This correlation of architectural framing and embodiment entails a certain understanding of architecture's technical dimension: architecture in the digital age must do more than simply deploy the technical capacities of the computer in an effort to overcome constraints of form dictated by the properties of architecture's raw material. This is partly because buildings—even digitally designed buildings—must still be built; more fundamentally though, it is because they must still be inhabited, which is to say, calibrated to our embodied form of life. No amount of freedom from formal constraint can undo architecture's constitutive correlation with embodiment, even if it can shift the locus of embodiment from the pregiven materiality of architecture to the embodied experience of inhabitation triggered by built form.
Indeed, the more digitally deterritorialized the architectural frame is, the more central the body becomes as the framer of spatial information, as the source of its “autonomy” or “interiority," following the conceptualization of the formalist critics of the 1970s. Just as the body assumes a renewed importance in the aftermath of the digital explosion of the technical frame, so too does it counterbalance the digital dissolution of spatial form, offering an indirect and supplementary—but no less fundamental—means to couple deformation and inhabitation, formal play and real life. For this reason, architecture must reconceive its function for the digital age: as the art of framing par excellence, it must embrace its potential to bring space and body together in the creation of “wearable space."
To the extent that this vocation involves a double dematerialization—of architecture as built form and of embodiment as static body or rigidly bounded organism—architectural framing might be said to furnish a generic body-in-code as a strict correlate to the rematerialization I am here proposing to name wearable space. While wearable space designates the becoming-fluid of spatial form that results from the imbrication of architectural framing and embodiment, body-in-code names the disembodiment-re-embodiment that ensues from this same imbrication. Wearable space is to architecture what body-in-code is to embodiment. Accordingly, if architecture is indeed the art of framing par excellence, is not its embodied correlate—the architecturally triggered body-in-code—in fact the generic form of embodiment, the process of disembodiment-re-embodiment that encompasses all other instances (including those we have focused on thus far) in which the body is distributed beyond its organic boundaries?
WEARABLE SPACE
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