Abstract

Anthropomorphic analogy has been a persistent paradigm to the discourse of architecture ever since Alberti claimed, with Vitruvian inspiration, that a building is a form of body. Words such as circulation, blood, arteries, as well as, head, navel, and feet have often been used often to qualify the morphology of the built domain. The body/building correspondence, however, has mostly been restricted to geometries of anatomy and physiology whereby a body is idealized in a state of normalcy that requires permanent surveillance. Urban discourse, for instance, opposes two images: one negative, which detects the city's abnormality as pathological; the other positive, which analogizes an ideal body in its attempts to rectify the urban form. From such a discourse, results a thematic of dependency on a geometrico-biological body along with a necessity to diagnose and prevent potential defects. The analogical bias confining the human body to a physio-biological framework while excluding the body's 'affects', is a rather panopticist posture that inevitably incarcerates the body in a single cell, scrutinizing and objectifying its flesh by obliterating its desires. At best, the built domain has been regarded as the stage of heightened sentiments while affects seem never to qualify or construct architecture. A building need not merely amplify an experience when it might actually materialize subjectivity. ;The following dissertation will evoke an 'amorous discourse' in architecture. A discourse that despite analogy , might homologize an affective body, gendered, languid, in love, in pain, etc. For if it seems ordinary to pronounce the word face in facade, one has yet to locate in this analogy expressions of melancholia, ravishment, or languor. Affects are revealed so that the body may not merely be reduced to fields of biology, anatomy, or geometry and so that architecture's anthropomorphic allusions might be liberated from what Roland Barthes has referred to as perfidious Analogy. A Barthesian reading of the built domain might extract from the words and images of architecture, an amatory dimension wherein the body is so often 'plural', always 'atopic', 'affective' and whose loves, no doubt, participate in the construction of buildings