Theatre Architecture: A Derivation of the Primal Cavity

Abstract

Among the cultural odds and ends that supply the architectural imagination are prevailing conceptions of the human body—its functions, perfectibility, and possibilities for pleasure and pain. Though architects of various periods have employed ideal proportions of the human body in conscious decisions about the structural proportions of monuments and buildings, this is not the only way, nor the most interesting way, in which the human body informs architecture. What is also meant by the body's relationship to architecture is the memory of body states that architecture evokes in the observer. These body states are recalled in the form of their psychological derivatives: moods, affects, and emotions. These derivatives initiate and qualify our aesthetic judgments about architecture.