This article was originally published in Turkish in Manifold on 8 December 2019. It can be accessed here.
Elizabeth Grosz’s text titled “Bodies – Cities”, included in Sexuality & Space edited by Beatriz Colomina[1], deals with just those, the interrelation and states of existence between the body and the city. Here, she refers to the body as “… a concrete, material, animate organization of flesh, organs, nerves, muscles, and skeletal structure which are given a unity, cohesiveness, and organization only through their psychical and social inscription as the surface and raw materials of an integrated and cohesive totality.”[2] and the city as “… a complex and interactive network which links together, often in an unintegrated and de facto way, a number of disparate social activities, processes, and relations, with a number of imaginary and real, projected or actual architectural, geographic, civic, and public relations.”[3] According to her, the urban built environment is what coordinates individual bodies and creates a connection between them naturally.[4] She describes two prominent models of the body-city relationship. In the first model, the relationship is causal, body being the cause and the city being the effect. In the second model, there is an analogy created between the two. Grosz criticizes both models; the first model diminishes the importance of the body and emphasizes the mind as of a higher rate, the second one perpetuates the inexplicitly inherent maleness of the generic human body that signifies a city and the naturalization of the body analogy as working for the betterment of the entity. She then suggests that combining parts of each model will result in a more suitable model for understanding the connection between the two. According to her, bodies and cities are mutually defining. Temporariness, flux and somewhat paradoxical disparate interconnections will make the body-city relationship better. Towards the end, Grosz makes an open ended prediction: That rapid advancements in technology will affect how bodies exist within cities, that relationship will evolve into something new in a questionable sense, yet remain ingrained, maintaining the existing models.
Grosz states that “ … what may prove unconducive is the rapid transformation of an environment, such that a body inscribed by one cultural milieu finds itself in another involuntarily.”[5] This statement leads to the question: Does a body get affected by the involuntary change of environment? I think the answer to this question is a definite yes. This can be discussed in multiple contexts, including migration, the refugee crisis, urban regeneration and gentrification. I wanted to ask if we can observe this in a singular building/urban area, in this case, Centre Pompidou. The timeline for the relation of the text and the building is convenient: Centre Pompidou was completed in 1977, Grosz’s text was written in 1990-1992. From today’s perspective, we can observe the way in which the suggestions and predictions of Grosz manifests in the example of Centre Georges Pompidou, by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano.
Past the dominance of modernism, a looser way of interaction with space was introduced through high-tech architecture, with its vast spaces being playgrounds of a sort for the user, not dictating what the body does in that space, how it interacts within the space and out/around it, how it connects and exists in the city through that space. The main example of this movement, Centre Pompidou, a “highly-flexible container for art”[6], shaped its surroundings drastically. As the winning project of an international competition, besides the radical idea to put the guts of a building on the outside and leave a massive interior space to be configured and used according to needs, the project divided the site into two almost equal halves and designed one to be a piazza, a square, a congregation space. With this element, it created a breathing space in the densely built environment, and allowed space for a body to exist as it wishes, for queer activity. Also, it diverged from the area’s physical qualities. In doing so, it might be considered as the involuntary space a body is exposed to in Grosz’s text. One would expect the body to have a negative experience within this new space it’s been dropped in. At first glance, it seems like the opposite. Despite the initial resistance to change and newness in the architectural and local community during construction, as soon as Centre Pompidou was completed, it was embraced by the user and the city and made Paris better for it. Creating room for the body to exist, with no restrictions (other than common decency of course) transformed the city. Centre Pompidou “ … enabled citizens to take possession of their city.”[7] Though, upon further thought, was it a forced integration for the body? Does the space work so well, and is generally well accepted by the inhabitants of the area because it went through a long process of making itself known, maybe forcefully, in the cognitions of the bodies? Does the body yield to its surroundings and find a way to adapt and accept these changes? Is this traumatic, or is it welcomed by the body?
Centre Pompidou is not a derelict, pristine museum with extremely controlled entrances to its piazza and an image of inaccessibility. Renzo Piano says that the space is “not a building but a town where you find everything – lunch, great art, a library, great music”.[8] The representational material “… was supposed to imply ‘openness’ and ‘social pluralism’”.[9] The design is intentionally inviting; it allows the user to connect to the city visually due to its height. The users of the area are observable by others, making other bodies believe they can exist, move and be in that space as well. Instead of serving just one function (visiting the museum), it allows an infinite selection of actions for the user. The clash between the traditional and the revolutionary within the city, similar to the well thought out ratio of public space and private in this design (as in accessible with a fee) (although originally public areas of the design are being monetized today) is one of its qualities that makes it feel welcoming for the other bodies, the feminine body, the queer body, the sexual, racial body.
Grosz touches upon the advancement of technology and how this affects cities and bodies’ positioning within cities. She contemplates on whether the physicality of the interaction is ‘reduced’ to screens and how these changes will impact future cities and bodies. The Centre Pompidou proposal design contained large screens that would allow interaction, which were not realized. Consider for a moment that they did. Today, they would have been converted to large boards for adverts, similar to those in Times Square, but let’s imagine otherwise. Would they have served as a tool for connection of bodies? Would they have created sufficient, pleasant and necessary interaction between people, thus making the city more connected, rather than being literal screens separating people?
The initial reaction to this space was similar to what Grosz is saying in her work. Yet, she failed to predict the current integration of this space with the city. The design has existed for over forty years now. Although it was a process, it’s been frequented and loved for most of that time. This process includes the time that it took for the bodies to shape this part of the city they have been involuntarily thrown in for it to be as beneficial and habitable by them as it can. The design is malleable enough for this to happen. Maybe other cities or city chunks that are stricter in their use, that are a reflection of culture and are analogous of the inherently male body, that over-infuse technology and severe the physical interaction of the population, do negatively impact cities and bodies, as Grosz suggests. But Centre Pompidou, despite its faults, has progressed to become an indispensable part of Paris.
NOTE: I would like to thank Şafak Cudi İnce for her contribution.
[1] Grosz, E. (1992). Bodies – Cities. In Colomina, B. (1992). Sexuality & Space. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. P. 241-253.
[2] Ibid. p. 243.
[3] Ibid. p. 244.
[4] Ibid. p. 243.
[5] Ibid. pp. 249-250.
[6] Crook, L. (2019, 5 November). Centre Pompidou is High-Tech Architecture’s Inside-Out Landmark. Dezeen. Available at: https://www.dezeen.com/2019/11/05/centre-pompidou-piano-rogers-high-tech-architecture
[7] Moore, R. (2017, 8 January). Pompidou Centre: A 70s French Radical That’s Never Gone Out of Fashion. The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/jan/08/pompidou-centre-40-years-old-review-richard-rogers-renzo-piano
[8] Ibid.
[9] Curtis, W. J. R., (1987). Modern Architecture since 1900. Oxford: Phadion. p. 374.
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