1 Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, The Ten Books On Architecture, trans. Morris Hickey Morgan (Scott’s Valley, CA: CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2016), 34.
2 Aimi Hamraie, Building Access (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 20-37.
3 Hamraie, Building Access, 20-37.
4 Hamraie, Building Access, 20-37.
5 Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017) 173.
6 See Rosemarie Garland Thompson, “Misfits: A Feminist, Materialist, Disability Concept,” Hypatia 26, no. 3 (Summer 2011) 591-609.
7 Clare, Brilliant Imperfections, 173.
8 David Gissen, The Architecture of Disability, Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes Beyond Access (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022) 45–73.
9 T.E. Lawrence, “The Mint,” in Lawrence After Arabia (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2016).
Paul DeFazio
Imagine a body from a book of architectural standards. I can probably describe what you’re imagining: a generic silhouette, likely gendered, depicted standing , walking, engaged in a chore, or participating in recreational activity. Alternatively, you might imagine a gender-neutral person, people of different sizes, or possibly a wheelchair user with arcs and lines measuring their reach or the turning radius of their chair. These have become some standard ways of representing the body of a person who uses a building.
Throughout history, architects have related buildings and bodies in different ways. Marcus Vitruvius Polio, for example, famously wrote about idealized bodies in his treatise De Architectura. Later, Vitruvius' description was illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci in a drawing of a masculine body that which, when prostrated in two positions, fits within the geometries of a square and a circle. The idealized body, whose proportions were exaggerated to fit within these shapes, is used to justify the use of these forms, as well as the use of symmetry and certain proportional relationships. Vitruvius wrote of the proportions of the body: the space from forehead to chin being 1/10, the entire head ⅛, the neck to breast ⅙, and the middle of the breast to crown ¼ the length of the body. In other words, a regular rhythm of measurements.
This is done with the intent to create an architecture that feels appropriate. In Morris Hickey Morgan’s translation of De Architectura, the term “propriety” is used: “Propriety is that perfection of style which comes when a work is authoritatively constructed on approved principles.”1 Vitruvius argued that a sense of propriety may come from prescription by an authority, common usage, or nature. Architecture and the body are related through these measures.
![Ann Hamilton. Face to Face. 2001]()
In the 20th century, the concept of ideal proportions resurfaced as anthropometry, a branch of military science originally intended to evaluate a soldier’s “fitness” for active duty based on the measurements of his body.2 The development of this science allowed anthropometrists to compile large banks of statistical data related to the proportions of bodies and sell this service to other professions. The data produced by anthropometry was used by a wide array of fields, from forensics and medical sciences, to industrial and clothing design, as well as ideological movements like physiognomy and eugenics. Furthermore, it influenced early architectural standards, including standard measurements and thermal comfort metrics. All of these fields in some ways narrowly define common humanity based on a set of statistical averages. As the scholar Aimi Hamraie has written, they create a template for what it is to be normal.3
Disabled architects have used anthropometry extensively, pointing out the faults of early datasets which were based nearly exclusively on young men entering the military, and reappropriating these practices for the measurement of disabled individuals for standards like the ADA.4 But deeper critiques of the commodification of these measurements are even more severe. For instance, this passage from Eli Clare’s The Promise of the Cure:
“‘Normal’ is posed as the most common and best states of being for body-minds. They are advertised as descriptions of who ‘we’ collectively are—a we who predictably is white, male, middle- and upper-class, nondisabled, Christian, heterosexual, gender-conforming, slender, cisgender. And at the very same time, these standards, which supposedly reflect some sort of collective humanity, are sold back to us as goals and products. It makes no sense.”5
In some ways it does make sense: if you design architecture for an average body, you will benefit the majority of people. It is a statistical impossibility that a body will be average in every way, but most people will fit pretty well. Some critiques of this are also obvious: What happens when you misfit?6 what if your body is marginalized in some way? Architecture then creates an implicit sense of “not belonging,” and the ability to move gracefully through the world is lost.
