TITLE: Public Receptors

Where does the body end and the city begin? Public Receptors proposes the development of wearable spatial structures on a human scale that are able to mediate between their users and public spaces – between the human body and its urban situation. The project aims to explore the relationships between bodies, materiality, architecture and the built environment. Public Receptors explores the potential for soft geometries and textile surfaces, conventionally associated with the individual body on a human scale, to generate alternative arrangements of social space and modes of interaction.

In particular, it is the human body that serves as transformative power as well as the place for the moveable spatial structures to transform. These architectonic structures are small in scale and unfold only once they are used and have interacted with the body, leading to a kind of ‘body architecture’, an architecture for the body that enables it to expand into space and to project people’s longings out into urban surroundings. 

Public Receptors was supported by the Van Alen Institute New York and the New York Prize Fellowship, and was performed by Stephanie Fungsang, Lydia B. Bell and Khalia Frazier in the urban fabric of New York City.