Relationship of Building & Body
The relationship between building and the human body is a long history until today. Architects tend to explore this relationship in between their space design with more interesting way to accommodate human and control their behaviors within it.
This relationship required proper dimensions and placements which refer to the modular measurement of the human body or also refer to the ‘Le Modular’ introduced by Le Corbusier. While in contemporary Architecture or other design industries, people would also define this rule as ‘Anthropometry‘ . They all play an important role where distributes statistical data about the understanding in human physical body’s dimensions to optimize the architectural design or any products that will be use by human.
'Body sizes and shapes vary according to physical and cultural differences, including sex, race, age, nationality, occupation, and social economic conditions.’ Quoted by Lance Hosey.
Differences in human’s activities, physical body’s changes or composition of human movement lead to changes in the distribution of body dimensions. For instance the entrance door design comparison between a hospital and an ordinary residential house. The door of Hospital are slightly bigger than a normal house, because it requires larger access to let the patients on wheel chair and wheel stretcher bed to move forward easily or rapidly whenever there’s emergency occurred. While an ordinary house would not have many chances of emergency incidents nor large volume of circulation, therefore it does not require a big doorway design.
Therefore, there is a deep relationship of architecture and the human body into those behaviors through the body, and also impacts the human user's emotions feeling, physiology and the spirituality of the body as well.
‘Architecture (and under this term, as I have already said, I understand practically all constructed objects)must be a thing of the body, a thing of substance as well as of the spirit and of the brain.’
Quoted by Le Corbusier.
An example of building is Jewish Museum in Berlin,which designed by Daniel Libeskind.
Conceptually, he wanted to express feelings of absence, emptiness, and invisibility expressions of disappearance of the Jewish Culture. And it was the act of using architecture as a means of narrative and emotion providing visitors with an experience of the effects of the Holocaust on both the Jewish culture and the city of Berlin.
Libeskind creates the long and narrow promenade that follows the 'zig-zag' formation of the building for visitors to walk through and experience the spaces within. This is how he translates the human’s body activities and experience into an architectural composition.
Daniel Libeskind's sketch.
Metaphoric expression of Berlin Wall
and Landwehr Channel.
Source from : aniel-libeskind.com
METAPHORS
Metaphors is a kind of thought and action which involve the natural dimensions and human sense.
This significant role in architectural has been realized and applied by architects since Vitruvius.
He suggests the use of nature as metaphor and observation of things growing, and also points out that when people adopted a sedentary life, some build shelters for themselves resembling bird nests by getting inspiration from swallows.
‘The design of a temple depends on symmetry, the principles of which must be most
carefully observed by the architect. ‘ Quoted by Marcus Vitruviu.
As the reason of human body was designed symmetrically, and so the ancients buildings or particularly temples were designed in symmetrical as well. This is also reason that effective identity of Gothic architecture is associated with its use of natural entities structures and natural processes as metaphors.
Thus, the human body and building will always engage and adapted to each other in every type of architecture.
As an architect will need to find the right balance between both. This means that is important for architect to archieve the ‘sense of space’ where the building designed must has optimize the harmonious in the relationship between building and body.