The medical industrial complex conflates artificial body standards with words like “healthy,” “normal,” and “natural,” a parallel to Vitruvius’s definition of propriety as authoritative prescription, common use, and nature. These kinds of bodies feel right in the world, despite the absurdity of the standards to which they hold themselves (or are held to.) To quote Clare again:
“White western belief separates human animals from nonhuman nature and devalues the natural world. Coupled with capitalism, these beliefs drive an out-of-control greed for and consumption of coal and trees, fish and crude oil, water and land. Drive the destruction of what is natural. Drive the declaration of cornfields as more productive and necessary than prairie. In short, white Western world both desires to be natural and destroys what is natural, depending on the context. It makes no sense.”7
Architects have different, contradictory concepts of nature. Often nature is viewed as vital and health-giving, as opposed to artificial and sterile man-made environments, while at other times, nature is described as a space that is hostile to infirmity, predicated on survival and (the term resurfaces) fitness.8 Some disability scholars use, rather than terms like access and inclusion, terms like “fit” and “misfit.” The term access, they argue, creates an unspoken power dynamic between the people who the space is “for” and who it is “not for.” “Fitness” comes from the Old English word “fit” meaning, again, proper or suitable. It didn’t come into common use in reference to physical bodies until the 1930s. One example from T.E. Lawrence’s book Mint illustrates this point, describing his time in the Royal Air Force, “I dodge the last weeks of depot training and the orgy of fitness-tests-fitness-tests with which it closes.”9 In Lawnrence’s statement, we can infer the fanaticism with which the body is measured, and against what?
When designing for bodies, architects have much to question and challenge. This includes whether concepts like fitness, health, normalcy, naturalness, or ultimately appropriateness are to the benefit of bodies. What if we asked questions like what anatomical metaphors are present in our buildings? What kinds of bodies does architecture fit and represent, and how does this relate to our self-image? How might these representations be challenged? How do bodies meet architecture? How can architecture respond to the myriad of ways that bodies observe, navigate, and perceive the world? Where is the hand and what has it done? How does the use of technology and prosthesis shift the way we use buildings? What is the relationship between embodiment, identity, and material agency?
Next time you add a silhouetted figure to a drawing, you may take a moment to ask: whose body does this represent, and where does it come from? What does and doesn’t it capture? I wonder where in architecture is the equivalent to Ann Hamilton holding a camera in her mouth, Yoko Ono inviting visitors to cut her clothes, Jenny Saville using bodies pressed against the glass to represent flesh, Félix González-Torres making work about what it means to have a sick body, Jorge Otero-Pailos capturing the history of the body through stains, or Lisa Bufano extending her limbs? These forms of embodiment are unapologetic, and abnormal, and explore what a body does in an expansive way.
Paul DeFazio is an M.Arch candidate at Rice University, and has a background in painting from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. His interests include disability and access in the built environment.
Ideal, Average Bodies
Imagine a body from a book of architectural standards. I can probably describe what you’re imagining: a generic silhouette, likely gendered, depicted standing , walking, engaged in a chore, or participating in recreational activity. Alternatively, you might imagine a gender-neutral person, people of different sizes, or possibly a wheelchair user with arcs and lines measuring their reach or the turning radius of their chair. These have become some standard ways of representing the body of a person who uses a building.
Throughout history, architects have related buildings and bodies in different ways. Marcus Vitruvius Polio, for example, famously wrote about idealized bodies in his treatise De Architectura. Later, Vitruvius' description was illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci in a drawing of a masculine body that which, when prostrated in two positions, fits within the geometries of a square and a circle. The idealized body, whose proportions were exaggerated to fit within these shapes, is used to justify the use of these forms, as well as the use of symmetry and certain proportional relationships. Vitruvius wrote of the proportions of the body: the space from forehead to chin being 1/10, the entire head ⅛, the neck to breast ⅙, and the middle of the breast to crown ¼ the length of the body. In other words, a regular rhythm of measurements.
This is done with the intent to create an architecture that feels appropriate. In Morris Hickey Morgan’s translation of De Architectura, the term “propriety” is used: “Propriety is that perfection of style which comes when a work is authoritatively constructed on approved principles.”1 Vitruvius argued that a sense of propriety may come from prescription by an authority, common usage, or nature. Architecture and the body are related through these measures.
