Title: Architectural Body Tracking & Diagramming (ABTD) – Research and Prototyping

Aim: To contribute to a better understanding of Arakawa and Gins’ project of procedural architecture and to allow its insights to more constructively impact prevailing discourses, this project pursues a methodology for notating factors in the awareness of an architectural body in movement through its architectural surround.

Significance: The work of Arakawa and Gins has posed a challenge to architectural and intellectual practices at many levels. It both models and, under the banner of a “crisis ethics” demands an architecture conducted as critical philosophy and a critical philosophy conducted as architecture. Major publications and now a fourth international conference (AGxKansai 2022) have been dedicated to probing their claims and proposals, and to furthering their mutual rethinking of architecture and philosophy.
My engagement with their work has centered the question of efficacy and surfaced complex networks of questioning between architecture and urban design, cognitive science, physics, governance and medicine.
The most radical and challenging aspect of their work – its body-immanence, our need to engage it (and its claims to efficacy) physically as architecture and bodily as embodied thought in action – has also proved the most difficult to approach with the tools of conventional analysis.
Both to understand Arakawa and Gins’ project more fully, and to allow its insights to more constructively impact the discourses available for approaching work of this kind, new methods and practices of critical detection, evaluation, analysis and reporting are needed. Arakawa and Gins themselves called for these:
“We believe that the resolving of these matters requires the construction of complex measuring and tracking devices, constructions by which to gain perspective on human functioning and separate out its component factors” (Madeline Gins and Arakawa, Architectural Body 2002: 13).

Relevant research: The architectural production of A+G poses a challenge to prevailing architectural discourse, on the question of quantifying the qualitative values ascribed to architecture as lived experience. The maximum of attention and discernment in questions of embodied reception and evaluation of architectural surrounds is commonly ascribed to phenomenological approaches in architectural criticism, generally recycling Heideggerian terminology in contemporary analysis.
An example of this maximum of descriptive capacity in phenomenological discourse can be seen in Angelika Jaekel‘s Gestik des Raumes: zur leiblichen Kommunikation zwischen Benutzer und Raum in der Architektur (2013) which explores the notion of an „architectural gesture“ as a concept approaching in subtlety and complexity the discourse A+G provide, but also marking 2 Q-FW PROHM ABTD 2024 the still striking gap in acuity when considered against the landing site-based analysis of A+G’s Architectural Body (2002) and procedural architectural practice.
In contrast, the discourse established in the writings, design and constructions of Arakawa and Gins demonstrates an analysis and articulation well beyond the standard even of the most reflective and penetrating contemporary theorists of architecture and its impacts. Having followed the development and dissemination of this discourse since my first personal encounter with Arakawa and Gins in 2003 and my participation in the first international conference on their work in Paris in 2005, I have contributed where I could to the elucidation of their theory of landing sites and biotopology and committed to working out in detail a methodology of biotopological observation and reporting, as they themselves described and called for.
In previous publications (list below) I have argued the surpassing in A+G of phenomenology as a mode of analysis, enumerated the legacy of approaches in A+G‘s own diagramming, proposed the foundations of an adequate diagramming practice and listed resources from contemporary cognitive science for undergirding an account of the impacts and efficacies called on in A+G‘s theories of procedural architecture. All of this directly supports and prepares the research and prototype development this fellowship is undertaking.

Related Publications
„Another Kind of Knowing” essays with Don Byrd and Jondi Keane, in Naohiko Mimura and Takeshi Kadobayashi (eds) Art and Philosophy in the 22nd Century: After Arakawa and Gins, Kyoto: Ratik, 2023
“From Literary Device to Architectural Procedure: on Arakawa and Gins and the Becoming-Architecture of Literary Method“, in the Journal of Poetics Research, Sept. 2015
“Building Body – Two Treatments on Landing Site Theory”, in The Funambulist Papers: Vol. 2 Body ed. Léopold Lambert , Punctum Books, forthcoming May 2015
Procedures Journal – notes for a procedural architecture, eds. Alan Prohm and Jondi Keane, Jan. 2015 at proceduresjournal.com
“Constructing Poesis: Storyboards for an Immersive Diagramming” in Inflexions: a Journal of Research Creation, no. 6: the Arakawa and Gins issue, Montreal, Jan. 2013 – http://www.inflexions.org/n6_prohm.html
“Architecture and Poetic Efficacy: Part 1 Architectural Poetics” in Architecture and Philosophy: new views on the work of Arakawa and Madeline Gins, Rodopi, 2010
“Making Dying Illegal”, review of the book by Madeline Gins and Arakawa Crayon 5 , New York, ed. Andrew Levy, 2007

