The essays collected in this volume are intended to stimulate research in the anthropology of architecture on the basis of a critical history of the body and its cultural constructions. The analogy between architecture and the human body is rooted in the fundamental impact the latter has on ordering, symbolizing, and interpreting the world. Correspondingly, the metaphorical conceptualization of the built environment in terms of the human body was already practiced in early cultures and has determined architectural theory since antiquity. While the architectural treatises of early modern times vividly imagine anthropomorphic and anthropometric figures, they seem to be overcome by an architectural theory that is based on purely rational as well as mechanical laws. However, these figures were never totally abandoned, and Le Corbusier ´s Modulor is only one, if not the most prominent example, for their ongoing reception and transformation in modern times. The human sciences of the 19th century played a significant role in this process. Physiology and psychology brought about not only new experimental devices for analyzing the human body and its physiological functions, but also new images of the body that directly went into aesthetics, art history, and architectural theory. This new understanding of the body had a large impact on the production and reception of modern architecture. With contributions by Claire Barbillon, Tobias Cheung, Günter Feuerstein, Tanja Jankowiak, Eckhard Leuschner, Harry Francis Mallgrave, Indra Kagis McEwen, Irene Nierhaus, Philipp Osten, Heleni Porfyriou, Paolo Sanvito, Christoph Schnoor, Sven- Olov Wallenstein, Frank Zöllner and Beatrix Zug-Rosenblatt. On the editors: Kirsten Wagner is professor for cultural studies and communication science at the University of Applied Sciences in Bielefeld. She studied art history, German literature, sociology, and cultural studies in Braunschweig, Oldenburg, and Berlin. She received a PhD for a dissertation on the spatialization of knowledge in the computer era. From 2002 to 2010 she was a research fellow at the Institute for Cultural Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her research focuses on images of the body in architecture, the theory and history of spatial knowledge organization, aesthetics and theories of perception in modernity, and the image of the city. Jasper Cepl is assistant professor at the Technische Universität Berlin, where he has taught architectural theory since 2003. He studied architecture in Aachen and Berlin. He is the author of "Oswald Mathias Ungers. Eine intellektuelle Biographie" (Cologne 2007), for which he received a PhD in 2006. Having published widely on the history and theory of architecture, he has also, among other things, edited a monograph on Hans Kollhoff in 2004 and the anthology "Quellentexte zur Architekturtheorie" (with Fritz Neumeyer) in 2002.
