Already grown up. Body and scale - body vision and perspective

The illustrations are digital artworks that are part of the Almost Alice series , produced in 2008, included in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll, Modernbook Gallery, Palo Alto, 2008

In front of Jean Nouvel's image of the Angel attached to the full height of the Tower at ^Smichov1 intersection in Prague, we are lost between the shrunken scale of our own bodies and the oversized city. We witness a detachment of the architectural scale from the concepts of MACRO and MICRO, simultaneously influenced by both visual determination and bodily sensory perception.

What is the meaning of small or large scales when the only stable entity remains the body and the only variable is architecture?

When confronted with the colossal order we relive the sensations of the first years of our life, when we could not climb a bench and lived in a world that was too big. Beyond the representational function of the monumental, we find a primary perception of uncertain dimensions and materials. The visual influx of the fantastic of recent decades contributes to this state in which the body can be as small/large as a rabbit or a cup.

Juhani Pallasmaa observes that architecture should 'domesticate limitless space and facilitate its occupation', at the same time helping us to 'domesticate time and inhabit the temporal continuum'^2.

Time and space once again become the determining couple of architecture, to the detriment of the image, the built being a subjective translation of one's own relationship with the environment, architecture being redetermined on the basis of experiential perceptions. The repositioning of modern and contemporary man in space takes up the old philosophical questions related to the house and the body: the house as an interior dimension, the house - projection of spatial experiences, the house - allegorical in corpore, the house - frame in scenographic perception, the spatiality determined/assimilated corporeally. Throughout history, theories have frequently related body and space in a mathematical determination of the parts, with a specific representation of the proportions between man and the built. Man appears in the religious representations of the Middle Ages as the dominant entity of the space/frame through an artifice of psychological manipulation, with the figures in the foreground having their scale magnified in proportion to their importance. The pictorial images seemingly 'sectionalize' the architectural object and the figures on a much larger scale than the real one. Giotto di Bondone reintroduces the framework-spatiality in which the figures are inserted at the expense of the passive architectural background in his landmark works in the Upper Basilica in Assisi and in Santa Croce in Florence. In The Legend of St Francis - The Miracle of the Crucifix, Giotto amplifies the proportion of the man in the house, minimizing the importance of the architectural setting. A direct relationship of subordination can be seen in the work Ognissanti Madonna, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena (c. 1310). A similar expression in terms of the body-house relationship can be found in the works of Ambrogio Lorenzetti, including the Allegory of Good and Bad Government and their Effects on the City and the ^Countryside3 (1337-39) . Rudolf Arnheim remarked in Art and Visual ^Perception4, the particular typology of representation: the buildings depicted are cut up (sectioned off), the architecture remains a shell of the body, with the sole role of contextualization - "The child's invention endures down the ages, so that even in the very realistic art of a Dürer or Altdorfer, the Holy Family is housed in a building without the front wall, which is unconvincingly camouflaged as a crumbling ruin".

Architectural representations evolve towards the Renaissance and Baroque, bringing man to scale and integrating him into the space as a constituent part.

The house in the three-dimensional spatial sense begins to develop in representation as corporeal projection in terms of anthropometry. Building on the tradition initiated by Vitruvius in the 1st century B.C., man became fully the measure of the universe again in the 15th century, through the work of Leone Battista ^Alberti5. On the one hand, he is the universal (Vitruvian) man of Leonardo da Vinci's 1490s, the perfect man, on the other - the model of symmetry and proportion in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein .

Man was the basis of planimetric geometry in the Renaissance and became, in 1948 and 1955, Corbusier's modulator, the anthropometric unit of things.

In particular, we note Leo-nardo da Vinci's emphasis, beyond adjusting the formulas of Vitruvius and Alberti, the double inscription of man in circle and square - two different centers of the body, of "magnitude/magnitude" and "gravity"... respectively two architecturally ^distinct relationships6. Magnitude has to do with spatial occupation, contrary to gravity which places the body in an indestructible relationship with the horizontal plane. It is not by chance that Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, in The Little^Prince7, described his position vis-à-vis home by the first spatial attribute of magnitude - "my home is so narrow" - even though he was on the infinite, horizontal surface of asteroid B621.

The same reduced spaciousness was metaphorically illustrated by the Tree Man in the triptych painting Garden of^Eden8 . Hieronymus Bosch interprets the womb in terms of both its relation of inclusion and its relation of torturous aggression, recalling the torture devices used in the Middle Ages - the bronze bull - and the oversized cage. The advertising campaign for Lavazza in 2011, in a game of commercial imagery that speculates on size by coordinating it with importance, re-envision Lewis Carroll's scaled character (Alice) as a Vitruvian man inscribed in a mug. Spatial subordination is, in iconic interpretation, the measure of all things. The Vitruvian man is reinterpreted in the original sense of geometry, the measure of things that change their substance according to him. The entire campaign is based on this game of the human scale, after the fashion of other advertising versions in the last decade that have brought the fantasy world of Alice in Wonderland up to date, such as Annie Leibovitz 's editorial for Vogue US in December 2003.

