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Body Building: Paul Pfeiffer's Vitruvian Figure

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Body Building: Paul Pfeiffer's Vitruvian Figure BODY BUILDING 521 Body Building: Paul Pfeiffer’s Vitruvian Figure NORA WENDL Portland State University INTRODUCTION geometries of ‘blobitecture’ mark a more intimate mimesis of the body. Since antiquity, the body has been material and muse for the making of cities, buildings, and the And, in an inevitable turn, architecture forms bod- landscapes between. Whether one delves into the ies—both our perception of these bodies, and the myth, history, theory, or practice of architecture, physical nature of them. While Jeremy Bentham’s from the foundational story of the Corinthian maid panopticon (1785) might serve as an earlier, anom- to the physico-chemical environments of Decosterd alous example of this phenomenon, a more recent & Rahm, bodies precede building. design by architects Decosterd & Rahm does more to enumerate architecture’s influence upon the body. Theorizing the body is the unspoken, often unac- In their Hormonorium, the skin is an external inter- knowledged, and ever-shifting starting point of face to be penetrated as countless UV bulbs elicit building. Vacillating between dominating architec- physiological responses by engaging hormones to tural discourse and receding into silence—some- heighten desire and reduce fatigue—“exerting an times fore-grounded by architects, and sometimes influence outside the realm of the senses and the not—it is always evident. The anthropomorphic skin,”1 in other words, eliciting a response from far vocabulary of classical architecture is a dark re- within the body. Though rendered with sophistica- minder that the first temples originated from al- tion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, such con- tars upon which animal sacrifices were made, the trol of the body has long been present in the most triglyph and guttae of the entablature derivative of ordinary architectural typologies—the airport, the the ancient Greek words for ‘thighbone’ and ‘fat’. shopping center and, as this paper will investigate The body has provided divine inspiration for build- through the collaborative work of an artist and an ing proportions, as recorded in Vitruvius’ first cen- architecture firm, the stadium—in which invisible tury bc De Architectura and resurrected by Renais- lineaments bind the body in space, determining sance scholars. It has been translated into module where it walks, sits, lingers, purchases and views, for the systemization of the building process, as or is viewed. What is new is that this is no longer in Le Corbusier’s Modulor man, 1948. The body limited to the obvious intrusions of the surveillance has provided conceptual language and form, as in camera, and is in fact increasingly reliant on ar- the 1960s Metabolist designs for ‘cells’ and Archi- chitecture’s collusion. The evolution of the stadium gram’s self-regulating structures. It has imbued acknowledges this, from the ancient Greek stadium architecture with gender, politics, sexuality, and in which the idealized bodies of athletes performed identity—it is a specific body that inhabits Charles feats that brought audiences into closer connection Moore’s Piazza d’Italia, or the restroom of Philippe with deities, to contemporary stadia that atomize Starck’s Royalton Hotel in Manhattan. In contem- and segregate crowds through highly designed, porary architecture, the self-generative systems of controlled and regulated paths, and the increased Evan Douglis Studio and the organically referent saturation of mediating—and distracting—visual 522 WHERE DO YOU STAND technologies. Through the tight control of space tion of the body of an architect, Dinocrates. Un- and dominating technology, events can only be successful in his attempts to seek conference with observed passively—the camera close up of the Alexander the Great, the architect reconsiders his catch and, as predicted by those knowledgeable, approach, presenting instead, as Vitruvius writes, the eventual at-seat controls from which spectators his “towering stature, appealing good looks, and purchase team merchandise, participating through a majestic build. Putting his trust in these gifts of consumption. Thus, the relationship between build- nature, he left his clothes at his lodging, anointed ings and bodies that has developed over the history his body with oil, placed a crown of poplar leaves of architecture is a dynamic loop, an endless cycle. on his head, covered his left shoulder with a lion It is precisely this cycle that we are confronted with skin, and, grasping a club in his right hand, came in Vitruvian Figure (2008), a collaborative work by into the tribunal where the king was giving jus- Paul Pfeiffer and the architecture firm Populous. tice.”3 Now that Dinocrates is exposed, reveal- ing the spectacular nature of his body, Alexander Vitruvian Figure takes as its explicit subject the takes notice of the architect immediately. Vitruvius’ largest Olympic stadium ever constructed. De- Roman readers, too, would know this man—it is signed by