Personal Space

Tania Lopez Winkler and Marcos Lutyens’s Second Skin brings visual and experiential elements to two ideas that had already added flair to philosophical explorations of identity:  a spatial approach to understanding human cognition and self-perception and the idea that homes and personal space serve as an extension of the body.  The Second Skin project emerged from a desire to explore a shared interest in psychology in a way that would incorporate Lutyens and Winkler’s backgrounds in art and architecture.  The idea of the “dream house” provided common ground, giving the pair a way to examine both the idea of physical sanctuary and of personal psychological refuge (”Nowhere you can go is more peaceful,”  Marcus Aurelius explained, “than your own soul”).

Building on their earlier work exploring domestic space, virtual reality, and mental spaces, Winkler and Lutyens’s initial work revolved around sessions in which subjects sketched and discussed the notion of “primary refuge” while hypnotized.  The first stage–conducted with architectural students from London–revealed differences in personalities but also a surprising recurrence of certain themes and structures, raising the possibility of a collective, almost subconscious, architecture.  As the project grew, Lutyens and Winkler created digital models of the interviews and sketches, allowing them to graph the styles of imaginary structures that emerged and use genetic algorithms to transform the collected works:

The digitalized houses are fed to the software according to their families, separating their elements and assigning them dominant or recessive values. During the execution, the program randomly selects pairs of houses and performs the morphing. This process is repeated in four generations, obtaining in as a result of the last generation a collective house, which varies every time that the program is ran. Being a summary of spatial qualities, this collective house, deliberately, is not dictatorial with regards to form.

The organic, sometimes fantastic, structures that grow from this process represent both an inchoate, primal, search for community and connection and a visual representation of personal identity.  Viewers become more aware of the ways in which “home” serves as an intermediary between spheres, synthesizing individual experience and the life of the community.