top of page
EMBODIED SPATIALITIES
keiko watanabe
architecture as a catalyst for affective and performative movement
"In this sense, what constitutes the fixity of the body, its contours, its movements, will be fully material, but materiality will be rethought as the effect of power, as power's most productive effect."
- Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex
While architecture has mainly supported the creation of the efficient, obedient capitalist subject, it can be reprogrammed to support diverse performances. Spaces valuing excess over efficiency can legitimize creative action over mechanistic production. Such environments can foster agency over compliance and curiosity over disinterest, turning architecture into a platform for diverse life expressions. This reimagining can transform architecture from a tool of conformity to a framework that supports varied experiences and challenges singular, dominant ideals.
This thesis demonstrates these techniques in a vibrant hub for the community, which will transcend the conventional and rigid expectations of how bodies navigate and act in space, and in so doing transform urban environments into platforms for self-expression.
Spanish Steps, Francesco de Sanctis, Alessandro Specchi (own photo)
[1] choreographies of space
Building on Michel Foucault’s concept of the apparatus (“dispositif”), Giorgio Agamben defines it as anything that captures, controls, or shapes behavior and discourse, producing particular kinds of subjects. Architecture, as an apparatus, organizes space while embedding social norms, shaping how people move and are perceived within it.
Since the rise of capitalism, architecture has served to produce the ideal capitalist subject: efficient, obedient, and productive. Spatial design embeds these values, making them seem natural and excluding those who don’t conform. Architecture thus enforces a standard of conformity, marginalizing alternative behaviors and bodies.
Plaza of Kanagawa Institute of Technology, Juna Ishigami (own photo)
Jacques Rancière’s notion of the "distribution of the sensible" shows how spatial aesthetics determine who is seen and acknowledged. Redesigning public space can shift perception, making room for new political subjects. Similarly, Judith Butler argues that subversive performances require social recognition and spatial support. The right to appear in public is unequally distributed, and without material structures to sustain non-normative expressions, resistance remains fragile.
[2] shifting space
ALIGN
EXTEND
LIFT
FOLD
SMOOTH
EMBED
The meandering, hairpin form of the building emerges as a spatial response to the irregular geometries and circulatory frictions of UN Plaza. Rather than simplifying or overriding these tensions, the form affirms them - cultivating an architecture of engagement, ambiguity, and encounter. This sinuous configuration encourages exploratory movement, where navigation is driven not by efficiency, but by choice, curiosity, and negotiation. The architecture calls forth a subject who is attuned and active - responsive to shifting cues, open to disorientation, and aware of their role in shaping the spatial script. In this sense, the building, ground, and roof plane act as platforms for both individual and collective performance - where circulation itself becomes an expressive and social act.
[3] disrupting the grid
By reframing circulation as relational and performative, rather than neutral or standardized, the project situates itself in contrast to earlier frameworks of architectural normativity. While Ernst Neufert’s graphic standards served as a foundational tool for modern architecture, their reductive, idealized bodies exclude the full range of human experience. This thesis instead embraces bodily multiplicity and difference, resisting singular definitions of ergonomics and movement.
Ernst Neufert's Graphic Standards
Negotiations of Space
The UN Plaza in San Francisco is a layered civic terrain, marked by surveillance, protest, transit, and marginalization. It is a microcosm of the city’s social fabric and a site of spatial and demographic crossings, bordered by cultural institutions, outreach centers, and transit lines. Rather than smoothing over these tensions, the project embraces them. Situated at the intersection of the Civic Center’s formal axis and Market Street’s informality, the building, ground plane, and roofscape participate in a choreography of friction.
“Only that when bodies assemble on the street, in the square, or in other forms of public space... they are exercising a plural and performative right to appear, one that asserts and initiates the body in the midst of the political field, and which, in its expressive and signifying function, delivers a bodily demand for a more livable set of economic, social, and political conditions no longer afflicted by induced forms of precarity”
- Judith Butler, Notes Towards a Performative
Theory of Assembly
[4] gestures of resistance
The ground plane is articulated through filleted patches of polished light concrete, which flow into the branching, organic columns that support the building. Each textured patch on the ground suggests informal zones of activity - skating, eating, sitting, gathering - without rigid boundaries. A singular raised circular platform, aligned with the Civic Center axis, anchors the plaza as a site of address and visibility. The columns echo the material language above, creating mirrored patches of light concrete on the soffit.
Internally, the building unfolds as a terrain of thresholds, intersections, and disorientation. The hairpin form generates performative shortcuts - paths that cut through the building not for speed, but for spatial and social engagement. Circulation becomes charged: one shortcut might pass directly through a gathering space, transforming movement into a public act. Others might tilt, compress, or skew, prompting improvisational navigation. Drawing from Michel de Certeau’s idea of walking as spatial speech, the user’s path becomes a form of authorship, an embodied rewriting of space.
Ground Floor Plan
Interior Plan
Programmatic overlaps resist zoning and reinforce spatial fluidity. Functions bleed into one another, encouraging unplanned encounters, shared actions, and evolving use. In dialogue with Henri Lefebvre’s proposition that space and society co-produce each other, the project fosters a porous, lived public realm where spatial meaning is always under negotiation.
Interior Plan
Performative Thresholds - shortcuts through the building that produce atypical ergonomic/social conditions, based on Michel de Certeau's idea of circulation and walking as a form of expression and agency
Programmatic Interceptions - anti-zoning and overlapping of space, based on Henri Levebvre's idea of space and social conditions producing each other
Dis[re]orientation - ambiguous or contrasting forms and arbitrary material differences to create categorical confusion, based on Sara Ahmed's ideas on how disorientation can reveal hidden social structures
Responsive furniture scattered through the building acts as mobile infrastructure. Designed to adapt to sloped floors and diverse users, these pieces include beanbag-like bases that mold to the body and rotatable forms that change function based on orientation. Rather than dictating behavior, these elements support appropriation and improvisation, reinforcing the project’s commitment to agency and responsiveness.
Toward Market Street, the building presents a monolithic travertine façade - a formal counterpoint to the layered spaces behind it. The travertine curves in plan and elevation, forming a gateway to the Civic Center that gestures toward invitation and theatricality. Each panel varies in grain direction, creating a patchwork of texture across a seemingly unified surface. Supported by a steel substructure, the façade maintains legibility while resisting homogeneity, mirroring the project’s broader attitude toward form and identity.
The architecture deliberately employs disorientation and categorical ambiguity as critical design tools. The hairpin form itself suggests a sense of spatial disorientation. Material transitions resist logic, and boundaries dissolve into one another. Informed by Sara Ahmed’s writing on orientation, these spatial ambiguities render social structures visible - exposing the norms that quietly govern how we move, behave, and relate in space. In doing so, the project opens up room for alternative modes of orientation, inviting unfamiliar ways of being with others.
bottom of page