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Research Paper On Images Of Muscle And Bone

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Images of Muscle and Bone “The union of soul and body is not an amalgamation between two mutually external terms, subject and object, brought about by arbitrary decree. It is enacted at every instant in the movement of existence.” [Mearleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception] Why do you doubt your senses? “Because”, said Scrooge, “a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!” [Stave I, A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens] As architecture students, we are told to think about the subjects in space –the occupants per say, that activate …show more content…

Under the title, Images of Muscle and Bone, Pallasmaa proposes, that there is “an inherent suggestion of action in the images of architecture, the moment of active encounter or a promise of use and purpose.” French philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes about this active exchange between the human body and the space it occupies by understanding the body as subject and object at once –a mutual engagement between the body as the perceiving subject and the body as the perceived object. Merleau-Ponty uses this dyadic reasoning of body and spatiality to characterize the existential nature of the human-body as “being in the world,” a phrase borrowed from Heidegger –the phenomenological aspect of the phrase comes, not from the world understood as a fixed, unchanging ‘space’ but rather how our bodies correlate with spatial consequence through sensory motility. It is also interesting to note how French philosopher, Gaston Bachelard, in his book, The Poetics of Space, describes a human being as a spiraled being who, “from outside, appears to be a well-invested center, will never reach his center. The being of man is an unsettled being which all expression unsettles.” Therefore, we can say that while we measure a building through our kinesthetic senses, architecture has the ability to organize itself around our bodily

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