Fantastic Architecture
I actually went to college to study architecture! In 1979, my tutor Colin Birtles, told me about a book. I suspect that he was trying to get me to be a bit more imaginative.
The book was Fantastic Architecture by Vostell Higgins on Something Else Press. I was never going to be examined on the books and I didn’t make notes. So once I got past my exams and my projects; did work experience and then a further degree, I couldn’t remember the name of the book.
After my “retirement” I have had time to think about art and architecture and have ultimately got into the “non visual art” thing I started looking of the book and indeed, the inspiration for the idea of architects working a bit harder than planning buildings with doors and stairs. Rising above the fight with regulation and money.
I bought a few “Fantastic Architectues” from libraries downsizing and getting rid of unpopular books and brick a brick shops. But I never found the correct item Until today 8 October 2024. Where it was available as a download from a website. So I downloaded it and tidied up the important bit (as far as I am concerned) and I tidied it up a bit so that it is legible.
Here it is, the reason for my interest in Non Visual Art.
The Parts of a Body House is by Carolee Schneenmann. Heres a link to the Wiki page for Carolee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolee_Schneemann
CAPTION 5
Ecology - to participate in the body. A relationship, perhaps, between the body politic and the
body physical? Between the body politic and any very large body of beings or of water or
earth or air?
A lost element of ecology in the making of structures: to use local, found materials simply
because they are there, usable, and natural, and to let them determine one's aesthetic, rather
than to use them because one believes in It.
Can we go further? Should not all future architects and environmental scientists be required
to study Urology, not just in the narrow sense of the gastric tract, but in the larger sense of
the movement of all liquids and liquid-behaving solids and masses within our bodies? Are
these not working models for the flow of all kinds of traffic? Concentrations of people and
social engagements? Flows of information and social change? It is a system which, we know,
works, where few of our social systems have been successful beyond the fairly limited goal
of assuring their own survival, and have contributed little to whatever came afterwards.
Can we use our study of Urology in our environment and still remain good Marxists? Or
Catholics? Or Scientologists? Or Conservatives? Or Neo-Lelbitzians? Or Mothers? To what
seventeen bodies might each of us belong?
Carolee Schneemann
PARTS OF A BODY HOUSE
Entrance and exit: The Coat Room
Admission to the Parts Of A Body House requires only that everyone bring a coat. The coat is hung up on any one of a series of infinite coat racks. On leaving everyone picks up and takes away a coat of their choice which is not the one they brought.
Cat House
When you enter the body house you walk south and north for a long time; you come to an open circular structure — a staircase of ribs, smooth and shiny white. You will see a flat knotted rope of black hair hanging down. The circular space has become dark. Take off your clothes, leave them. Hoist yourself up the rope; the hairs spread out and become a carpet you crawl along. It has led you into the Cat House which is somewhere behind the eyes of the house. Cat House is a tiny room filled and entirely with cats. They have their own small door and enter and exit at will. Lie down among cats. Cats kiss, stroke, brush, sleep, turn gently. Up and down your body, some cats need your hair, your belly. They sniff your chin, your ears, your thigh, your armpits, your sex. Dozens of furry shapes different weights, textures. Walk on you. Move around you. Brush against you. Lick you. Cat’s eyes shift, shine, blink off, blink on. Cats purr, hum, vibrate. There is a tail against your neck. Lights of cats eyes flashing.
Bathroom
When you leave the Cat House, you enter a bathroom, it is at the back of the head of Body House.
1. stormy afternoon. A cat is swimming in the bathtub. In the bottom of the bathtub is a large, crumpled burnt oil painting of nudes. The cat soaks and swims a long time. You sit on the toilet watching. Something must be let in from the storm. You go and get chairs and pile them into the bathroom. You will have to stand in the bathtub to load them all up. Crawl in and out of chairs, piling chairs until they reach the ceiling. Stand in the tub among the chairs. Pick up the wet cat and dance. Blue raining, blue light.
2. winter night. Get into the bathtub — which is full of warm water and pine bubbles — with someone you love. Make love in the water. The only light is blue-black night, gold and blue flashes. A cat comes to swim in the tub. It paddles and sneezes, it is fur-soaked. Then the cat sits on the edge of the tub watching you in the dark water. A film is made of this.