In the 20th century, the concept of ideal proportions resurfaced as anthropometry, a branch of military science originally intended to evaluate a soldier’s “fitness” for active duty based on the measurements of his body.2 The development of this science allowed anthropometrists to compile large banks of statistical data related to the proportions of bodies and sell this service to other professions. The data produced by anthropometry was used by a wide array of fields, from forensics and medical sciences, to industrial and clothing design, as well as ideological movements like physiognomy and eugenics. Furthermore, it influenced early architectural standards, including standard measurements and thermal comfort metrics. All of these fields in some ways narrowly define common humanity based on a set of statistical averages. As the scholar Aimi Hamraie has written, they create a template for what it is to be normal.3
Disabled architects have used anthropometry extensively, pointing out the faults of early datasets which were based nearly exclusively on young men entering the military, and reappropriating these practices for the measurement of disabled individuals for standards like the ADA.4 But deeper critiques of the commodification of these measurements are even more severe. For instance, this passage from Eli Clare’s The Promise of the Cure:
“‘Normal’ is posed as the most common and best states of being for body-minds. They are advertised as descriptions of who ‘we’ collectively are—a we who predictably is white, male, middle- and upper-class, nondisabled, Christian, heterosexual, gender-conforming, slender, cisgender. And at the very same time, these standards, which supposedly reflect some sort of collective humanity, are sold back to us as goals and products. It makes no sense.”5
In some ways it does make sense: if you design architecture for an average body, you will benefit the majority of people. It is a statistical impossibility that a body will be average in every way, but most people will fit pretty well. Some critiques of this are also obvious: What happens when you misfit?6 what if your body is marginalized in some way? Architecture then creates an implicit sense of “not belonging,” and the ability to move gracefully through the world is lost.
The medical industrial complex conflates artificial body standards with words like “healthy,” “normal,” and “natural,” a parallel to Vitruvius’s definition of propriety as authoritative prescription, common use, and nature. These kinds of bodies feel right in the world, despite the absurdity of the standards to which they hold themselves (or are held to.) To quote Clare again:
“White western belief separates human animals from nonhuman nature and devalues the natural world. Coupled with capitalism, these beliefs drive an out-of-control greed for and consumption of coal and trees, fish and crude oil, water and land. Drive the destruction of what is natural. Drive the declaration of cornfields as more productive and necessary than prairie. In short, white Western world both desires to be natural and destroys what is natural, depending on the context. It makes no sense.”7
Architects have different, contradictory concepts of nature. Often nature is viewed as vital and health-giving, as opposed to artificial and sterile man-made environments, while at other times, nature is described as a space that is hostile to infirmity, predicated on survival and (the term resurfaces) fitness.8 Some disability scholars use, rather than terms like access and inclusion, terms like “fit” and “misfit.” The term access, they argue, creates an unspoken power dynamic between the people who the space is “for” and who it is “not for.” “Fitness” comes from the Old English word “fit” meaning, again, proper or suitable. It didn’t come into common use in reference to physical bodies until the 1930s. One example from T.E. Lawrence’s book Mint illustrates this point, describing his time in the Royal Air Force, “I dodge the last weeks of depot training and the orgy of fitness-tests-fitness-tests with which it closes.”9 In Lawnrence’s statement, we can infer the fanaticism with which the body is measured, and against what?
When designing for bodies, architects have much to question and challenge. This includes whether concepts like fitness, health, normalcy, naturalness, or ultimately appropriateness are to the benefit of bodies. What if we asked questions like what anatomical metaphors are present in our buildings? What kinds of bodies does architecture fit and represent, and how does this relate to our self-image? How might these representations be challenged? How do bodies meet architecture? How can architecture respond to the myriad of ways that bodies observe, navigate, and perceive the world? Where is the hand and what has it done? How does the use of technology and prosthesis shift the way we use buildings? What is the relationship between embodiment, identity, and material agency?
Next time you add a silhouetted figure to a drawing, you may take a moment to ask: whose body does this represent, and where does it come from? What does and doesn’t it capture? I wonder where in architecture is the equivalent to Ann Hamilton holding a camera in her mouth, Yoko Ono inviting visitors to cut her clothes, Jenny Saville using bodies pressed against the glass to represent flesh, Félix González-Torres making work about what it means to have a sick body, Jorge Otero-Pailos capturing the history of the body through stains, or Lisa Bufano extending her limbs? These forms of embodiment are unapologetic, and abnormal, and explore what a body does in an expansive way.
Paul DeFazio is an M.Arch candidate at Rice University, and has a background in painting from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. His interests include disability and access in the built environment.
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