In 1865, in the novels Alice in ^Wonderland9, What Alice ^Found10 and Alice in the Land of ^Mirrors11, Lewis Carroll saw his main character growing and shrinking, with a fantastic dimension in relation to the architectural spatiality (the real plane).

The body-shell relation appears in a typical hypostasis in the imaginary, where - in the context of growth - the real body is related to a model of the house. The change in optics produced at the end of the 19th century was driven by a fascination with curiosities, as we notice in Joseph Cornell's series of works, works that rework architecture in the sense of miniature worlds: Pink Palace ( 1946-48), Setting for a Fairy Tale( 1942). Maggie Taylor's illustrations for the Modernbook Gallery edition of Alice in ^Wonderland12 are based on a Victorian house typology that almost all Lewis Carroll's screenings have used. The dark atmosphere of the rigid house is matched by the dark interiors of ^Antony House13, built in the early 18th century, the filming location for Alice in Wonderland, directed by Tim ^Burton14.

With strong sources in nineteenth-century vision (Lewis Carroll), cinematography (frequently in horror films) sees doll's houses most often in their original form, the models of Victorian houses. The visual allusion embodies the unconscious fear of a man who no longer finds his place in the world, for whom the scale of things changes as he matures. Genuine architectural space, in the context of the body's deformations, often as a result of growing up, becomes cramped and cramped. In 1920, Le Corbusier brought the sleeping car ladder into architecture as a necessary, sufficient, hygienic staircase for the home, a manifesto of modernism, of the minimalist interior. His drawings show a fragmentation, a repetitive piling up of elements that have to fit into a space, into a frame(The Fall of Barcelona - Chute de Barcelone I, 1939/1960). The modulator, as the interior scale of things, determines one of the real conflicts of architecture, which does not distinguish between the minimal and the comfortable staircase in the ^Marseille Housing Unit15 in 1952. In an early variant, in the ^Weissenhof16 complex in 1927, Le Corbusier approached compressed function as a visual artifice of spatial dilation. In a minimization of 'useless' space, the bedroom was reduced to a mobile, foldable unit and the living space enlarged.

A number of examples of contemporary architecture speculate tight space as essential, necessary. MVRDV, in the vision of the archetypal house, designs the interiors of social housing as having minimal spaciousness. The entire Didden ^Village17 dwelling in Rotterdam, the Netherlands (2002-2006), functioned on the principle of compressed space, the idea being representatively illustrated in the children's bedrooms. The children's room materializes the 'tight' space as an extension of the sleeping place. The bedroom becomes a box in the children's use, the oversized window acting as a hatch opening onto the roof. In the imaginary spatial context of the body-house couple, Alice in Wonderland is the reference that depicts coming of age as a spatially aggressive growth, in which the building becomes unmanageable. The novel, later the film version directed by Tim Burton, develops archetypal architectural images, also taken up by Guillermo del Toro in Labyrinth of the^Beast18 . As mentioned earlier, the architectural imaginary projection often encompasses one's own bodily perception, as a subjective spatial reflection of one's position in the built world. The house does not appear in Alice in Wonderland in the sense of a main character, but it is the environment into which the fantastic is introduced by the house-body couple. The dimension of the story begins with the rise and fall of the little girl in the interior space - in a room - that is, with the distortion of the common perception of human scale. The psychiatrist John Todd noted in 1955 the 'imaginary' changes in perception - visual, auditory, tactile - described by Lewis Carroll as more than a spatial illusion. It is also worth remembering that the writer suffered from migraines and was familiar with the psychiatric interpretation of perceptual disorders. The AIWS(Alice in Wonderland) syndrome describes the psychiatric disorder as a dual alteration of perception, bodily and visual, in the sense of altered scale of objects/members.

The distorted body image, misperception of various parts of the body, oversizing of the hands and head, often accompanied by loss of sense of time, mentioned by John Todd and Lewis Carroll, are associated with spatial and psychological discomfort.

