The Body is a cluster which is a part of a major project with a new vision for a Campus that the Self Sufficient Building Studio designed to Provençals del Poblenou, a neighborhood in the Sant Martí district of Barcelona, Catalonia.

To design this new Campus we were divided into 7 clusters each with one theme that represent our own personal agenda for the campus. Nature,Body, Publicness, Retrofitting, Skin and Structure, New Buildings and Archive.

The first objective is to analise and understand my body (My Body is my agenda) and how it works.

My skin.

Understanding the graphics:

From 12:00 am till I wake up I loose water, my temperature, pressure, heart frequency are low. I wake up at 7:30 (the cortisol increase 50% to wake me up), my pressure and heart frequency start to increase. I have breakfast.  From 10:00 to 13:00 I am in a balanced period as per my stats. At 14:00 I go for lunch (Glucose goes to the cells, realeasing insulin). At 16:30 when I am paddle, I start to sweat due  to my high temperature ,so I loose a lot of water, I need to drink more water to keep a good performance, my heart beat goes high my pressure goes low so the blood flows faster throught my body. After practice every stats goes down again but my pressure goes up and I need to keep drinking water. Then all the stats get balanced once again before dinner. At 21:00 I have dinner. My heart beat is alredy slow preparing to rest. 23:30 I go to sleep. Every stats goes down and I keep loosing water.

Analysing the skin:

On our skin, goosebumps occur with an intention to protect our body from the cold, The tiny muscles around the base of each.hair tense and pull the hair more erect.  If we had enough covering of fur, this would fluff up the coat, getting more air into it, making it a better insulator. But with a human’s thin body hair, it just makes our skin look strange.

As already mentioned before, sweating is a bodily function that helps regulate your body temperature but when temperatures are lower, to protect us from loosing heat, our blood vessels in the skin tighten and limit the amount of hot blood that can reach the skin.  The same happens with our pores becoming smaller when exposed to colder temperatures in order to retain heat.

Our skin regenerates itself. The dead skin cells are shed on a daily basis, creating a new layer of skin every 28 days.

In our life we always have something that helps us in our day life, something that complements us. In sports its the same. We have our tools to improve our performance, like supplements, medicine and even the necessary tools for the sport, like a paddle, canoe, ball, shoes, etc.

So after studying my body and always staying in the human scale, my added value was how to empower people in the site and the projects.

I will be the human sensor for each cluster and I will help in creating wearbles and accessories that helps connect the people and the different projects.

These are the conceptual ideas for sensors, for a few projects.

THE BODY

Architecture always have had humans as a starting point to their projects, independent of the final result. This relation dwells deep inside, which is why people feel and manifests in a special way when the two unites. 

For example, Sou Fujimoto’s works often explore the space and how human body interacts with it. He leaves open, possibilities for the user, he lets people behave  the way they feel.

Philipe Rahm in another way manipulates elements like heat, light and air instead of bricks, glass or steel. He designs the climate, as he says: “Olmsted created Central Park in New York as a green land that has to clean the air, for the health of New Yorkers” and “When you read Pierre LÉnfant in french, he proposed two of the parks in Paris and the trees in it’s boulevards. It was not a romantic idea of greening the city, the tree was a machine to create shadows and to cool the street during the summer”. What he did, is to create multiplicity and diversity of (atmosphere) qualities in different places. 

The point is to find the balance betwen human body and architecture, how they interplay, where the two meet, exchange and how they influence one another. So the aim is to find these right moments with the design and allow the occupants to experience new feelings and enhanced senses, curiosity, creativity, confort, etc.

These are few ways of dealing with architecture and the human body, while there are many other possibilities. 

The way I chose to work is by thinking the body as the scale of the project, creating wearbles and accessories that enhance the human body and make a connection with the projects.