Architectural Body

4. Architectural Surround

Let our species cease being stunned into silence and passivity, into defeatism, by a formal architecture that seems so accomplished but that leads nowhere. Members of our species have been stunned into passivity by what should be their greatest ally. To counter the deer-in-the-headlights effect, we have turned from speaking of architecture, vast architecture, to speaking of what of vast architecture a person can encompass in any given moment, naming this the architectural surround. This is architecture at the ready, at everyone’s disposal. It is not monumentality but an approachable workaday architecture our species is in need of. ∞ An architectural surround’s features: its boundaries and all objects and persons within it. Each circumjacency has a characteristic set of features. Here are some architectural surrounds and their characteristic sets of features. In the case of an architectural surround that is nothing more than a small enclosure in a wheat ¤eld formed by many stalks having been trampled upon, the set includes a ®oor of trampled-upon wheat stalks, walls consisting of wheat stalks, bent stragglers mixed in with intact ones, and sky for a ceiling. The set of features for a kitchen will be all that makes it a kitchen, including the woman putting a roast in the oven. The set of characteristic features for an immensely large architectural surround such as a city will be everything that makes it a city, including all those bustling or ambling through it. 4 Architectural Surround ∞ Similarly to how she ®exes her muscles, a person ®exes her surroundings—both are with her and of her always. Landingsite dispersal and a ®exing of the circumambient determine and describe the world that lies within one’s ambit of the moment . A person who is noting what is around her is dispersing landing sites; as body-wide landing-site dispersal registers the body’s immersion within a volume held in place by certain demarcations, recording particulars about boundaries, a person will feel herself surrounded ¤rst according to one description of the world, then another. Moving within an architectural surround, a person fashions an evolving matrix, an architectural surround not entirely of her own making. Repeatedly, incessantly, a person surrounds herself by conforming in a particular set of ways to what surrounds her. Constrained by her environment, she proceeds to piece together an architectural surround that maps onto the one within which she ¤nds herself . In a glance, she takes in a tree, a lake, or a wall. Glancing in that direction again, but this time having lifted, for example , her right leg to start walking toward X, she . . . ∞ Questions that query the degree to which persons are surroundings -bound need to be posed by actually erecting measuring frames around them. If persons can never be extricated from surroundings, then what must be looked at is the extent to which they are bound to and in®uenced by them. In what respects and how variegatedly do physical surroundings invite bodily action? How far out into the environment does an organism that persons extend? To what extent do surroundings in®uence thoughts and actions? 40 GINS AND ARAKAWA ∞ A rounding of multiple foci into a supposed whole occurs again and again, continually. One such surrounding of oneself follows upon the last, and there comes to be a layering of surroundings , a summing up of surroundings, into the singular plural of “the surroundings.” So much happens all at once, and surrounding and to be surrounded are spatiotemporally multilayered, this plural oneness (“the surroundings”) lets you know. The words con¤nes and bounds deliver the same message of a multiplicity of events, the active everything through which one moves—from a supposedly single viewpoint. These terms are conveniently all-inclusive; the word surroundings in one of its uses designates the people in one’s vicinity or members of an entourage. ∞ Preexisting those who enter them, architectural surrounds stand as elaborately structured pretexts for action. Ready and waiting to be entered, even when in disarray, they are alwaysencountered and often-noticed but little-understood atmospheric conditioners. Someone might make a convincing case for doubting that she exists or that isolated objects do, but it would be preposterous for her to try to use doubt to wipe away features and elements of an entire architectural surround. It would be unusual and unlikely for someone holding a glass beneath an open faucet and ¤lling it with water to doubt the existence of either any part of this situation or...