Body-Building-Becomings

This paper concerns the conceptual resonances and ‘relays’ between the two contrasting philosophical notions and operational modes of the ‘architect’ and the ‘artisan’, here explored though a feminist philosophical framework and focus on materiality and corporality. There is a particular concentration on the way in which a ‘DIY’ (Do It Yourself) production methodology in architecture complicates Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s invocation of the architect-artisan binary in their collaborative text A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980). For them, the architect is a hegemonic figure whose detached operational approach differs from that of the artisan who discovers and responds to ‘real-life’ circumstances as they are directly encountered within project settings. Through reference to writings on the body and space by specific feminist philosophers, this paper draws attention to an artisanal mode of operation associated with architecture in which the body is deliberately enfolded within architectural production and consumption. An explication of my own comportment within the architectural processes of two self-initiated collaborative projects enables the relation between the two modes of operation – architectural and artisanal – to be recast within the very body of the architect herself.