In-corporeal-ating architecture: The living body and a place of death

Abstract

The history of the senses will be looked at in terms of a concept of viewing emerging from the visual, and domination that this viewing holds over the other senses (and sensing in general) in architecture. A change in the hierarchy of the senses becomes evident during the late Gothic period, it is institutionalized in architecture by Durrand and in philosophy and art criticism by Kant. What this separation of viewing from vision (as a sense) and the isolation in Kant of the cognitive faculty from the aesthetic, does is impose a severe mind/body split. It is this dialect that informs the very basis of modernity, science, and architecture within the university. Architecture has the power to deny this mind/body split, and this potential has been realized concurrent to the domination of the visual