With its emphasis on permanence and stability, architecture at first resists an easy pairing with live performance, usually considered ephemeral and elusive. But architecture and performance share a core concern: the interplay of bodies and space.
"Bodybuilding" is the first publication to examine the use of live performance by architects. Looking past the unbuilt, utopian projects of the early modernists or the postwar avant-garde, the authors unearth an alternative canon of architects who actually employ performance to fortify the process of building, or else to explore architecture’s enmeshment with labor, security, race, migration, the environment, gentrification, and public assembly. For these architects, performance can be a tool, a method, or a heuristic device; in every case, performance is a blade that cuts into the matter of architecture.
With rates of construction plummeting after the financial crisis of 2007–08, newly minted architects have had to find alternative ways to continue working within the field. "Bodybuilding" grounds these new practices within a century of precedents, and insists that performance is a critical tool to rethink architecture’s agency, goals, and aesthetics.
