Recalling Cache's argument, we can now appreciate just how much the privilege accorded architecture as the quintessential art of framing for our time owes to its constitutive embrace of the body.xxii Simply stated, embodiment is the operator of all interchanges between space and architectural interiority. It is from the bodily conversion of force into affect that new framings of space—dynamic framings “adequate to" the new spaces and, above all, the infospaces of the contemporary technosphere—always ultimately arise.
- WEARING THE BLUR
How exactly do digital media contribute to architecture's privilege as the quintessential art of framing for our time? To answer this question, we must deepen our understanding of Eisenman's correlation of the digital with a certain refunctionalization of architectural interiority. How, we need to ask, does the digital effectuate an opening of the autonomy of the architectural sign such that it is made available for a re-embodiment through the bodily affects it triggers?
To address this crucial question, let us return to Diller + Scofidio who, as I shall now suggest, represent a legacy of Eisenman's efforts to retool architectural interiority that stands in marked contrast to the one currently pursued by today's so-called machinic architects. In a general sense, this divergence can be discerned from Diller + Scofidio's penchant to use technology against the grain, as a means of introducing delay into the temporal flux of contemporary experience. Rather than seeking to maximize productivity and efficiency, as capitalism preaches, or to make seamless contact with the material flux, as the machinic architects urge (following Kwinter's characterization), Diller + Scofidio deploy technologies as a means of introducing indeterminacy and instituting delay so that something unpredictable, something new, can emerge. The crucial question, then, will concern their use of digital media to open architectural interiority for the creation of new experiences.
In an insightful article that situates Diller + Scofidio's practice in relation to the 70s generation and, specifically, to John Hejduk and Eisenman, Michael Hays traces the singularity of Diller + Scofidio to their effort to expand the motif of interiority/autonomy beyond its narrow architectural embodiment. Whereas the"theory-practice alignment of the 1970s produced built (or at least buildable) objects (mostly private homes) that used elaborate formal devices to visibly lay bare the compositional procedures that had generated the object in the first place, that is, to represent the formative logic of the object in the object itself," Diller + Scofidio deploy the formalist code “in a different, higher register in which the new work sought to reveal the unintended presumptions that ostensibly autonomous architectural techniques had enabled or had tried to remove from the possibility of thinking."21
BODIES IN CODE
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