In The
Metapolis. Dictionary of Advanced Architecture. City, Technology and Society in
the Information Age (Actar
2003).
INDIVIDUAL
Manuel Delgado
An
individual is bodily mass with a human face, endowed with sentiment and reason.
Individual, too, is the basic – though not necessarily unitary- molecule of social
practice, source of energy that generates the spaces and times it passes
through or dwells in. It is the individual who, alone or in the company of
others, takes possession of space, turning it into territory, or appropriates
it, in the sense that he considers it fitting and possesses it only in as much
as he makes use of it. It is the individual- as a body that exists according to
the other bodies with which it forms society- who proclaims a place, the
geographical point at which he finds himself and that he names, an outline that
lets itself be apprehended and transported by forces proceeding from its
historical, social, emotive, and sensible surroundings, that perceives all
presences and absences, susceptible to the flows that influence it. The individual
is the main character in social situations that consist in him looking at
himself in the mirror held up by other individuals, whom he at the same time
reflects and shadows. A provocative and provoked individual, the product of
space and producer of space, determined by it and determinant of it, generates
oppositions and parallels, symmetries and breaking-offs, is comprised of
reciprocities with things, is reflected in the changes he occasions and is the
result of them. It is the body of that individual that intervenes as the source
and the destination of all initiative, as the framework in which impressions
are registered and issued, and as the surface beneath which projects and
intentions are intuited.
The
occupation of a space does not imply that space is an empty container waiting
for irruption within it. It is the body of the individual that makes the space
it occupies. It is the individual’s action that gives off its own ephemeral or
lasting territoriality.
Personal,
informal space is that which accompanies every individual wherever he goes and
that expands and contracts according to the type of meeting, the relation with
the people with whom he intercommunicates and his continual search for a point
of balance between approach and avoidance. The occupation of space is, then,
the deployment of the moving body. Each body is a space and has a space, space
for relation and for movement. The body generates symmetries; it imposes itself
as an axis according to which is established a left and a right, an up and a
down, a here and a there, what is there and what is not, a now, a before and an
after, The body, then becomes its most mathematical properties: applications,
functions, operations, transformations, etc. on or in relation to something or
someone on front or behind, far or near, before or after that body.
[Photo by Jorge Ledesma, jorgeledesma.net]
