Let’s Get Physical: Bodies, Bowels, Bowls

The thesis of this little book is that architecture has become modern by coming closer to the human body, and only by focussing on the body's needs and desires can it keep pace with the contemporary world. Typological innovations such as the corridor and the toilet made it possible to articulate the thresholds between private and public in more sophisticated ways, deeply changing the way we in ha bit, interact with others, and our whole self- awareness. lt is quite a recent and restless story that, despite architecture's intrinsic stability, has witnessed over the two last centuries lively dialectics between established habits and challenging design experiments. The more architectural design has tried to deal with our bodily concreteness the more meaningful and controversiaI its results. Now that technical prostheses are becoming increasingly pervasive, getting physical seems a hard but inevitable goal.