The international conference “Images of the Body in Architecture. Anthropology and Built Space” is presented by the Sonderforschungsbereich Kulturen des Performativen, based on a co-operation between the Institute of Cultural History and Theory, Humboldt-Universität, and the Department of Architectural Theory, Technische Universität Berlin. The conference is intended as a further step to an anthropology of architecture on the basis of a critical history of the body and its cultural constructions.

The analogy between the human body and architecture is rooted in the fundamental impact the human body has on ordering, symbolizing, and interpreting the world. Correspondingly, the metaphorical conceptualization of the built environment in terms of the human body has already been in practice in early cultures and has determined architectural theory since antiquity. While anthropomorphic and anthropometric figures were vividly imagined in the architectural treatises of early modern times, they seemed to be overcome by an architectural theory that was based on purely rational as well as mechanical laws. However, these figures were never totally abandoned, and Le Corbusier’s Modulor is only one, if not the most prominent example, for the ongoing reception and transformation of them in modern times. In this, the human sciences of the 19th century played a significant role. Physiology and psychology brought about not only new experimental devices for analyzing the human body and its physiological functions, but also new images of the body that directly went into aesthetics, art history, and architectural theory. This new understanding of the body had a large impact on the production and reception of modern architecture. Due to this background the arts eventually became anthropologically founded.

The conference consists of three sections: anthropomorphic and anthropometric figures from antiquity to modern times, the physiological body with a focus on the 19th and 20th century, as well as the disciplined body that includes a fundamental critique of the modern physiological, anthropo- and biometrical framing of the human body. This last section specifically discusses the influence Michel Foucault’s concepts of the body and (architectural) space have had on the understanding of the built environment.