Lived Body (Body Schema)

Definition

The lived body (le corps propre, the body-subject, the phenomenal body) names Merleau-Ponty's central thesis that the body is not an object in the world — a mechanism to be known from without — but the very subject of perception and the "vehicle of being in the world." It is "our general medium for having a world": the tacit, sedimented, pre-objective ground out of which space, things, others, language and time arise. The related body schema (schéma corporel, body image) is the body's "total awareness of my posture in the intersensory world" — a system of equivalences and potential actions ("the laying down of the first co-ordinates") that is not an association of images but an open, dynamic intentional structure. Two corollaries follow: motility is basic intentionality (consciousness is first of all an "I can," not an "I think"), and habit is incorporation — the body extends itself into its world by absorbing instruments (the blind man's stick, the car, the organ) into the schema. The lived body is the concept that grounds the haptic/embodied turn in architecture.

Key Thinkers

• Maurice Merleau-Ponty — the founding account: the body as "vehicle of being in the world," the body schema, motility as "I can," habit as incorporation, the body "comparable to a work of art."
• Juhani Pallasmaa — the architectural transmission: the "thinking hand," haptic vs. "architecture of the eye," "I am my body."
• Christian Norberg-Schulz — the body's "existential foothold" and existential space.
• Pierre Bourdieu — the sociological cognate, habitus: the body as a socially informed, knowing repository of dispositions.

Related Concepts

• Embodiment — the broader thesis that the body is a knowing entity; the lived body is Merleau-Ponty's specific articulation of it.
• Dwelling — being-at-home as an embodied, existential condition; the body as the locus of habitation.
• Atmosphere — the pre-intellectual, haptic impression of place felt through the lived body.
• Habitus — the socially incorporated dispositions that generate practice; the sociological parallel to the lived-body schema.
• Everyday Life — the habitual body in organized space and time.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Being and Time (Heidegger 1927) — the ontological foundation of Being-in-the-world as dwelling; "Being-in" derives from "innan" (to reside, dwell); the lived body is the vehicle of this Being-in.
• Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty 1945)
• The Thinking Hand (Pallasmaa 2009)
• Architectural Atmospheres (Borch ed. 2006)
• Building Dwelling Thinking (Heidegger 1971)
• Genius Loci (Norberg-Schulz 1980)
• Outline of a Theory of Practice (Bourdieu 1977)
• Embodied Spaces in Digital Times (Wagiri et al. 2024)
• Warped Space (Vidler 2000) — the anxious, phobic subject against the lived body's oriented space.
• Proximities (Taylor & Preston 2006) — the interior environment felt and projected upon "via body as a culturally lived organism" (p. 11); the identification of specific space to specific body (sexed corporeality, p. 11).
• The Dialectics of Outside and Inside (Bachelard 1958/2006) — the body as the site of the outside's immeasurability (via Rilke): "when the level rises outside, it also rises in you… it grows in the capillary veins, drawn upward into the furthermost branches of your infinitely ramified existence" — the ramified, overflowing lived body as the medium in which the outside's immensity is lived (pp. 23–24); the editors note the selection engages "both physical and psychological body-space relations" (p. 22).
• Bodies and Mirrors (Colley 1999/2006) — the literary anticipation: Pater's child-body as a sensuous presence whose perceptions "emerge from and return to a body through which images move along the nerves and bring vitality to his being" (p. 70) — "the haptic and the visual conjoin to create an impressionistic body" (p. 70); interiors themselves figured as bodies that "extend and incorporate what is beyond them" (p. 71); and Colley's note 1 claiming Ruskin, Pater and Stevenson "anticipate those like Maurice Merleau-Ponty who argue that it is not through thought, absented from body, that one knows one's surroundings, but through one's 'bodily situation'" (The Primacy of Perception, p. 5) — with the room–body "exchange" in which "each passes into the condition of the other" (p. 71) as the literary ancestor of the lived body's "gearing" onto the world.
• Volatile Architectures (Drobnick 2002/2006) — the olfactory register of the lived body: the white cube's anosmia "provides less than full or lived body experience" (editors, p. 89) — the "lived body" named as the measure the smell-less gallery fails; and the Shoe Exhibit's odor that "invades visitors' bodies and in so doing cements concept to experience" (Davis, quoted p. 94) — the lived body breached by volatile particles, smell as the sense that crosses the skin's boundary without invitation. See olfaction, embodiment.
• Sensorial interior landscapes (Garófalo-Khan 2018) — the immersive register: the lived body in conditioned media. At Vals, "the earth and the water that occupants submerge themselves in define a corporeal engagement with a mass"; light entering "though minimal apertures" becomes "a third, more ephemeral visible volume that the body can engage"; and in Hylozoic Soil the body moves through a responsive field — "Its programmed activity engages the occupant in a delicate dance" — where touching "and the possibility of touching" structure the encounter. The chapter's bodies inhabit media (water, air, verdant density) rather than rooms: the body schema extended to buoyancy, coolness, moisture and smell — the same extension Treadwell's swimmer makes, here as design programme rather than phenomenological description. See embodiment, biophilia.
• Design studio through the subtle revelations of phenomenology (Smith 2018) — the pedagogical register of the lived body: the body as the studio's knowing instrument and its nested figure. "Our body is a sophisticated device which is highly attuned to the physical world, and our brain, likewise, has acutely interpretive functions we may not even be aware of"; perception runs through "the conditions and the movement of our body" (see adumbration); and the interior's privilege is doubled corporeality — "It brings us back to the intimate scale of oneself as an individual; a body within a body." Pallasmaa (quoted): "A building is encountered; it is approached, confronted, related to one's body, moved through, utilized as a condition for other things." See embodiment, adumbration.
• source-notes/dubbeldam-2006-thing-shapes

Open Questions

• Does the later "flesh of the world" (The Visible and the Invisible) revise the lived body into a general ontology of intercorporeality, and what would that mean for architecture's concern with the built body?
• Is the haptic/lived-body turn a critical alternative to the spectacle and the parametric/digital paradigm, or a recuperable, potentially nostalgic form of resistance (cf. Douglas Spencer, the noopolitical critique)? See Phenomenology.
• Can the lived-body account (rooted in existence, not design) be operationalized as a normative criterion for making buildings without domesticating it?