Beden ve mekân ilişkilerinde ideal olmayan: Hiçbir beden için mimarlık
Non-ideal in body and space relations: Architecture for no body
Yazar: ŞULE OTÇU
Danışman: PROF. DR. PELİN DURSUN ÇEBİ
İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi / Lisansüstü Eğitim Enstitüsü / Mimarlık Ana Bilim Dalı / Mimari Tasarım Bilim Dalı
Derece: Yüksek Lisans, 2023
Konu: Mimarlık = Architecture

Özet:
Bu çalışma beden ve mekân ilişkileri çerçevesinde şekillenir. Bedeni idealize ederek mekânı kuran pratikleri sorunsallaştırır. Bu pratiklerin dışarıda bıraktığı, ideal olmayan bedenleri göz önünde bulundurur. Bu bedenlerin mekânsal pratiklerine dair çeşitli açılımlar önerir. İdealize edilen bedenler, mekân ile ilişki kurmada ayrıcalıklı pozisyonlar yaratırlar. Bu nedenle, farklı bedenleri içerebilmek bağlamında çeşitli problemler barındırırlar. Bu çalışma, tarihsel süreç içinde benimsenen ideal bedenlere ve bu bedenler bağlamında üretilen mekânsal pratiklere bakarak, ideal olmayan bedenleri saptar. Bu ideal olmayan bedenler için mekânı kurmada alternatif yollar araştırır. Niyeti, ideal olmayan bedenleri de içine alacak, kapsayıcı olması bakımından alternatif mimari pratiklerin potansiyellerine işaret etmektir. Mekânın hiçbir bedeni dışlamadığı, her beden ile kurduğu ilişkinin benzer mesafede olduğu; hiçbir beden için / tüm bedenler için kapsayıcı mimari pratiklerin yollarını keşfedebilmektir.
Çalışma ilk bölümünde çalışmanın amaç, kapsam ve yöntemini açıklar. İkinci bölümünde, ilk olarak, tarih anlatılarındaki belirli ideal beden tanımlarına ve bu idealler üzerinden kurulan mimarlık kavrayışlarına odaklanır. Değişen ideal beden tanımlarına dair ipuçlarını bir kronoloji çerçevesinde ortaya koyar. Bu kronoloji aracılığı ile mekânsal pratikler bağlamında ideal olmayan bedenlere dair bütünlüklü bir temsil ortaya koyar. Bu kapsamda, Joseph Rykwert'in beden tartışmaları; Alain Corbin, Jean-Jacques-Courtine, Georges Vigarello'nun birlikte yazdıkları, son derece kapsamlı üç serilik beden tarihi anlatıları ve Sergei Eisenstein'ın kuramsal tartışmaları ziyaret edilir. Bu anlatı sırasında saptanılan beden idealleri, çalışma boyunca takip edilen ipuçları ile çerçevelenir.
Çalışmanın üçüncü bölümünde, bedenin hareketinin keşfi tarihsel süreç içinde işaret edilen bir kırılma noktası olarak değerlendirilir. Hareketin çeşitli temsil biçimlerinin keşfi ile birlikte beliren mekanik beden anlatılarına odaklanılır. Mekanik beden ideali, mekanizasyonun ortaya çıkışı ile ilişkilendirilir. Bu bağlamda, mimarlık tarihçisi ve eleştirmeni Sigfried Giedion'ın mekanizasyonun doğuşu tartışmaları, kuramsal olarak merkeze alınır. Giedion teknolojinin gündelik yaşam içerisindeki konumunu insan odaklı bir tarih yazımı üzerinden değerlendirir. Makineleşmenin beraberinde getirdiği fotoğraflama aracılığı ile gerçekleşen hareketin etüd edilmesini mekanik sistemler ile ilişkilendirir. Bu bağlamda tartışmasını, teknik aracılar sayesinde hareketin temsil edilebilmesinin olanakları üzerinden sürdürür. Étienne-Jules Marey, Nicolas Oresme ve Frank Bunker Gilbreth'in hareketi merkeze alarak gerçekleştirmiş olduğu çalışmaları tartışmaya açar. Bu araştırma, bu bölümünde bu çalışmalar üzerinden mekanik beden ideallerine dair ipuçları yakalar. Mekanik beden idealine dair yakalanan ipuçları ile saptanan mekanik beden idallerinin mimari yansımalarının, modernizmin geneline yayıldığı söylenebilir. Sözgelimi Le Corbusier'nin Moduloru, Bauhaus dahilinde gerçekleştirilen çalışmalar, Neufert'in ya da Dreyfuss'un standartlaştırma girişimleri, bedeni belirli hareket mekanizmaları içerisinde değerlendirir. Bu çalışmaların dışında bıraktıkları bedenler ile ilgilenir. 