Populous and built for the 2000 Olympic Heracles (Latinized Hercules), the mythical pro- games in Sydney, Australia, the stadium broke all genitor of Alexander and all Greek kings. Thus previous records for audience capacity in an Olym- the architect, the ideal body, the empire Alexan- pic stadium with its 100,000 seats. Among the der is about to build, and Alexander himself are buildings designed to house Olympic games, the all one—a moment of Vitruvius’ most revered rule stadium is chief —marking the beginning and end- of architecture, symmetria, the calibration of in- ing events, symbolic of the games themselves, and terconnected elements to create a sense of beau- inevitably of the ideal bodies competing within. Vit- ty from wholeness and proof, of course, that the ruvian Figure presents a distortion of this ancient body of architecture is the body of the empire. typology as Pfeiffer and Populous imagine—and vi- sualize—that same stadium inflated to an audience Who builds this empire, what signifies the em- capacity of one million spectators. For Pfeiffer, this pire, and what bodies may occupy it? If we follow is a speculation on the future of architecture and the old adage that “cricket follows the empire,” it for Populous, it is the opportunity for a carefully implies interrelated political, economic, and geo- planned exercise in crowd control. This monstrous graphic processes related to the development of revision is presented through a trope that is Vit- sports and stadia. Just ask Hercules, who upon ruvian Figure’s implicit subject: the architectural completing his twelve labors, and being taken to model—both in the sense of the object of the scale Mount Olympus and immortality, builds the first model itself, and the idea of a model (pattern) Olympic stadium in thanks. He begins building this which guides the making of new form, to wit, the stadium by walking a straight line for 200 steps, Vitruvian figure or the ideal human body itself. In thus inventing the ‘stadion,’ a unit of measure- Vitruvian Figure, Pfeiffer and Populous collaborate ment that is the length of the track at Olympia. to reprise the ancient question of the body’s loca- tion within architecture, provoking the radical and Based as it was on Hercules’ 200 steps, the ar- timely question: just where do we stand? chitecture of the stadium is inextricably bound to—one with—the body that competes within it, BODY BUILDING and the body that built it. Though Hercules is the model for all three—stadium, athlete and archi- No matter which source one chooses to begin with, tect—the actual athletes of the earliest Olympic history or myth, the origins of architecture are the games would have participated in the five-event origins of the ideal body. Begin in the first century pentathlon: jumping, throwing discus and javelin, bc with Vitruvius’ De Architectura Libri Decem, “the racing and wrestling. The body of the pentathlete whole body of architecture” as the author com- was, in the words of Artistotle, “a body capable monly referred to it, at one point proclaiming his of enduring all efforts, either of the racecourse or work emendatum, the perfect body of architecture, of bodily strength…This is why the athletes in the without a flaw.2 Vitruvius prefaces his second book, pentathlon are most beautiful.” For visual confir- “The Origin of the Dwelling House,” with a descrip- mation of the pentathlete’s beauty, we could turn BODY BUILDING 523 to the loose fragments of an ancient bronze sculp- argues, are likewise reflecting, yet they also project ture that informed the Vitruvian man: Doryphoros, what is our inevitable future if the technology of the the spear-bearer. This mid-fifth-century bc statue spectacle supersedes the experience of space. One by Polykleitos was believed by the Romans to con- wonders why, of all people, Vitruvius did not antici- firm the sculptor’s Kanon, which for the first time pate the evolution of the simple Greek stadia into “gave all the explanations of the symmetries of the the contemporary stadium, or even the stadium that body.”4 From this Kanon, Vitruvius based the series is in some ways the model and mother of all stadi- of key human proportions that preface Book III, ums, the Colosseum in Rome. At the end of Book V, “On Symmetry In Temples and in the Human Body.” “The Forum and Basilica,” Vitruvius writes only, “Be- His description of taking measure from the human hind the xystos [a covered running track] a stadium body, however, relies on the body’s passivity. “… should be built, designed so that great numbers of For if a man were placed on his back with his hands people may have plenty of room to view the com- and feet outspread and the point of a compass put peting athletes.”7 In a millennium and a half, the on his navel, both his fingers and his toes would stadium gains enough notoriety as an architectural be touched by the line of the circle going around typology that in his De Re Aedificatoria, Alberti pref- him.”5 As noted by Indra Kagis McEwen, “the man aces his discussion of them with a warning: “I now is given, passively, conlocatus, placed on his back.
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