LEAPs as Relational Catalysts: Drawings for the Eastway Studiolo

Through traditional design practices, the conception of the human body in architects’ work plays a crucial role in imparting ontologies into architecture. Could a rethinking of bodily presence in design enable a more radical relationality, where agency is a modality of forming contingent alliances with humans, non-humans, and Others? Posthuman visions of anthropos acknowledge the body as an original prosthetic; this condition opens corporeality to encounters with alterity, at times profoundly deepening entwinement with the world and others, but in other instances, intensifying the body’s propensity to manifest as an uncanny stranger.
Enter Leaky Embodiment Alter-ego Personas: alien, yet possibly endearing, LEAPs are visions of bodies as assemblages, tragicomic actors with unwieldy bodies comprised of bulbous, mismatched, ever-changing parts. The LEAPs interact with process and place, reflecting the circumstances of their becoming, where contexts contaminate and at other times clash with their bodies.
The Eastway Studiolo project explores how the LEAPs can aid in catalysing the presence of realms of relationality not accessible through the inclusion of normative scale figures in design. In drawings for the Studiolo, LEAPs become actants with the potential to transgress assumed boundaries between people, nature, and things. This is in part because, much like Odradek, whom Jane Bennet notes in Kafka’s short story defy ontological categorisation by the story’s narrator, LEAPs always remain other than. Through the design with LEAPs, what Ian Bogost would call ‘unit operations’, or interactions between sets of things, where ‘something is always also something else, too’ begin to reveal themselves. Latour-esque litanies, compendiums of things and their aliases, can be compiled. And yet the LEAPs suggest worlds beyond themselves which do not align precisely with our own; in this slippage they are not only diagnostic but also speculative devices, interjecting possibility. In my talk, I explore the capabilities of LEAPs to complicate the binaries of architect/inhabitant, human/non-human and self/other in the design process.