Description of the research content: The built constructions of architects, artists and philosophers Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins are unique in the history of art and architecture. The sites built and visitable today in Japan include the Reversible Destiny Lofts MITAKA (In Memory of Helen Keller) 2005, Mitaka Tokyo; Site of Reversible Destiny-Yoro Park, GIFU 1995, Yoro Gifu; and Ubiquitous Site, Nagi’s Ryoanji, Architectural Body 1994, Nagi town Okayama. Their unprecedented forms and spatial features are the expression of a revolutionary theory of architecture that sees itself as the future of philosophy and as a medium for overcoming the human condition of mortality.
A+G’s „procedural“ brand of architecture (from its theory through its built manifestations) poses an exciting challenge to the contemporary field as well as to the longer modernist and classical traditions of architecture, which A+G confront in their practice from the 1980’s onward by addressing themselves to the question of what an architecture could do that would do everything it can for the body. Understanding and, crucially, evaluating this architecture (or other architecture in comparison) requires adequately grasping the theory of landing sites or biotopology that undergirds the reception aesthetics at the heart of their architectural theory, and applying this to direct 1st and 3rd person reporting. The use of these sites was always imagined to involve practices of „daily research“, to include observing and reporting on the detail of perceptual and imaging „landing sites“ active in moment-to-moment world-building.
The Studies of the Architectural Body Research Group at the Institute of Oriental and Occidental Studies of Kansai University is a leading site of investigation and innovation around the study of Arakawa and Madeline Gins‘ oeuvre. The conference AGxKansai in March 2022 brought together the largest and most encompassing community of researchers so far around the work of Arakawa and Gins at venues in Kyoto and through a full virtual event program online. The current program of the Research Group involves concrete construction and testing of units of procedural architecture. The opportunity for highly constructive exchange on the theoretical and methodological bases for evaluative and testing procedures makes this an essential element of the content for research during this fellowship.

Concrete research method, plan and necessary time: The method in development draws on principles and examples from A+G’s own diagramming practice, from approaches in published criticism on A+G’s work and from my own prior work and writing on the topic (above). Essentially, it involves a graphic notation scheme for mapping the body’s encounter with a space in terms of “landing sites” (Arakawa and Gins 2002).
Graphical schematizations of the body and its kinaesphere (sphere of bodily movement) are overlaid onto a wide-angle photo, video capture or 3D volume of the immediate architectural scene, taken at eye-level. This schematization can be marked up (notated) according to the perceptual and imaging data taken in by the observer. The resulting image allows the user to record and track attentional acts directed toward particular regions or architectural features, indexed to the body parts or body regions registering them as either affordances or impingements in ongoing acts of coordination, which are recorded through verbal reporting in a comment layer on the visualization.
Applied synchronically or diachronically, such a method promises to enhance both introspective study of one’s own experience in/as architecture, and the objective/experimental observation of other users. The attentional analysis it facilitates, a methodological instantiation of landing site theory, is essential to the establishment of a phenomenological reception theory for evaluating and assessing the claims of works of experimental (and procedural) architecture. This short, intensive stay will allow a minimum sufficient encounter and documentation to support continuing development.

Reason for need to stay in japan:
Only in Japan were Arakawa and Gins able to build on a sustained scale toward the (procedural) architecture they conceived and developed in writings, drawings, models and installations. Steeped in this oeuvre and having intimate experience of the Bioscleave House in East Hampton, New York, this research itinerary will enable me to work with direct knowledge of all of their constructed works. For conceptualizing and prototyping my planned methodology and toolset, 1st-person experience and access to near real-time 3rd-person reporting on the encounter with and experience of the sites is essential. On-site exchange with colleagues at Japanese centers of research is additionally of tremendous value.

Status of preparations: Agreement with the Studies of the Architectural Body Research Group at Kansai University‘s Department of Oriental and Occidental Studies

Goal and method to disseminate outcome
The goal is to present this research and the methodology and tools in development 1) already before the Fellowship in a conference appearance at the 25th World Congress on Philosophy at Rome in August of 2024 with Prof. Naohiko Mimura and other colleagues, 2) in a print&digital Product Brochure comprising the essentials of the concept and its planned instantiation and serving as the Final Report of the Fellowship, and 3) as a culminating chapter in my upcoming joint publication with Don Byrd and Jondi Keane, Another Kind of Knowing (due 2024 with Punctum Books). Finally, through feedback, criticism and further iteration, the initial prototyping can support final design and publication of a web application for mobile or tablet as well as initiatives for its integration in user study and educational activities at sites of procedural architecture or architectural body research in Japan or elsewhere.

Medium- and long-term goal(s) in research and career
My current independent research initiatives are supported by my part-time design work with Studio TheGreenEyl. Medium-term I am working toward the publication of Another Kind of Knowing: on the Work of Arakawa and Gins with Don Byrd and Jondi Keane. In 2024 I intend to pursue funding to extend these publishing activities to work with the Reversible Destiny Foundation archives on the edition of a selected writings of Arakawa and Gins on architecture. Additionally, I have brought forth proposals to mount an exhibition of the works of Arakawa and Gins in Europe, with a focus on working out the intricacies and implications of their “procedural” architecture. Together, I hope to submit these current and other recent writings as the body of a “cumulative” Habilitation for higher certification through the Institute for the History and Science of Culture of the Humboldt University in Berlin, where I periodically teach and pursue related research.