The relation of the body to architecture and the complex phenomenon of corporeality has always had a privileged position within the history of European culture. This is particularly true of the tradition springing from Vitruvius, who compares the human body directly to the body of the building, and then makes a sequence of claims for this analogy that far transcend the need to explain the meaning of proportion, symmetry, and harmony in architecture. Although this highly provocative subject has been treated with great attention and subtlety by critics, it remains nonetheless poorly understood. The most critical aspect of the role of the body in understanding reality is the relation between the body and that which truly exists. Plato, followed by Aristotle, took the decisive step toward a coherent understanding of corporeality. The body for Plato is not a given or something that can be isolated or defined as an entity; rather, it is part of a process of ordering within the domain of necessity. As a result, the body appears as a relatively stable structure ordered in the context of reality as a whole (cosmos). Aristotle’s contribution to the understanding of corporeality has much to do with his emphasis on the individualization of eidos, on the particularity of the essential structure of things or bodies and their substance, ousia. That only particular substances are self-subsistent does not mean, of course, that they are the only substances that exist. Aristotle insists that there can be no action without contact, and from that he deduced not only the importance of contact but also of position, existence in place, lightness and weight. This brought his vision of corporeality dangerously close to the later Stoic doctrine in which everything that either acts or is acted upon is a body; in other words, the only things that truly exist are material bodies…