ODEL: THE NORMATIVE BODY

21 October 2015 KETCHUP DROOL

Norms, have long inhabited the architect’s toolset. Pertaining to the carpenter’s square or rule norma is first codified in the early nineteenth century as ‘standard, pattern, model’ as evidence of its common usage. Whereas the vernacular use of the noun ‘norm’ had to do with geometry, with ‘right angles’ and perpendicular lines, its adjectival derivation ‘normal’ is defined in 1828 in the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘constituting, conforming to, not deviating or differ from, the common type or standard.’ The emergence of the adjectival form of the noun is the first historical clue that suggests a symbolic shift that happened throughout the eighteenth century from the language of geometry to that of biological matter.

Ernst and Peter Neufert
Architects’ Data, 1936
full text in pdf

Wiley
Architectural Graphic Standards
Hoboken, 2000

The exhibition ‘Teatro di Oklahoma: Whisky Quiz’ played a central role in the activity of the collective and was staged in 1977 at the Diagramma/Luciano Inga Pin gallery in Milano, a place of intense experimentation, above all in the field of body art and performance. The human body was the linchpin of the exhibition, analysed as a pose, garment and mask, and no longer in its carnal dimension. Treated as objects to portray in a still life, the bodies were portrayed garbed and segmented in photographic images. Luciano Inga Pin and Elio Fiorucci worked on the costumes, and Giorgio Colombo took the photographs. […]

Aldo Spoldi’s artistic production went on to investigate how popular culture creates standardised visual representations of the body and emotions, crushed from within by a society that favours conformism and uniformity.