2025.05.30
BODIES OF “HUMAN” AND “ARCHITECTURE”
Standing between saskatoon-berry bushes on a granite patch, my feet do not move. I am able to remain upright. I am not thrown off this rockface. I am governed by the same forces as the stone beneath me. Yet, my human senses do not perceive any life rising from the earth—no felt movement or warmth detectable by my fleshy body and its run-down senses. Life, as my tactile senses might infer, is something that must be felt—and by this measure, the earth seems inert.
I may exclaim some empathetic sense of the animate, existing beyond my physicality. Even then, it is not my spirit that counts seconds and minutes, but my fleshy, ticking brain. It is this brain that allows me to register this one present… and the next… and the next again.
If the microscopic insects on my skin think, I cannot blame them for considering me eternal—some sustainer and giver of life and domain. Still, as primates we boast of our intellect and apex status, living in naïveté as we believe in our own significance. It is an insolent act to age the cosmos in terms of our cycles—to believe we may impart wisdom to the cosmos itself as an act of generosity: to give identity and age, done by telescopic lookers, cameras, and abstractions of what is—as if we are called to tell everything what it is.
This is to assume that all findings of science are truth, and that we exist in a time governed by space and the Big Boom. We say, “Before it was nothing,” despite our own bodies beating and beating. We name this instance—the ongoing span evolving from that beat—as if we can define it from within.
I am a mayfly’s mayfly—even less.
It is with humility that I see my own standing—where the moving parts of the cosmos are independent of me. Yet I am within them. I am within the presence of this granite on which I stand still, where one present moment consists of mine ad infinitum.
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While this may have started as a cynical, existential thought experiment, it holds relevance for architecture and design. If we think about all these temporalities—these present-moments—as accumulating materials, then the physical forms we construct in a building are amalgamations of instances.
If one could truly see a tree for who that tree is—a being composed of experiences and moments, like ourselves—then that tree might be seen as a gift, not a disposable object in some terra nullius fantasy.
In my comprehensive master’s project, I positioned time as a central driver of my design thinking. I made claims and poetics that sought to distinguish my project from architecture as usual:
Yet after eight or so months spent on this project—from initial mappings to construction details—I completely missed the plot.
The concept of this project is rooted in varying temporalities of human and more-than-human scales. Germane to this theme, the project explores the inhabitation of all things and their orientation within place and time by identifying presences. There are two streams of presence contemplated in this exploration: the materiality of the physical architecture and the introspective journeys of the inhabitants within. Time moves through both, where the present is a permanent state of reconstruction.
The physicality of this building is intended to exist within a larger scale of time and present—where material appears unchanging to the perception of the inhabitants, so they live within their own presence. Yet these materials will also change as they are exposed to the elements, dependent on their own temporal bodies: stone will lapse in geological time, wood to ecological cycling, and glass to fragility—each celebrating and responding to the natural present in which all things exist in time.
The weathering of material serves as a visual and tactile dialogue between body and environment, not unlike the introspection and transformation of the inhabitants within. The difference in scale between bodies in flux offers opportunities to the ephemeral; it is inside this monument that the inhabitants may stand still within their own presence, and the community with which they interact. It is the enabling of an individual to truly dwell—a grounding of spirit that spreads through the minds, hands, and mediums of makers. It is the act of making that proves existence—the existence of a single present, a temporal marker for a moment mid-transformation—a tactile version of memory’s reconstructions, where an individual continues to grow with time but can recognize this artefact as relational to their once-present.
The display of these artefacts will show the lapsing present of inhabitation—existing within stone walls. These stone blocks, an amalgam of glacial existence, are monuments to moments present and past. They offer their bodies in protection so we may exist within our own metamorphosis, until they too return home.
The nature of the within is never permanent—the mortal body will always return home. It is with this return that a metamorphosis occurs. There is creation in death, a oneness with the body of land—where one’s present becomes tangled with all that exists in this cosmos. Home does not exist if one never returns.
In those months of deep reading, contemplation, and writing about time, I somehow neglected a basic truth: that this hypothetical architecture—and its real counterpart—are no different from anything else that exists. They participate in the same conditions of being as the urban fabric, the surrounding landscape, the ocean’s depths, the atmosphere, the clouds, the vacuum of space, and the cosmos.
And maybe it isn’t even limited to the physical. My memories, too, are products of experiences and sensorial transmissions—virtual instances relayed to my brain, shifting and reshaping as I age. Each moment accumulates, some to become memory and some to become part of my condition of being within all future moments.