Body in Architecture

Peter Salter

The naked figures in my work are a reminder of the particular, the inhabited and materially potent spaces. To say that they are emblematic reduces them to a decorous collage. They refer to a series of spaces that have now become more or less familiar to me. These spaces exist in my memory as places from which to measure the sense of belonging and place of the project. They are a way of grounding; they try to enact what Noel Perrin calls a "consciousness below knowledge".

Distended and swollen stomachs, pitifully thin legs with calf muscles taut with cramp that exaggerates the short and thick Achilles tendon, the hollow at the base of the skull that shrinks away from the sinews of the neck and exposes deformity of the spine brought on by physical circumstances, swayback and breasts weary from nursing a family - there is an intimacy to nakedness that constructs spaces.

The community bathhouse. In nakedness there is a sociability, a familiarity and recognition of the community in which generations have grown together. Broken and dirt encrusted nails, lined and weathered faces, rheumatic knees- there is a recognition of a common working endeavour beyond the room. In these circumstances of nakedness there is a kind of formality, a community demeanour and a generosity. This understanding enables the room of the bath to become the primary space of quality, without passages for the coy between changing room, footbath and their common tank of immersion. The room echoes with laughter and the sound of pouring water as scooped up pailfulls douse the squatting individual in a preparatory and ritualistic scrubbing before the common bath. Copious hot water is matched by the capacious and extended room where light comes from very high up between roof trusses and at the level of the bath�s rim as a screen is slid open to the landscape beyond.

Osaka Folly - Blocks of rammed earth demarcate the space for event. With its fragments of wall and screening elements it needed visitors to create the room. Only the suspended cage offered a complete space, its scale and extent of shadow delineated the space below - its size judged as a common meeting room, a community space for a village trip or for an extended family day out. Dug into the earth the rim of the room was lined with reclaimed timber boards, the raised grain of the material offered a new horizon for the squatting figures eating lunch.
Pockmarked and exfoliated by humidity, the eroded earth walls carried the marks of wear, of scratched graffiti -scripted evidence of love - a space owned by nobody and everybody, an institutional place. Judgements of scale and fineness in such circumstances become critical, the furniture-scale pieces of the original design were removed, quite rightly judged as too domestic.

Thai Fish Restaurant - Loose-laid stool tiles like the footware of traditional Japanese dress lift the customers above the sub-floor. These tiles act as stepping-stones across a bed of water rivulets, gullies and sinks that is the landscape of the floor. Braided channels of fish offal, the left-overs from the process of choosing, killing, cleaning, cooking and eating fish are washed away with powerful water jets. The constant slop of overfilled tanks in the turmoil of catching a chosen fish creates backwaters and eddies across the floor. Businessmen mingle with the white Wellington booted fishmongers as they eat a quick stand-up meal between appointments. Extended families celebrating a special event are placed at quiet formal eating tables raised still further above the slosh of the floor. With one delicate twist of fingers the wooden sticks dissect a perfectly cooked fish. Silence in appreciation of the succulence of the fish accompanies the portions of almost translucent white flesh which are presented to the senior members of the family. The delicacy of such a fish offering is matched by the frailty of the party.

The intensity of this gathering sits within the wider but still internalised and chaotic space in which the architecture is made up of the functional components servicing the restaurant reflected against the landscape of the floor. The scale relates to the tank sizes and water volumes in relation to human scale. In such circumstances the space, which bears little relation to the outside, must be set like the table settings for a meal, with architectural furniture of larger scale which set a pace and almost a means to navigate the room like the various dishes on the table from which to make a meal.

There is beauty in our ugliness, in the swellings and seepages and the waning health of the body as it changes from season to season and year to year. The body weakened through age is bowed by circumstance. In my memory the character of Lucy Cabriole in John Berger�s book "Pig Earth" describes a figure who lives in rural isolation and survives by collecting the fruits of the wild and by goat-herding. In my mind�s eye she is bent with years and worn by the daily tasks of husbandry in a rugged landscape. Gradually that landscape gives up its secrets, revealing to her new juices and the potency of berries collected which are matched by her spirit and her lust.

The weathering and accretions of the building could be understood as "working" an adjustment of the fabric by use, as the individual inhabitants find the building�s accommodation. The scoured debris and dusts found in crevices between the various inhabitations of the room are traces of an accommodation as revealed through daily use. Stirred up, such exfoliations work with the light to give a physical presence of space to the room or combine with the shadow to form a dark velvet-like interior.

