Entering into this edifice consisting “primarily of entrances," the body is “invited to move through composite passageways—rectilinear above, curvilinear below—often in two opposing ways at once" (258). In phenomenological terms, this results in a radical deceleration of the body's passage through space because the normal perceptually guided negotiation of space yields to a longitudinal exploration that infolds imaging potential directly into the bodily constitution of space. "It could take several hours to go from the living room to the kitchen," claims the project description. "Parts of the kitchen or the living room reappear in the bedroom or the bathroom. It might take several days to find everywhere in the house that the dining room turns up" (258). In the end, this radical deployment of architecture catalyzes nothing short of a shift in the function of space: the process of passing through perceived space yields to that of dwelling with the imaging potential of space, what Arakawa and Gins aptly gloss as the “underside of things" (259).
Arakawa and Gins'architectural experiments thus expose the bodily source of architecture in its most extreme, indeed, bare form: for them, architecture comprises nothing short of an opportunity to alter "habitual and deadening" patterns of thought by soliciting the site where these patterns originate—namely, the body as imaging potentiality. Architecture, Arakawa and Gins bluntly state, "exists to provide landing sites" (Architecture, 121). That is why, ultimately, all architecture comes from the body: "What generates landing sites? The movement and power of the body. Through where does the body fall? Not through spacetime but through landing sites. In what does architecture have its origin? In the movements and exertions of body" (150).
By tapping the potential of bodily movement to create new landing sites, architecture supports the body's concretization of spacetime, its giving of time and space as the foundation for all real experience. Arakawa and Gins'work proffers many permutations of this technical exteriorization of embodiment. Consider, for example, the Trench House, which “accommodates and embodies the body's endless desire to draw close and be in rapport with virtually everything" (105). Consider Reversible Destiny House I, which offers a means for “a person to have a sense of her own extent" (99). Or, consider Double-Horizon Public Housing, designed to demonstrate the maxim that “to form the body endlessly is the purpose of the city" (121). In all of these cases, architecture is built out of the body; it comprises an instrument to tap the body's capacity to constitute space.
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