- THE ARCHITECTURAL BODY
Wearable space emerges out of the interlacing of body and architectural space. Nowhere has this interlacing been given better expression than in Japanese-American artist Arakawa's concept of the “architectural body." Defined, simply, as the conjunction of the “body proper" and the "architectural surround," this concept is meant to capture the recursive correlation literally intertwining the body with space. For Arakawa and his constant collaborator, Madeleine Gins, this correlation informs the very origin of the body:
If the body is born into architecture and is from then on inextricable from it, why not take it up in its full scope as an “architectural body" (the body proper plus the architectural surround)?... If the basic unit of concern is the body, not an abstract body considered apart from impulses and movement, but the body in action, then will not the concepts most central to the living of a life be those formed—no matter how fleetingly—through architectural encounters?⁶
In sum, because the body always is a body in space—or better, a spatializing body—it is by necessity an architectural body. Starting from the position that having a body includes having a world, Arakawa and Gins elaborate a theory of world constitution through landing sites. Defined as “spots at which stimuli for and effects of sensory modalities ... are positioned" (157), landing sites express the field of action connecting a body with space:
"The fabric of the world consists of a multitude, a plenitude, of sites.... Landing sites occur as a perceiver's perception, whatever that might be, lands here and there as the world.... A landing site is simultaneously an event and an event-marker. The concept of landing site is basically a heuristic device for mapping how a person forms the world and situates herself within it.7
WEARABLE SPACE
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