MANIFESTO

Architecture as a human body

Architecture as a Human Body is a conceptual and visual framework through which I explore the intimate connection between the built environment and the human form. The concept emerged as I witnessed cities damaged by conflict: walls torn open, interiors exposed, structures reduced to bone and tissue. In these fragments I recognized the logic of the wounded body—and the way trauma can become a visible architecture.

In my work, façades behave like skin, staircases tense like tendons, and ruptured openings resemble cavities. I do not depict specific places. Instead, I construct anatomical fictions in which a city becomes a body under pressure—bearing scars, fractures, and absences as evidence. My paintings are not views; they are dissections. They search for the sinews and bones of the urban organism beneath its exhausted surface.

Carl Jung’s notion of archetypes helps me understand why this imagery resonates. The wounded body is a shared figure of suffering and endurance—an image that is culturally specific and yet universally legible. By relocating this archetype into architecture, I invite viewers to feel the city not as a backdrop, but as an extension of our own vulnerability.

This work is also grounded in philosophies of embodiment. Merleau-Ponty insists that perception is not abstract but bodily—that we understand the world through the lived body. Sartre goes further: our bodies extend into the spaces we inhabit. As he writes, “My body is everywhere: the bomb which destroys my house also damages my body, in so far as the house was already an indication of my body.” When architecture is harmed, something in us is harmed as well—not only materially, but existentially.

Architecture as a Human Body extends a long tradition of anthropomorphism in architecture, but shifts its emphasis from ideal proportion to exposure and repair. I paint the moment when survival becomes visible as structure: reinforcement as prosthesis, repair as a new kind of fragility. The work holds the wound open—not to aestheticize damage, and not to illustrate events—but to make the traces of history tangible, precise, and shared.