Unseen Bodies
This drawing explores how the human body has been depicted, understood, and imagined in Danish architectural and design education over the past 270 years. It represents a study of more than two hundred public and private archival materials sourced from various contemporary educational institutions, libraries, and archives across Denmark.[1] The study draws upon a broad range of materials, from curricula and syllabi to other visual and textual materials, in each instance looking for inscriptions or depictions of the body.
The drawing offers a non-linear analysis of history that challenges the singular narrative of the human body, as often conveyed in conventional architectural representations. Through a closer engagement with archival research, the drawing traces how people, ideas, and material conditions interact, making visible how certain types of knowledge dominate while other knowledges are dismissed, marginalised, or forgotten. The material collated in the drawing brings to the surface historical examples of continuities and shifts that occur in our conceptions of the human body—some widely celebrated and some remain still largely unquestioned, and how these conceptions, through time, become part of architectural and design education. It suggests a sustained engagement with a body, echoing what disability scholar, Aimi Hamraie, termed as ‘normate template’: the mythic creation of a universal body in architecture and design.[2] As an incomplete genealogy, the drawing encourages a critical questioning of the normalised body.
Notes
- The Royal Danish Academy, Aarhus School of Architecture, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, The Royal Danish Library, The Royal Danish Library Archive, and private archives from former lecturers in Danish architectural and design education. Further, visual archival material has been studied at The Royal Danish Library Archive, The Cast Collection of The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, The National Gallery of Denmark and The Museum of National History in Denmark.
- In 1997, the humanities scholar and leading voice in disability justice, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, introduced the term ‘normate’ to describe the culturally idealised figure within society. This figure is commonly imagined as white, male and non-disabled, and is widely assumed to represent the default human. Although Garland-Thomson’s analysis is rooted in the history of American culture, she and other scholars have argued that the ‘normate’ can also be applied beyond that context. See for example: Jos Boys, Doing Disability Differently: An alternative handbook on architecture, dis/ability and designing for everyday life (2014); Aimi Hamraie, Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (2017); Sara Hendren, What Can a Body Do?: How We Meet the Built World (2020). The ‘normate’ tends to be perceived as an ‘average body’. Disability scholar Aimi Hamraie in 2017, coined the term ‘normate template’ stating: ‘[…] the normate template has served as a historical pattern language for Western traditions of architectural design since antiquity.’ Aimi Hamraie, Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (Minnesota Press: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 21.
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Christine Bjerke is an architectural researcher, designer, and educator working at the intersections of architectural history, design pedagogy, critical disability studies and spatial justice. She is currently a PhD student and part of Centre for Spatial Inclusion at the Royal Danish Academy—Architecture, Design, Conservation.
This text is one of the selected responses to the second category of the Open Call 2025: Visibility, and the Unseen—a series of short contributions that either bring to the surface the unseen drawings within the Drawing Matter Collection (I. In the Archive) or explore original architectural drawings, created by the author(s) of the contribution, which make visible the unseen (II. In Practice).