Çalışma dördüncü bölümünde, öncelikli olarak ikinci ve üçüncü bölümde yakalamış olduğu ipuçlarını yan yana getirerek saptamış olduğu ideal olmayan bedenleri tartışmaya açar. Değerlendirilen bu ideal olmayan bedenler için kapsayıcı mekânsal üretimlerin alternatif olarak değerlendirdiği çeşitli mimari vakalar üzerinden işaret eder. Bu kapsamda, Diana Agrest'in feminist teorisi, Lillian Möller Gilbreth'in esnek tasarım önerileri, Aldo van Eyck'ın işleri gibi alternatif üretimler üzerinden kapsayıcı tavırları değerlendirir. Bu kapsayıcı pratikleri genişleterek, 'hiçbir beden için mimarlık' ismini verdiği bir yaklaşım önerir. Bu yaklaşımı, çeşitli sanat pratikleri de ortaya koyan mimarlar Suziki Arakawa ve Madeline Gins tarafından üretilen "Architectural Body" ve "We Have Decided Not to Die" kitaplarında ortaya koydukları kavramsal çerçeve ile değerlendirir. İkilinin 'reversible destiny', 'organism of body', 'movement body' gibi tartışmaya açtıkları kavramlara odaklanır ve bu kavramlar bağlamında ürettikleri mimari pratiklerin kapsayıcı potansiyellerini işaret eder. Sonuç olarak, bu çalışma mimari mekânı üretmede bedeni idealize ederek mekânı kuran pratiklerin dışlayıcı tavırlarını sorunsallaştırır. Bu nedenle tarihsel süreç içinde ele alınan idealleri serimleyerek, aslında bu ideallerin kapsamlı dönüşümlere tabi olduğunu, üzerinde uzlaşılabilecek evrensel bir ideal bedenin mümkün olmadığını ortaya koyar. Yöntem olarak benimsediği, ipuçları adını verdiği temsiller ile ortak bir kesişim diyagramı oluşturarak, ideal olmayan bedenler için alternatif kavrayışlar üretir. Bu kavrayışların da tüm bedenleri kapsamadığı çıkarımları ile en kapsamlı mimari üretimin, hiçbir beden için mimarlık kavrayışı ile gerçekleşebileceğini ima eden bir kapsayıcı bir yaklaşım önerir.

Abstract:
Throughout history, the human body has held a central position. For example, in some conceptions, the human body was regarded as God's masterpiece, the most sublime work created. As a result, it was assumed that the secrets of the universe were hidden within the humanbody. In this sense, the body is thought to provide references on how to produce architectural form by establishing an analogy. Analogical relationships have been established, for example, where the head of the body forms the roof of a building and the body forms the structure of the building.
The study is primarily concerned with performing a historical reading of ideal bodies. It attempts to create a catalog of these relations in the historical process in order to reveal the differences and commonalities of the relations of ideal body and space, which change according to different models and processes of social reason. This cataloging is important for revealing the ideal's problematic exclusionary attitudes. It seeks to investigate alternative paths for non-ideal bodies created within the context of the ideal. With these discoveries, it will be possible to realize the manifesto of architecture for no body and the point to tactics that create inclusive space for all bodies. 
