our contemporary experience due to the technological extensibility of our bodies. This in turns poses the critical problem of rethinking what the experience of human embodiment is in our world today.4 If the body is no longer just a corporeal manifestation, but instead a combination of disperse experiences, how should the image of the body be understood in relation to space? Moreover, how can space translate this existential shift in order to engage with these aspects of embodiment? Spatial constructs, therefore, play an important role in the reconciliation between the body and the world. “In its way of representing and structuring action and power, societal and cultural order, interaction and separation, identity and memory, architecture is engaged with this fundamental existential questions”5 , to the extent that the image of self cannot be separated from its spatial and circumstantial condition. As a result, the spatialbody assemblage is the transformation of emanated sensations engraved in a spatial medium. In understanding architecture as an integral component of human existence, spatial constructs can be analyzed as the manifestation, the medium and the instrument that gives presence to invisible aspects of our bodily existence. The question is how could, architecture engage, not merely reflect, this opaque interiority of our bodies? How can it become the medium of embodiment? who/what is the reconstructed body/self? To inquire for the (reconstruction of a body is not to ask for the redefinition of what constitutes to be a human being, but to question preconceived notions of innersubjectivity, self-consciousness and self-authorship in relation to spatial production. It is important to recognize that the terms ‘body’ and ‘Self’ encompass a broad range of connotations and
positions. For the work of this thesis, they both refer to the combination of surrogate6 objects and subjects that constitutes the essence of individuality and the internal aspects that render a sense of being and make up the bodily existence. It renders the body, not as a physical (corporeal) object, but as an elaborate combination of pliable transformations which continually mark and transform space. The body has been theorized as an accumulation of its own pieces and of others, attaining its integrity through the assemblage of surrogate objects and subjects.7 It has also been interpreted as unique medium; as a sensorial object and an object to be sensed.8 Bodies and selves are also considered to be divisible, boundary diffusible, unifiable, possesable, and introspectable.9 Contemporary concepts have also portrayed it as a Self of Selves composed of multiple aspects central to human beings.10 These ‘molds’ of human experience are by no means determinate, as it is not possible to talk about the self as a ‘matter of fact’ condition. However, the fact that it could be conceptually represented denotes that the interiority of the body is sufficiently determinate to be grasped as a construct. These philosophical concepts either interrogates the mind as separate from its material condition, make the body its central circumstance, or fragment it into parts. In either situation they create a replica; a double and surrogate of the original condition. In this sense, self-constructs represent a counterfeited11 form of the body’s interiority. …and who/what isn’t? Merleau-Ponty distinguished a ‘geometrical’ space (a homogenous and isotropic spatiality, analogous to our conception of ‘place’) from another ‘spatiality’ which he called an ‘anthropological space’. Prevailing views of the discipline either catalog the body/self as client, as occupant/user, as community, and, sometimes, as the architect himself. All of these views of the body/self