Personal Architecture

The idea of creating space using our bodies in interaction with its enclosing space, springs from thoughts of French philosopher Henri Lefebvre. In his book The Production of Space, he explains that there would be no space without body, or in other words we wouldn't experience it. He argues, because the body is what perceives space first, we become what we are through our bodies's reaction to our environment. (Weinert, 10-11)

Since our environment is now ultimately created for the sake of functioning with dedicated places for what is considered necessary, we need to realize that we become a product of space. This asserts that the space we live in, and co-create, isn't fit to our bodily and emotional needs. (Weinert, 11) This is indeed the starting point for me to choose my living/bed-room as the dedicated space in which I perform the everydayness.
 

References:

Weinert, Jasmin. "Making sense of Lefebvre’s "The Production of Space" in 2015"
Lecture from Seminar für Ethnologie: Henri Lefebvre „The Production of Space"
Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Sachsen-Anhalt, Summer Semester 2015

As we co-create our environment through interactions with it, I intend to perform the practice of space [re]production (digital and physical) based on the interactions between my own bodily experiences and my living room. Other than random moves, activities such as sleeping, studying, resting or exercising constitute said everyday life.

While the existing space is truly represented by an enclosing cube, the bodily experience generates corresponding form. The co-created space is the void as the result of subtraction of either forms.

In order to track my body or capture its motion, I used Kinect as the motion sensing input device. Using Kinect Studio as its dedicated SDK, Kinect’s raw and processed data can be transferred and used in Grasshopper environment (the algorithmic modeling tools for Rhino 3D) by means of an add-on called Firefly. Firefly allows near real-time data flow between the digital and physical worlds, by which I could record the traces of different parts of my body.

On the right, the screenshot of Grasshopper environment. As an example, this script shows up the utilization of Firefly’s Skeletal Tracker component in order to acquire and record two curves in 3D space regarding right and left hands.

The abstraction of body skeleton with particular points/vertices referring to human body’s major joints.

The recorded 3D curves as the result of tracing the respective points of my hands located on the skeletal abstraction. The red and blue curves respectively refer to my left and right hand’s moves.

The resulting curves can be the spatial data for creating 3D models based on. The following two examples show how the resulting space can be generated as series of surfaces and geometries (BREPs as boundary representations). However, the final representation can also be the result of further processing and modifying the existing geometries. Particularly in this case the final surface/brep formed by extracting the smoothed outer surface.

The subtraction of the resulting form generated from body moves from enclosing cube/box produces my intended space as personal architecture. In order to make the physical model of the space (as its materialization), I decided to fabricate section cuts of the geometric model, in order to rather achieve a simple representation of itself, by aligning/arraying them together.

By selecting cardboard as the fabrication material, I cut them using a laser cutter to achieve smaller composing parts of each eleven sections. On the right, some examples of CAD drawings for the laser cutter.

Here are some pictures from the fabrication or model making process, as well as the final product as my architecture.

Links to view its 3D model online

3D view of the intended space as my pavilion

3D view of fabricated model