The scope of this study begins with a question about what the ideal body is. It focuses on architectural debates that idealize the body in order to establish its  own framework. In this context, it examines the History of the Body compiled by Alain Corbin, Jean-Jacques Courtine, Georges Vigarello, as well as the works of theorists such as Joseph Rykwert and Sergei Eisenstein. In addition to these studies, Vitruvius, Alberti, and Sigfried Giedion, as well as Le Corbusier, evaluate body definitions. Because these names have revealed various schisms in the body's conception.
Starting from the definition of the ideal that he has established the framework of the study, he first presents certain ideal definitions of the body from the Paleontological Age to the discovery of movement. It constructs these ideals with titles in a poetic language in which it builds its own narrative. The progression of the work by dividing it into headings is actually related to the fact that the ideals adopted in the historical process refer to certain historical or social jumps. In other words, as an open work, the ideals about the body are left in a selectivity that can be added or removed. As a result, this study does not claim to expose all of the ideal bodies adopted throughout history. Its goal is to emphasize the variety of ideal bodies adopted throughout history. In this way, it demonstrates that it is impossible to speak of an ideal. He connects the reason for the ideal of the body to comprehending the world. This ideal of the body, which is desired to be captured in the historical process, is based on Plato's 'idea'. With the realization of the studies on the discovery of the body's movement at the beginning of the 18th century, the body ideals defined by the clues followed throughout the study form the next section, New Ideal: Mechanical Body and Spatialities. 
The definition of the mechanical body is associated with the discovery of movement and the discovery of mechanization. Architectural historian and critic Sigfried Giedion discusses this relationship in his 1948 text "Mechanization Takes Command"1948. In his text, Giedion (1948) emphasizes the importance of going to the source of knowledge by establishing an in-depth mechanization/mechanization process narrative by putting the concept of 'movement' at the center. For this reason, this study also grounds the mechanized body and its spatialities in the discovery of movement. Giedion (1948) relates the position of technology in human life with mechanization to mechanical tools (photographic technique) produced on movement, and he investigates the position of technology in everyday life through people because, until his time, the dominant factor that constituted design was human. However, he claims that any design object is created by focusing on humans, and that human comfort-needs and movement mechanisms play a central role in all of these production processes. In this context, in order to problematize the spatial reflections of moving bodies, this study first presents the origins of the body's movement. Through the discussion of Giedion (1948), Giedion (1948) opens up the discovery of movement through the work of the 19th century French scientist, physiologist and chronophotographer Étienne-Jules Marey, the 14th century mathematician and philosopher Nicolas Oresme, and the pioneer of the study of motion, Frank Bunker Gilbreth. By framing spatial practices that treat the body as an ideal through certain mechanisms of movement, she brings new layers of non-ideal bodies. Among these layers, he first reveals the ways in which the mechanical body ideal is handled in art. He evaluates the mechanical body ideal in architecture with the principles of modernism and standardization at the beginning of the 20th century. 
The modulor by Le Corbusier is the first port of call in this exploration. The modulor by Le Corbusier has become the new ideal body. A modulor system has replaced the body-space relationship that established one-to-one proportions in the previous ideal body section. The modulor ruler, created as a set of norms that establishes specific spatial proportions, refers to the issue of mass production, which develops the logic of standardized production. Through Le Corbusier and his standardized examples such as Neufert, Bauhaus and Dreyfuss, this study problematizes these new ideal and standard productions in the modern period and creates a field of determination. By juxtaposing these examples as in the previous section, the study identifies commonalities and differences in the context of their relations with the body. It evaluates the problems and/or deficiencies that may arise from idealizing the body only through its movement and playing a decisive role in the construction of space.
