Scaling of the body in architecture history and cartography
Associated body of work: Tentative Architectures
[use slides for Glitch City Demo Night]
Once upon a time people thought the world revolved around them and the object to which they attributed this perception was the Sun. But they learned that was wrong yet we’ve kept this ego-centric world view: that everything else changes but us. Specifically, we are fixed-scale while the scale of objects change. Take for example the map, a representation of Earth at a scale we can easily place on a table to study, or satellite images in sequence of zoom representing different scales of the image. In both of these instances, our body is a fixed-scale body while Earth is a variable-scaled body. What if we switch this around?
Now imagine that to see the entire 100m length of a building from an aerial view it is not the scale of the image that is changing but your scale—literally you are the body that must scale so that you are large enough to see the full length of the building. Now imagine that to see the surrounding neighborhood, then city, country, and Earth in full view, once again it is not the image scale that is changing but your scale that is getting larger and larger to encompass those objects in your full field of view.