Building & Body

“The human body is so designed by nature” By Marcus Vitruvius.”

Based on Vitruvius text our human body are create by nature ,which mean each proportion of human have his own meaning , same as building should also have a proportion refer to human body .

In every generation of architecture , the relationship between building and body are always very close , because a building need to design based on human activities. The standard and measurement of human proportion have always need to apply into a architecture design. Between that , architect also need to consider gender, age, race, nationality, occupation,ability and socioeconomic condition .

" The buildings should have to standardize to achieve the harmony between the building and people." Stated by Le Corbusier

From Le Corbusier “ Modulor" he stated that industry need a system of proportional measurement which would reconcile the needs of human body with beauty inherent in Golden Section. He renders the Golden section proportional to height of a human, and form an ideal basis for universal standardization.

THE BODY HOUSE

The poetics of metaphor in architecture is what comes to mind when one investigates this house in a row. Monolab discarded the formalism of traditional dutch houses that derive their setup from social logic: a façade hiding and garding the bourgeois interior as a shrine , while lace curtains allow to monitor the street in low profile. The Body House draws more from a Roman layout - organised around the emptiness of the atrium - and the premodern houses that lack context but intensify their introverted way of looking into the interior by hallowing the centre of the house, around a defining domestic element (stairs, terrace, fireplace, ...) that symbolises the most important function of the house.

The body house concept in metaphor in human body and the abstraction of representing the human body.

The Body House same as human has it own heart ,body,eye,lung and structure (bone of human) , it's look like the architect is giving the house a life .

HEART

The program was very simple, there was no exhaustive list with spaces and square meters. The clients wished a living area with cooking & dining space at the heart of the house. Sleeping and bathing could function in a more peripheral way. In order to keep the living as empty as possible, we planted all program -except the cooking & dining space- in a plinth. The heart could then hover freely in the void over the plinth.

BODY The wire frame grew during the design process and connected to the plinth and the roof. Since the wire frame contained program it is covered by a skin. It became something like a mass, a body, a caged predator.

EYE The body attaches itself in the big facade opening at the front and deforms itself towards the panoramic view of the river. The front facade is facetted like an insect’s eye and is pulled in and pushed out by the body. Three facets were glazed, the one below directed onto the context (the park), the one in the center focusing westward onto the river and the upper one spreading out to frame the ever changing Rotterdam skyline with its concentrations of Dutch ‘high rises’.

LUNG The intestines of the body are important. Apart from its Ethernet connection with brain center, the ventilation unit acts as a lung, breathing inside. A tentacle connected itself to the entry facade to inhale fresh air via the second letter ‘O’ of Body House letters on the front facade.

STRUCTURE

The PLINTH is the base in cast concrete. It is a kind of lifted foundation or ‘ground floor basement’. It gets special lighting from the patio in the back: during daytime sunlight filters down through steel grills on top of the patio (1st floor), at night artificial light beams up from under the steel grill patio floor at ground level.

In my opinion , building are the combination metaphor of body and abstraction of body. Architect should design with refer to human body , nature create human in every proportion ,have own meaning and function , just like my case studies(The Body House) in above , using heart representing the importance of space , the eye is the view ,lung is the ventilation, body as it’s skin ,skeleton as the building structure to support the building , the concept of abstraction and metaphor of body creating the building be more in function ,every part of metaphor of body represent of the use and activities of space and proportion.Human body have function , today architect should studies more into human body , so that building will not only just a empty shell and it will be more function and it look like creating a life for building.