Body of Architecture

Critical Thinking | Allied Design | 2025

The Body of Architecture, Thinking Architecture, Peter Zumthor

Critically thinking of this chapeter, and decoding through the images of Peter Zumthors works and emphasing sentences.

To understand and get hold of the body, we draw, as it is our first basic instinct, the first step of the process. But how do you draw the experience? The experience that is so subjective, visceral and intangible. How does the memory embodies into something tangible, for it to communicate and to take a form of its own ?

For this experience to attain a body, a form; we use lines and diagrams. What are the essential lines required to convey, express and represent this body of ideas and experience?

Further in this process, Models, Architecture Models gives a physical, three-dimensional form to the imagination, the sweeping lines and the experience. These are Sculptures, SCULPTURES OF THOUGHTS.

These are the first to sweep in the agency of MATERIALS to the spatial form.

But how much and in what forms do the choice of material shapes the idea of the building or a non-building? Does the Material follows Form or Form follows Material?

Material influences the geometry, the anatomy, skin and the finish of the structure. Understanding of this material; it’s properties, nature, limitations and further experimentation and challenging of it’s function becomes important.

Functions differ with scales from a macro to micro level. Micro- where as simple as a door handle,

Could bez reimagined, rethought as a sculpted out volume.

Often the new body must engage and knit on with the old. How does it becomes it’s part and forms

a new whole? How does the new material merges with the old?

Scale, Proportions, Volume along with the Material and the way it gets detail out;

CREATES ATMOSPHERES.

The Building then starts to EXPRESS. Express the sensuously and textural quality of the material. It embodies cultural significance and invites the user to use the primitive sense of touch to understand it’s synthesis.

This body is always in engagement with the context, histories and built environment.

The Body of Architecture

A self reflection through this provaction.

The body of Architecture can be in literal terms understood as a body, a physical mass. To attain the form of this body, I start with understanding the context, site, site practices and the larger questions that this body could raise and respond to. When I look now at the few academic projects I have done, I realise that while it attains the form through a strong contextual approach, this understanding falls short or rather brings in the idea of materials a far later.

How do you think through a material? How much and in what forms does the choice of material shape the idea of the building or a non-building? Does the Material follows Form or Form follows Material? For me up till this moment of time it has always been the latter, where probably the only substitute the choice of material brings in is to the wall thickness.

During my 5 months internship in Bhopal it led to opening up an inventory of materials, histories and bodies of architecture.

A note from a visit to Bhimbetka Rock Shelters :

“Apart from the Rock paintings which it is actually known for, the shelters amazed me with its scales, textures, material, patterns, vantages, geometry, physics and conservation. The idea of home/ shelter as a place of rest with maximum vantage points leads to the several carved out spaces.” The simple logics of balance, composition and gravity for the material stone derived the varied forms. Cantilever stones was one such form where merging from the two adjoining rocks formed a huge canopy and a homely shelter. I was fascinated by their understanding of this material, its properties, nature, limitations and still further challenging its function and evolved form. I had experienced the use of stone in its purest form (as rock-cut) and the many ways in which it could be shaped and thought of as. Here the form follows material.

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Manav Sangrahalaya in Bhopal is an open air ethnographic museum with 1:1 human scale houses from across the country, where the houses are made on site by the people of the community itself. Apart from housing the many regional practices of several communities, it also houses the many different material cultures. The materials used for the houses are in correspondence to their specific regions and climatic conditions. But what intrigued me was the way in which the materials used were detailed out according to several different functions. Where not just the form, but material quality is ingested in almost everything that makes a house. Bamboo weaved jalis, a sliding bamboo door, ladders carved out of tree trunks, seatings built as a part of the wall, storage niches within walls; were few of the many. Here, as much as the materials derive the scale, volume, proportions and thus form of the built it also goes beyond and experiments with the resource for almost everything that is used (door, windows, storage, furniture, ladders, seatings, etc).

I learn about architecture through the many things around me. These other dimensions of material experiences are physical manifestations of how several communities have been thinking about architecture (here their homes) through the agency of materials along with several other factors (like climate, availability and function). So does the form follows material or material follows form? These provocation should not be thought of in binary but as a back and forth negotiation, as a nuanced process that constantly works and challenges the biological material. But why material in the first place? Because a material or combination of materials is what finally gives the body a physical form, a skin, a flesh and an anatomy. Until then it’s just hypothetical, something on paper and in imagination. It allows the form to express, breathe, grow, form and be a part of the existing ecology.

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