To inhabit oneself

The body is no longer perceived as a pure, natural entity, it is also technological: we can now talk about self-creation, body design, prosthetic bodies. These new body models involve new technologic realities that imply adapting the concept of inhabiting. In this cyborg paradigm, architecture should reframe itself by generating hybrid responses.

This research project consists of a historical analysis on the concept of body and its relationship with architecture as well as a review of numerous interventions and proposals of a hybrid nature that approach the body in different ways in order to understand what are the repercussions that bodily modifications can have on the configuration of individuals both conceptually and spatially. While in architecture that was limited to working from the skin outwards, parameters such as ergonomics, functionality, program or tectonics were essentially taken into account, in architecture that works in continuity with the body, factors such as fluids, permeability or connections are also considered. The expansion of the architectural vision towards objects, atmospheres and fluids, causes a closer connection to the individuals that inhabit it, reinforces the link between body and space and eliminates the hierarchies that are established between them. Hormones, air and water particles, wavelengths, electromagnetic fields, cables, electricity, enzymes... are also agents that participate in the configuration of space, making the skin become a much more permeable and architectural element, capable of being transformed and designed. Therefore, prosthetic modification generates a new bodily but also spatial condition. Architecture is a prosthesis, through which individuals have the ability to transform, to compose themselves in multiple dimensions; the body, and more specifically the skin, is the mediation centre through which it makes sense: the means to experience architecture is the body itself. Without the presence of the body there is no architecture, there is no perception or interaction with space; without architecture, there is no body today that can develop itself. The body is the subject of inhabiting. To inhabit oneself is to reflect on the foundations of spatial experience, expanding the limits of the body through the interaction between the technological and the physiological. To inhabit oneself is to consider the body as an entity capable of generating spaces, the body as a place.