Silently packing away the bed-linen in the early morning, unsure whether the shadows and dark places are from a dawn yet to come or from the deep space of the domestic interior. Moving without words, recognising each other�s sex but still familiar with each other�s nakedness and frailty, there is an ease and a devotional quality to this predawn chore. The intimacy and the domesticity of these daily acts are like silent messages that bridge the space, creating anew a bonded space within a domestic life.

Keilder Water Bothy - Trapped for the night on the edge of Keilder Water, the walkers turn back from the last light reflected off its surface. Silhouetted and revealed against the depth of the dark forest, the awkwardly shaped pitch-black building offers a sheltering bulkhead at the margin between the high water mark of the reservoir and the neglected ground thinnings and debris from the blocks of coniferous plantation beyond. The rows of dark wood following the rise of the ground are less welcoming than wilderness, and the level in the reservoir that measures some distant city's water use is somehow less comforting than the more gently sloping margin of a naturally founded lake. Entering the Bothy is like coming upon the gloom of a deep-set clearing in the forest at dusk. The raised wooden floor of the shelter resonates hollowly against the absorption of the forest floor beyond. To move around and to make a place for the night is largely by touch and by familiar sounds. Shuffling between the log-stacked wall and the rounded features of the clay shaped fireplace, kindling is found under the bench and crackles as a fire is laid in the hearth. On the mantelpiece is a tin with firelighters; prising open the lid the smell of petrol from impregnated blocks overcomes the smell of resin from the logs.The smoke from the new fire finds its way across the arching back of the fire box and out of the mouth of the fireplace in some reciprocal act of burning. The soot traces the smoke exit to the night. It stains the chimney breast and the bulkhead of timber overhead. The black tar, a residue of the smoke, glistens and locks in its acrid smell only to become overpowering in the gradually warming room.

Firelight traces the perfectly cut log ends and creates deep shadows in the interstices of the stacked wall. The bulkhead wall constructed of sawn timber studs and butt jointed boards shows its imperfection of saw-ripping lengths of timber in the open air. The excess of black pitch used to weather the building has dribbled down the inner surface of the wall creating its own variegation. Following the curvatures of the fireplace the walkers step up into the creaking basket structure of the sleeping space. The smallness of the room, woven around the warm belly of the fire box, ensures the life preserving closeness of its occupants and the gradual and easy intimacy of bodily warmth.

Seminar Room, Hook Park - The seminar room rides on the back of a two hearth wood-burning structure. Built of clay, it provides a warm floor that is dusty and wide like the back of an elephant. The bent wood structure rides delicately balanced across the spinal ridge of the elephant and is divided by a sliding shutter that separates enclosures for its inhabitants. Lying on the floor, a sense of wellbeing, feeling the warmth gradually creep across one�s back, speculating on the twisted greenwood planks: will the warmth from the floor sap the moisture from those planks? As the floor encourages new energy, is its heat somehow drawing out juices from the stressed wood, leaving it barren and brittle?

Ramshorn Churchyard Glasgow �The upturned boat on the shoreline is a recognition of a community of fishers at rest. Perhaps the weather is too bad or there is an unspoken acknowledgement that skill and local knowledge can no longer make up for the gradual leeching away of the physical strength of the oarsman as tiredness and age take their toll. The boats are laid up, discarded, lying damaged and weatherbeaten, an unloved tool without a name- there is no sentimentality here. Only working boats have names as the fisherman needed their protection and sea-worthiness in order to work the banks and shoals offshore. The upturned boat is a recognition of the burial place of twenty merchants and a cast-iron shipwright of the Merchant City. The cast-iron form offers shelter, but its weight and displacement could never resist the sea. Its material follows the cast-iron cages that protect individual graves from Body Snatchers. Each cage offers a volume, an ordered space as though between the gunwhales and bilge of a ship. Time however has colluded with the acid soils of the churchyard to reduce the physical remains to the most delicate of stains and discolorations of the ground. The cage now protects only the idea, connections between generations of Seafarers and Merchants lost. This new upturned hull casts a space of quietness, a place where office workers eat their lunchtime meal, quizzical and probably disconnected from a seafaring past? At night the heavy rusting structure casts a darker shadow, making a more secret place. It is a place to hide, to make one�s own space, a place to drink and to blot out memory .

It is difficult to trace precisely why naked figures appear in my drawings, and on reflection they appear quite awkward as figures in the spaces. In these few anecdotes I have tried to fold in the recurring memories of spaces known, with the ambition to create a material presence in the projects. It is the naked body, frail through circumstance and drawn with a certain inhibition, that offers an emotive and more intimate exploration of the space.

Peter Salter is an architect and Professor at the University of East London