CHOREOGRAPHING ARCHITECTURE:
Developing a Generative Movement Language for Embodied Design

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ABSTRACT
   
How can a choreographed language based on movement responses to architecture become the guiding framework for design? Although there is scholarly and practice-based research in applying choreographic language to the field of urban planning and landscape architecture in recent years, there are few scholarly works that apply these research findings to an architectural design method. Movement languages used by choreographers exhibit clear notational definitions and can span various types of performances and functionality such as cognitive science, mathematics, and computer science. Choreography is a field that has been exploring this relationship between documentation of human movement and creative performance. While the research in segmenting and representing elemental human tasks aspire to its computational automation and replication, the development of a movement language also has generative, expressive, and instructive potential. My work links computational descriptions of design and embodied performance with choreographic languages to produce an open-ended system for documenting and re-enacting design processes. Launching from scholarships and design experiments on making grammars, movement annotative systems, and motion-caption technology; the geometry of a physical room is performed with the body, based on improvisational rules defined by the responses of different elements within a physical room. This performance is then transcribed into a movement language; producing vocabulary in generating new geometry and new movement sequences responsive to specific architectural elements that are adapted to create new spaces. The intended contributions of my research are to investigate how embodied performances can re-map and generate space, providing a tool for design instruction, computation, improvisation, and collaboration.


Keywords: architecture, design, choreography, movement language, computation

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