The mid-twentieth century deliberately projected the myth of Alice in Wonderland in psychedelic perspectives in black and white cinematography and photography; we refer in particular to the 1966 screen version by director Jonathan Miller. The influence manifests itself as a definite visual preference, against the backdrop of experiments in photography and the texts of the time: Aldous Huxley'sDoors of Perception --, Timothy Francis Leary'sPsychedelic Experience - by Timothy Francis Leary, The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The architectural vision, as the director Tim Burton will redesign it in 2010, is that of the Victorian house seen in the sense of spaces dominated by chiaroscuro, photographic experiments, the spectacle of curiosities. The interior space, in terms of the house, is seen by Miller in his screenization as a ^prison20, a box that imperceptibly tightens around the growing child who no longer sees the surrounding world with the eyes of innocence. "In (Miller's) safe hands, Alice in Wonderland is not merely a fantasy tale of caterpillars, mice and bloody queens seeking to behead their subjects, but rather the journey of a young British girl's self-aware, coming-of-age journey as a prisoner in a Victorian nightmare..."²¹, remarked Scott Thill in Bright Lights Film Journal. The director's interpretation refers to the change of scale that is triggered by growing up - "the shadows of the prison-house begin to close in around the growing child, and this seems to me to have been exactly what Dogdson had in mind when he was describing Alice's two adventures, one in Looking Glass Land, the other in Wonderland"^22. In the context of the changes in perception, we are witnessing an atypical dynamic: the impossible temporal traversal of space is overcome by new access routes - mirror crossings - the permeability of materials, the spatial modification of architecture built according to the artifice of perspective (visible in cinematography). One of the typical plot sequences in Alice in Wonderland is the abandonment of space. The interior does not grow simultaneously and does not change its determined ratios, retaining its real appearance and the scale of the furniture objects. The house becomes a useless box and, as a result, the architecture ceases to contain the body that can no longer occupy it, orienting itself towards new landmarks of reality. Seemingly antithetical to Alice's world, the universe of asteroid B621 on which the Little Prince lives is too cramped, described by the spatial attributes of the contrived frame, although paradoxically there is no home on the new planet, only "home". "Where is 'your home'? [...] The Little Prince then said with great seriousness: - It's nothing. My home is so tight. And then, slightly melancholy, he added: "Where I can see with my eyes, you can't go very far.... "²³ The story of the Little Prince about childhood, innocence and solitude starts from the visible appearances of ^{representation24} and speaks of a specific clarity of childhood to perceive the world and relationships with others, to approach space, to identify with objects. The difference between home and hearth, as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry projects it, translates into the exclusion of the built shell - home becomes the owned space, marked in an almost original sense by everyday activities. The universe of asteroid ^B62125 is concentrated, "tight", paradoxically described through sensorial spatial atri-butes. The Little Prince brings existential architectural space to an abstract, symbolic minimum. The space, though open, has an "intimacy" of the singular, of the unshared space belonging to a single person.

The spatiality conditioned by the measure of the body in the sense of constraint is a particular, formal category, defined by the content-container couple.

The unlimited sufficient space in The Little Prince and the insufficient space in Alice in Wonderland, both tailored to the human measure, are radical hypostases of the corporal-spatial imaginary that reflects the architectural projection through the prism of interior states. The house translates as a materialization of personal limitations, a reinterpretation of the Heideggerian dasein. It is the original frame with which the body comes into contact in a privileged sensory perception, the narrow house whose awareness is heightened by spatial constraint. Man as the scale of things changes its dimensions in relation to the architectural frame in Alice in Wonderland, becoming the intrigue of the fantastic dimension. Symbolically, he exceeds the measure of things that no longer fit him, the world becomes too small - the problem of contemporary perception in progression. The physical room, which is obsolete, is no longer mathematically conditioned by the scale of man, it no longer grows in the sense of the modulator, it does not explode, it does not decompose; it becomes merely insufficient, limited in the sense of constraint. The fantastic dimension is given by the visual difference between the frame and the content - Alice grows by expanding into a room, becoming to negate the determination of the construction. The house becomes too small to contain her body and her aspirations. Complementarily, the architectural space becomes a tactile, haptic frame, in an over-sensitization of the body vis-a-vis its limits.

"Soon (the little girl's) eyes rested on a small glass box sitting under the table: she opened it and discovered inside a very small cake, on which was written with blueberries EAT ME. 'Well, I'll eat it,' said Alice, 'and if it will make me grow big, I shall be able to reach the key; if it will make me small, I shall be able to slip under the door: in either case I shall get into the garden, and I don't care which way.'"(Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland)

**Maggie Taylor (born 1961) is a photographer and digital artist, known for her particular vision expressed in photomontages, from Gainesville, Florida, U.S.A. A double major in philosophy (Yale, 1983) and photography (University of Florida, 1987), her work has surrealist influences. They can be found in collections including: The Art Museum, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ; The Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ; The Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; The Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, AL; Musee de la Photographie, Charleroi, Belgium; Museet For Fotokunst, Odense, Denmark; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; NationsBank, Charlotte, NC; and the Prudential Insurance Company, Newark, NJ e.t.c. www.maggietaylor.com www.maggietaylor.com

1 Jean Nouvel, Golden Angel Tower, Prague, 2000 Jean Nouvel, speculating on the local folklore of the guardian angel, incorporated the image on the building's corner facade, overlooking the Vltava River and the ruins of Vysehrad, The reproduction depicts actor Bruno Ganz, the "angel" in Wim Wenders' 1987film Wings of Desire. The building proposed the unification of four existing buildings under a 32.5m-high curtain facade and was critically acclaimed for its scale, materials and iconography.