Lung room
Walking south you will arrive at the Lung Room. Huge, transparent, glimmering lungs, seemingly suspended in air are stretched at varying angles and levels through the endless space. You might best traverse these net-like lungs on hands and knees, crawling over the stretched membrane. In the centre of a lung you can do jumps and falls, using it like a trampoline. Many people are crawling around; others have curled up, fallen asleep on the lungs; others are holding hands, bouncing through the space from one lung to another. The transparent lungs are luminous; there is no other light to define space.
Heart chamber/Cunt chamber
A leap in the dark from an easterly lung: falling briefly, a sudden landing in the Heart Chamber/Cunt Chamber. Enormous soft velvety warm damp walls, rounded, ridged, pulse gently. Your whole body is squeezed up and down; between pulses you can clamber around holding onto the ridges. Each ridge you touch emits a flash of brilliant coloured light. It is slippery, the muscle walls expand, contract, push you slightly up or down. You may doze in the strange rocking. Only one or two persons at a time in this chamber. When you wish, begin to crawl down, head first, pushing between contractions. Exit.
Ice Palace
You arrive in the Ice Palace and are handed ice skates. This is simply a great frozen internal pond where everyone skates. Good old-fashioned skating music echoes here. A stand sells hotdogs and coffee.
Liver room
The exit from the ice Palace is a short peristaltic journey: an esophagus/intestine. Just room enough to stand upright, bracing yourself with hands against the walls. You are quickly propelled forward. An almost unbearable foul aroma. No light at all. You will be ejected either into the Liver Room or Nerve Ends Room.
The Liver Room is sculptural: chunks of liver-like stuff (brown polyurethane), about 12 feet long each, are piled into an overlapping hilly structure. Near rivets, picnic baskets and jugs have been embedded under crevices. All your friends are here to picnic. There's a pleasant glowing golden light, smell of the area smell of the sea. People climb around on the livers, which are nice and springy, they sit on outcroppings and edges, sharing food and drink. At the top of the hills there is a long narrow machine which, when tapped, will blow out a length of foamy brown blanket. These blankets slowly dissolve and our left blowing about. A certain amount of dancing, arguing, singing; and napping and intimate love-sleep in more remote crevices.
The Nerve Ends Room
The Nerve Ends Room is evolved as a free-flowing, self-perpetuating, self-destroying energy environment using active elements of:
ORGASMIC STREAMING ORGANIC GARDENING ELECTROCULTURE BIRDS ACID JOYFUL TECHNOLOGY EXTRASENSORY PERCEPTION WILD-LIFE PRESERVATION LENNY BRUCE BLACK POWER BACH BEATLES BEAST SONG SYNESTHESIA KINESTHESIA
Ecstatic physical interchange. Participants will freely choose music, noise, lights, seasons, stars, galaxies, winds, colours, photocell activations, circuits cut-offs, slides, film, laser beams, traffic signals, dirt, sand, mud, grease, powder, friendly animals, fabrics, SCRs, water…fires ropes, swings, ladders, smells, aromas, wood, nails, hammers, saws, chisels, trees, shrubs, flowers, costumes …..and agree only that their choices may exist simultaneously in juxtaposition with the choices of others in the same time-space continuum.
The participants will be able to select their materials in advance; they may also build or activate parts of the environment with found materials or by using preset electronic circuits — sensory components determined by computer programs. The found materials can be used in any imaginable way, alone or cooperation with other people. Maximum sensory information and strange and immediate physical circumstances will provoke actions/reactions in developing involvement. People will be bombarded, “charged”, as they shape and reshape the environment. Ear plugs, eye masks, perfume, tiny lights and hunks of form rubber to build chambers will be available to disperse environmental conflagrations — to provide utter quiet for private turnings-in/turnings-on. LSD, DMT, pot, alcoholic drinks, mushrooms, vitamins, strange and common foods will be available. The Nerve Ends Room will be situated in a transparent bubble in a woods to facilitate exchange of inside and outside, actual landscape and fantastic landscape.
Finally, a memory bank will be available to everyone by which they can open travel into the experience to anyone desiring to go where they've been. (My memory bank idea is fully described in the English magazine Icteric.)
The Kidney Room
In the kidney room people come together to discuss revolution, that is changing or transforming political forms which are repressive, exploitative, divisive and life negative. It is a single it is a simple outdoor space (a vague sheltering landscape); daytime light; a luminescent green Bile River runs by. There are three large kidneys to sit on, made of stone; they form a semicircle on a grassy Bank.
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