lack of living space – all with less than $40,000 and a four-week construction window.
“The brief from the client was fairly simple: ‘A liveable space and some flexibility would be great.’ I don’t think, at the time, she imagined anything like what I was going to give her,” Gurney told Australian Design Review .
FROM THIS CASE STUDY (COMPACT LIVING),
WE DEEPLY UNDERSTAND THAT
"Proportion is correspondence among the measures of members of an entire work"
"Same as building, building should have a proportion refer to human body"
