Embodied Aporia: exploring the potentials for posing questions through architecture

Abstract

Through shifts in scale, as illustrated in creative spatial practices, affinities can be drawn out between persons and architectures that lead to encounters with forms and materials as both familiar and strange. Such encounters hold potential for developing sensitivity to the forces at play between body and surroundings, and the identification of separate bodies can be shifted to identification with, and as part of, an ecology of bodies. Using examples from artist-architects Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins alongside art historical examples of Minimalist sculpture, lines of connection are drawn between disparate practices in order to illustrate a continuity of questioning the body directly through the construction of environments. These spatial practices evidence that certain questions are best posed by architecture, as questions which cannot be posed through language can be posed through other methods. Strategies for increasing this sensitivity are parsed out towards the identification of a particular form of embodied doubt, a lived puzzlement felt body wide.