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  • Body and Building: Essays on the Changing Relation of Body and Architecture
  • Simone Osthoff
Body and Building: Essays on the Changing Relation of Body and Architecture edited by George Dodds and Robert Tavernor. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, U.S.A., 2002. 438 pp. Trade. ISBN: 0-262-04195-2.

Written by an international group of architects, scholars, former students and friends of the architectural historian and theorist Joseph Rykwert, the essays in this book originated in the symposium Body and Building, held at the University of Pennsylvania in March 1996 and organized in celebration of Rykwert's 75th birthday. As diverse and wide-ranging as Rykwert's intellectual explorations themselves, this collection of essays, without constituting a Ryk-wert "school" of thought, addresses artifacts and topics that refer back to two and a half millennia of Western architecture. They share with Rykwert the notion that the body, the senses, space and artifacts have a history, and that our ideas of the relation between the body and buildings must be deeply embedded into social and cultural history.

Although none of Rykwert's writings are in the book, his presence is clearly established in George Braid's introduction and Vittorio Gregotti's epilogue. Braid charts Rykwert's intellectual formation and original contribution to the field of architectural history and theory, highlighting Rykwert's opposition both to the positivist perspective of function as a measure of value and to the perspective that sees form as an aesthetic question. By privileging content and meaning and abandoning teleological notions of progress in history, Rykwert sought the question of the origin of architecture, continuously making connections among culture, religion, buildings and power. He pointed out how rituals and ceremonies both influence and are influenced by architectural and urban designs. Rykwert's powerful analogy between buildings and the human body underpins the chapters of the book. The chapters are organized in chronological order in three broad groups: the first focuses on embodiment and on revisionist readings of architectural and other artifacts from the ancient world. The second group of chapters examines a series of cultural products across Europe between the 15th and the 18th centuries: paintings, buildings, sculpture, fortifications and texts. The third group discusses a wide range of contemporary topics, both social and cultural: examining issues of representation; rationality and its magic and mystic others; and scopic and somatic relations. In the book's epilogue, [End Page 331] Vittorio Gregotti, Rykwert's colleague of long standing, points to the timely relevance of Rywert's writings, as they oppose the major issues with which architects struggle today: issues that oscillate between productive pragmatism and, due to the impoverished teachings of functionalism, the acceptance of a purely decorative role for art. This collection of essays on the changing relations of body and architecture are a proper homage to Ryk-wert's legacy as they continue to articulate this challenge. [End Page 332]

Simone Osthoff
E-mail: <sxo11@psu.edu>.
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