On Embodied Design

Body is what every human being is born with and what goes along with one’sentire life. All interactions between human beings and the outside are based on body.Body is human’s executor of actions, receptors of senses, and environment of thegeneration of cognitions, so it influences the relationship between human and theoutside world from many aspects. With the control from vision, function and technology,architecture could gain universal humanistic values by concerning body.Body and architecture is a classical proposition in architectural field, but its angleof view keeps changing with Zeitgeist. In the Information Age, architecturalphenomenology of perception is the leading theory, as it emphasizes on constructingatmosphere based on body senses. This reflects the philosophical trend of combiningbody and mind. Architectural phenomenology of perception is mainly consist ofarchitects’personal descriptions and this results in its lack of objectivity and operability.Based on these backgrounds, this dissertation employs related contemporary theoriesfrom natural sciences to analyze connections of body and architecture from an objectiveview. Then, it takes case studies for concrete analysis and finally put forward anapproach of architectural design from the viewpoint of body.The main body of this dissertation consists of three parts: criticism, analysis andsolution. The criticism part specifically interprets the body problem of modernarchitecture. Led by technology and evolution, modern architecture alienates body andignores the corresponding psychological requirements with its superscaleness,abstraction, sameness and sculptureness. From here, key points for solving the bodyproblem are selected among the dimensions of body study in architecture. Then, theanalysis part takes contemporary related theories from psychology, psychoanalysis andcognitive science as basement and puts forward three levels for the connections betweenbody and architecture: the perceptual level, the cognitive level and the motor level.Connecting modes in each level are revealed separately. Guided by these theoreticalconnections, typical architecture cases are studied based upon field studies, PostOccupancy Evaluations, and interviews of the architects, from which methods andmeanings of the connections of body and architecture are analyzed. Based on theseworks, the solution part takes the founder of phenomenology of perception Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s extended meaning of “embodied” to propose the concept of “embodieddesign”.“embodied” means “influenced by body experiences” and “embodied design”means an architectural design approach who takes the spiritual influences from body’slife characteristics to human in architecture as starting point. The main contents ofembodied design are embodied design guidelines and embodied design workingmethods. By reexamining the architecture language of space, order and form from theview of body, embodied design guidelines for place, place organization and interface aregenerated. Embodied design working methods include taking memory of experience asdatabase in conceptive process and making operation and experience influences eachother reciprocally in design progress.Besides, this dissertation also discusses the connections between embodied designand the body tradition in Chinese culture, as well as related contemporary designpropositions. Two practical programs managed or participated by the author are taken asexperiments of embodied design.