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Nat Chard Seamless Space If architecture can achieve its ends through its relationship to the performance of our bodies, then by modifying our bodies we can modify the city. This project proposes ways in which to take possession of the city on our own terms. Comic-book heroes and villains are often characterised by a body modification that allows them to respatialise the city, and the experience of those with disabilities would also exemplify this relationship. This work which follows on from an earlier project' that relied on speculative technology, concentrating on the digestive system, proposes modifications to a range of organs that have strong programmatic links to architecture. The apparatus, inserted within the body, engages with the programmes that are dealt with most prescriptively by the traditional house: comfort, hygiene, sleep, feeding and privacy. The mechanisms supplement and augment our existing organs, with which they work in parallel, controlled through a series of feedback loops. When these fall momentarily out of synchronisation, we also sense the space of our interior. This would be a by-product of the 'comfort performance' whereby the new equipment can modify body temperature to deal with greater extremes of external temperature. The digestive equipment uses food more efficiently and manages storage. This results in a less frequent requirement to feed or unload waste. Sleep and feeding are not as comprehensively supported as by the traditional house, modified by the amount and frequency required. Eight pairs of stereoscopic drawings describe how the apparatus fits within the existing organs. Care has been taken to keep the pieces discreet and allow them to slide between the organs they work with when, for instance, you sit. The apparatus is installed with minimum invasive surgery. The incisions through which the parts are inserted are made into new apertures for supplementary air-handling and for longterm maintenance. The X-ray drawings are based on photographs from a manual of radiography. On the photographs, I have inserted bulges that reveal the existence of the equipment. On the X-rays I have drawn those elements that would show up through such a medium. The perception of the body is mediated by the viewing apparatus. This raises questions of privacy analogous to the selective surveillance of our lives in the traditional home, where logging and billing systems attached to our address trace many of our moves, while on the street, optical surveillance records our actions. The third set, where the X-ray reveals the intestines through the selective transparency of the barium meal, is of course an anachronism as the new organs would sense the barium early and divert it away from the natural organs, therefore revealing more of the supplementary digestive system. Each person would have a tuned set of equipment so that they could take possession of the city in their own way. Obviously, it would be counterproductive for every set to be the same, as this would only transfer prescription from architecture to the equipment. At one end of the scale the equipment would be a house, allowing a nomadic existence. This would enable new privacies in line with the inversion of public and private space, in which the public realm is becoming internalised in the mall, theme park or sports centre where we run, cycle, row and climb indoors while the street takes on an increasingly marginal existence with its privacy of a cash economy. With widespread use, the internal house would undermine the economy of land-ownership and transfer the emphasis of housing from commodity to experience. Used body parts would have little or no second-hand value. As components could be easily replaced or modified, a broad-based, third party manufacturing base would help establish diversity of performance. Notes
1: Blood and digestive
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