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In our living condition we are constituted by the effects of forces, with their diverse and mutable relationships that stir the vital flows of a world. These forces traverse all the bodies that compose the world, making them one sole body in continuous variation, whether or not we are conscious of it. … We usually call “intuition” the extra cognitive mode of decoding that is proper to affect’s power of assessment. However, this is a word so worn out in our culture … that I propose to replace it with “body-knowing” or “life-knowing,” an eco-ethological Knowing.
–Suely Rolnik, “The Spheres of Insurrection: Suggestions for Combating the Pimping of Life,” E-flux, no. 86 (2017).
In this studio we will explore adaptive reuse and architectural tactility through global typologies of the public bath. Our methodology will alternate between analytic and expressive modes of architectural investigation. A series of grounding material investigations at the scale of the body will dialogue with the history of ergonomics, highly tactile artistic practices, and the space in which we live. We will investigate architecture’s capacity to intimately weave together ecologies, bodies, and cultures, and its capacity to adapt to change through a study of contemporary public bathing spaces from around the world. Bringing tactility and tactical urbanism to the scale of the city we will create new architectures of community rooted in Rolnik’s body-knowing at the site of an under-utilized public pool.
