Like Arakawa and Gins, Diller + Scofidio deploy architecture as a means to catalyze a fundamental shift in the sensory economy of the body, from a frontal, visually dominant modality to a longitudinal modality that draws heavily on both hearing and touch, as well as properly bodily senses like proprioception. In contrast to Arakawa and Gins, they do this not only to uncover a truth about the body, but also to bring out the bodily component of spacing—the way that architecture, at least in this age of medial fluidity, must open itself out to the body as an environmental source of heterogenesis, of architectural exteriority, that is crucial to its ongoing individuation or internal resonance.
Like Eisenman, Diller + Scofidio invest space with the potential for triggering longitudinal experience, such that the shift in the body's sensory economy cannot be said to ensue solely from powers contained within the body, but rather to be the result of an encounter between the body and the longitudinal dimensions of space released through the crossover of architecture and electronic technologies. In contrast to Eisenman, however, this encounter of bodily affectivity and interstitial spacing is far more immediate, something that can be experienced explicitly within the confines of the bodily inhabitation of the blur. Indeed, in the Blur Building, space becomes wearable not as some abstract correlate of a distinct figural liberation of the interstitial, but rather as the condition for effectuating the interpenetration of architecture and media that is at once its primary phenomenological and architectural goal: the dematerialization of architecture into “atmosphere' and the becoming-palpable of electronics (the digital) as “habitable medium."
For these reasons, Diller + Scofidio's Blur Building is the quintessential expression of wearable space as a phenomenological and architectural condition directly tied to the massive infiltration of digital media into the contemporary lifeworld. It puts into action, on the cusp between architectural (in)form and the affective body, the program of sensory deterritorialization—specifically, the dethronement of vision—championed, in various ways, by Arakawa and Gins and by Eisenman. And it does so with a sensory immediacy that has the effect of inverting the function of architectural presence, transforming it into a source of affective intensity capable of making space wearable, not as an abstract design condition, but as a concrete phenomenological reality.
WEARABLE SPACE
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