Kinespheres / Commonspheres

The choreographer Rudolf Laban propounded theories about the body-space relation.

He claimed that  'space is the hidden aspect of movement and movement one obvious/undisguised aspect of space'. Space that consists of forces, matter and time is the first 'architectural' element of movement. The centre of gravity of the body is the point, where forces cross-over. The multiplicity of their directions, with starting point the centre of gravity, creates a kinetic sphere, or as he himself calls it, a kinesphere. Kinespheres represent the body's private space, the space that the body and its members occupy without transfer of weight. It is the space that the members can reach when stretched and in a standing position, it is the sphere that accompanies the body all the time.

The study of an action and its interrelation with space, involves a paradox: the avocation with an ephemeral phenomenon that the same time it is born, it is destined to vanish. The journey, the movement's trace in space, is a conception, a construction. As Paul Virilio sais: 'between the subject and the object what's always missing is the trajectory. I mean this in a very concrete way: we have to reinvent the being of trajectory, to rediscover its meaning, to the point where I now speak of the trajective, of trajectivity, in the same way one speaks of the object, the objective, objectivity'.         (Traces of Dance,1994, σ.39)

This seminar intends to investigate two issues that concern architectural design:

first and foremost the way we understand and use architectural space through the body movement of each subject alone and second, how more subjects co-exist and interrelate in space. We are interested in how the form of space affects this understanding and co-existence and conversely what 'shape' has the projection of the changing co-existence in space. 

The second level of investigation, deals with the inherent problem of architectural design that he/she who designs space, is not usually designing for him/herself and moreover he/she will design the space outside of it.

We start the seminar by creating teams that will interact, divide and define boundaries in space.

The displacement of context from the single subject, the body and the ways it perceives space to the aggregation of more subjects, means the displacement of the field of architectural design towards cognitive fields such as sociology, anthropology, psychology of space etc.

In this seminar, we will deal with ways of describing the body movement of subjects that use culturally defined objects, such as doors, tables, chairs, vertical surfaces etc. These objects are the mediators of the relation of body movement and architectural space, the mediators that define the relation between different persons.

We are interested in the understanding of the relations and the ways that they are inscribed through the transfer of spatial forms-mediators, in order to challenge the stereotypical characteristics of the forms and relations that re-produce space: To rethink new characteristics and properties of the architectural form that will be capable of destabilizing existing scenarios of subject-space correlations.