Arab Society for Computer Aided Architectural Design
Short Paper – Abstract Submission - Research in Progress
2007 Conference “Embodying Virtual Architecture”

Body, Form, Space, Architecture.

"Cyber space is opening up, and the rush to claim and settle it is on. We are entering an era of electronically extended bodies living at the intersection points of the physical and virtual worlds."

-William J.Mitchell, City of Bits (1995)


This paper presents a novel approach to digital investigation of body, space, form and motion to expose issues of spatial perception. The spatial experince as generated from, and translated by, the human body is the focus of this work. As society continues on the path of further cybernetic extension of the body’s sense-image, the context and spatial/visual literacy of the learned sense of space-time will continue to evolve, transform and alter as cultures stretch to engage both edges of the physical and virtual worlds. Changing attitudes towards the representation and geometric description of the human body and the corporeal metaphor in architecture offer the ability to reinterpret the body in motion as a dynamic spatial event. Since the time of Vitruvius architects have described form and space through symbolic, metaphorical, and proportional relationships to the human body. This corporeal metaphor seeks to relate space and body through formal geometric systems of description. If the body is conceived not just in space but also in time than the ability to reinterpret the body and its dynamic motion engaged not as a static condition, but as a set of event spaces. Motion is a continuity that can be subdivided by artificial boundaries that describe space, time and body. If these continuities are conceived as datums that designate meaning one might begin to project space within them, therefore describing motion as line offers a way to describe spatial organizations through geometry. The intention is to examine the relationship between the human form and metaphysical simultaneity as generators of architectural form. The work is structured by a research approach that dissects and isolates the representational concept/image from the body in a way that might offer an alternative description to the historical linear models.
