architecture++

What isn’t there cannot go wrong

(Source: 1virtuallight)

#SOPAblackout

If clothing is an extension of our private skins to store and channel our own heat and energy, housing is a collective means of achieving the same end for the family or the group. Housing as shelter is an extension of our bodily heat-control mechanisms — a collective skin or garment.

[I am not], as architectural phenomenologists would have it, an autonomous, self-sufficient, biologically embodied subject encountering, objectifying and responding to my immediate environment. I construct, and I am constructed in a mutually recursive process that continuously engages my fluid, permeable boundaries and my endlessly ramifying networks. I am a spatially extended cyborg.

Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it’s caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But, because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself. Things are an annex or prolongation of itself; they are incrusted in its flesh, they are part of its full definition; the world is made of the very stuff of the body.

The ongoing shift of functions from urban and architectural to bodily real estate inverts some familiar customs and rituals. You once slipped into a telephone booth to make a call […], but you now slip a cellphone out of your pocket. Playing music through a stereo system at a party is a social gesture, but playing it through [an iPod] is a way to withdraw. In a movie theatre you look for a good seat and orient your eyes to the screen; with a portable display, you sit down anywhere and arrange the screen in front of your eyes.