MANIFESTO

Architecture as a human body

Architecture as a Human Body is the framework through which I treat the built environment as an extension of the lived body. The concept sharpened through experiences of displacement, repression, and the moment when a home stops functioning as a point of return and becomes a condition of risk. In such situations, shelter loses its neutrality even before any physical damage occurs. Architecture reads as a nervous system of thresholds, permissions, surveillance, and absence.

I have also encountered sites where this condition becomes materially explicit: buildings opened, interiors exposed, support structures revealed like bone, membrane, and tissue. Here, damage is not a spectacle but evidence—an index of pressure registered by the built world. A façade behaves like skin, stairwells tighten like tendons, and voids appear as cavities: not as metaphor, but as structural legibility.

I do not depict specific places. I construct anatomical fictions—cities under pressure—where fractures, seams, and absences operate as evidence rather than narrative. The paintings are not views; they function as sections, searching for the load-bearing anatomy beneath an exhausted surface.

This logic is material. On canvas, I build dense, gestural layers and cut back into them—scraping, reopening, repainting—until exposure becomes structural: less a motif than an event that reorganizes the image. On paper, I score and incise with a scalpel; pigment can be released from behind the sheet at the moment of the cut, turning incision into a mechanism of disclosure.

Phenomenology helps name what is at stake. Perception is bodily and lived; the body extends into the spaces it inhabits. If so, then damage to the built environment is registered bodily as well—not only materially, but as a condition of being in space.

Architecture as a Human Body rejects anthropomorphism as idealization and uses anatomical language as an analytic tool. I paint structure at points of stress and failure, where shelter becomes readable as anatomy and absence becomes evidence—making pressure historically legible without illustration.