The study identifies the bodies excluded by the practices that construct space by idealizing the body in the world of constants and the bodies excluded by the standardized practices that think of the body in terms of limited movement mechanisms / mechanical body, revealing non-ideal bodies. Since it addresses this inference through the ideal bodies it defines in the context of physical characteristics within the scope of the study, this study also reveals the non-ideal bodies excluded by this ideal from the same framework. In other words, it is aware of the fact that strategies positioned outside the ideal regarding the body can also be read from sociological, psychological and political layers. This study does, however, establish its own anthropological position through analogies of body and space. It identifies women's bodies, physically disabled bodies, genderless bodies, bodies that cannot perform even limited movement mechanisms (too fat or too thin, which are considered 'unhealthy'), children's bodies and elderly bodies as bodies that are excluded from ideal body definitions using the clues she captures in this context. In this context, the study takes a stand against approaches such as Teyysot's (2013) A Topology of Everyday Constellations, which treats the body as a machine that must be corrected and changed if it is not functioning optimally. In other words, instead of approaches that define the body from within an ideal, characterizing it as a broken object that needs to be fixed, it adopts to point to alternative ways of architectural production for these bodies. With this intention, in this section of the study, first of all, it performs an alternative reading through the works realized for these non-ideal bodies. It makes no claim to have identified all alternative spatialities for the non-ideal bodies. She wishes to highlight the possibilities of alternative theoretical and spatial attitudes toward the non-ideal bodies this study identified. First of all, the alternative approach to the non-ideal, female body and the trans body, which is excluded by the architectural space established with the ideal male narrative that she discovered, takes reference from feminist theory. In this context, Diana Agrest (1988), in her book Architecture from Without: Body, Logic and Sex, argues that the perfectly proportioned male body from which architectural principles are derived is constructed to suppress women, and that these ideal norms of body and space give birth to the excluded and female excluded. In this context, Agrest (1988) suggests striking a balance between includes and excludes. This theoretical framework is evaluated alongside Lillian Möller Gilbreth's spatial proposals in the study. Second, it defines non-standard bodies as those that are  excluded by architectural practices that construct space by standardizing the body within the scope of modulor; the elderly body and the child body are considered non-ideal. Through examples such as Eileen Grey's E1027 (1929) house with movable architectural elements produced in the context of the concept of flexibility and Aldo van Eyck works, Endless House, it highlights the potential for flexible, transformable practices to be inclusive. It employs the catalog-making method, juxtaposing all of the works with the alternatives they generate. It reveals the situations they exclude as well as their welcoming attitudes. The situations that these alternative inclusive works exclude form the approach of the work's design for no one. Because this work makes us wonder if there can be a space that does not exclude any body and/or can relate to all bodies at a similar distance. With this questioning, it generates a tactic in which the way to create space without excluding any body can be realized through architecture for no body.
Instead of idealizing the body, it investigates the possibilities of ignoring the body; instead of making room for any body, it investigates the possibilities of making room for no body. This study contends that if the relationship between body and space can be established through the 'uniqueness' of each body, then no body can be denied access to that space. This argument is discussed by artist architects Shūsaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins in Architectural Body (2002) and We Have Decided not to Die. The duo's works are of the type in which the body's relations with space are not identical, are not reproducible, and that the body's movement potentials can be revealed. The duo (2002) discuss the uniqueness of the body's relationships with space in their discussion. In fact, for them, experiencing the space is similar to how each reader of a text can draw different conclusions from it. As a result, when creating the design, they compare the relationship of the space with the body to a crawling baby's first encounter with a staircase. Any body's encounter with space should be both alien and intriguing, so that no group is denied a privileged position because of their physical characteristics. The study uses the duo's projects as examples of no body design proposals in this context. Biological house, Reversible Destiny Lofts, Paintings for Closed Eyes and other works demonstrate that it is possible to relate to all bodies at a similar distance. In this way, it highlights the possibilities of various spatial constructions in the relationship between body and space, where everyone, not just anyone, feels alien while also allowing for different experiences. 
As a result, the research focuses on non-ideal bodies that are excluded by architectural practices that construct space by idealizing the body. It seeks alternative methods of creating space for these bodies while not excluding any body. This study draws attention to the existence of bodies that it still excludes by utilizing the potantials of these alternative methods. It seeks ways to not exclude any body and, as a result, creates an approach of design manifesto stating that the way to not exclude any body can be realized through architecture for no body.