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Thomas Carpentier’s “L’homme, mesures de toutes choses”

May 16, 2012 by Fosco Lucarelli Leave a Comment

Thomas Carpentier’s graduation project at ESA questions the normatization of the human body proportions introduced by early Modernist Architectural manuals such as Neufert‘s, or the “Architectural Graphic Standards” or by the anthropometric scale of proportion devised by Le Corbusier with the name of Modulor.

The ambition of identifing an idealized human proportion was the alleged basis upon which building a new rational and sanitized architecture, but the mere concept of finding a norm out of an ideal body is in fact paradoxical and even discriminatory. Despite that, the Neufert’s manual easily encountered a widespread success, and the standardization today involves not only the human anatomy but also men’s behaviour.

Without futher addition to what has been already and more exhaustively written by Léopold Lambert twice in his blog (“The Modernist Ideology of a Normative Body” and “A Subversive Approach to the Ideal Normatized Body“), we leave you with the work of Thomas Carpentier.

As a parody to the normatization of the body, Thomas focuses his attention to out-of-standard but iconic character’s bodies, such as the one of a culturist, Jabba the Hutt’s, Oscar Pistorius’, Borg Queen’s or David Toole’s. Around their real or fictitious proportions he then re-imagines or create architectural spaces whose main purpose is to accomodate their other standards.

Related:

Frederick Kiesler. Architecture, “Biotechnique”, and a Peek into the Future of the Computer, 1940. Thanks to Ethel Baraona for signaling!

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