2. Juhani Pallasmaa - The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. West Sussex: Academy Press; 2nd edition, U.K., 2005.

3. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Effetti del Buon Governo in città, 1338-1339, Sala della Pace, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena.

4. Rudolf Arnheim - Art and Visual Perception. A psychology of creative vision, 2nd edition, translated by Florin Ionescu, Polirom, Bucharest, 2011, p. 198.

5. Alberti, Leon Battista - On the Art of Building. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1991.

6. cf. Keele apud Michael John Gorman - STS 102: "Leonardo: Science, Technology, and Art", Stanford University, accessed 05.12.2011 - http://leonardodavinci.stanford.edu

/submissions/clabaugh/history/leonardo.html

7. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, http://gutenberg.net.au ebooks03/030077771h.html, accessed 02.03.2012.

8. Hieronymus Bosch, The garden of Earthly delights, or The Millennium, oil on wood, triptych, 220×389cm, 1503-1504, Prado Museum, Madrid.

9. Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, illustrations: John Tenn, Macmillan, 1865, PDFreeBooks.org; Carroll, Lewis - Alice in Wonderland. Translation: Elisabeta Gălățeanu, illustrations: Mabel Lucie Attwell. București: Editura Tineretului, 1958.

10. Lewis Carroll - What Alice Found There, illustrations: John Tenn, Macmillan, 1871, PDFreeBooks.org.

11. Lewis Carroll - Through the Looking-Glass, illustrations: John Tenn, Macmillan, 1871, PDFreeBooks.org.

12. Illustrations: Maggie Taylor for Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, author: Lewis Carroll, Modernbook Gallery, Palo Alto, 2008.

13. Antony Estate, Torpoint, Cornwall, PL11 2QA; dated early 18th century. Landscape by Reginald Pole Carew, Humphry Repton (c. 1790), accessed 03.02.2012 - http://www.gardensofcornwall.com/outdoor-kids/antony-house-and-garden-p133063

14.Alice in Wonderland, directed by Tim Burton, screenplay by Linda Woolverton, based on Lewis Carroll's (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) novels Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 1865, and Through the Looking-Glass, 1871, produced by Walt Disney Pictures, Roth Films, Team Todd, Zanuck Company, 2010.

15. Le Corbusier, Unité d'habitation (Unité d'habitation, Cité Radieuse), Marseille, France, 1952.

16. Le Corbusier, Complex Weissenhof, Stuttgart, 1927.

17. MVRDV, Didden Village, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 2002-2006.

18.El Laberinto del Fauno, directed by Guillermo del Toro, co-produced by Estudios Picasso, Tequila Gang, Esperanto Filmoj, in association with Sententia Entertainment, Telecinco, OMM; 2006;

19.Alice in Wonderland, direction: Jonathan Miller, production: BBC, Jonathan Miller Adaptation, screenplay Jonathan Miller, after a novel by Lewis Carroll, 1966.

20 'The shadows of the prison-house begin to close in around the growing child, and this seems to me to have been exactly what Dogdson had in mind when he was describing Alice's two adventures, one in Looking-glass Land, the other in Wonderland' - Jonathan Miller, apud Scott Thill, Bright Lights Film Journal, November 2003 | Issue 42, http://brightlightsfilm.com/42/alice.php, accessed 02.03.2012.

21. Scott Thill - Bright Lights Film Journal, November 2003 | Issue 42, http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/42/alice.php, accessed 01.02.2011;

22. Jonathan Miller, apud Scott Thill, ibid.

23. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince, accessed 02.03.2012, http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300771h.html.

24. The irony in the introduction of the book, the parable of the representation of a Boa snake, refers to the author's own experience and the failed studies in architecture in his youth.

25. 'The planet the Little Prince came from is asteroid B612'- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - Le Petit Prince, http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300771h.html, accessed 02.03.2012.

Alberti, Leon Battista - On the Art of Building. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1991.

Arnheim, Rudolf - Art and Visual Perception. A psychology of creative seeing. Translation: Ionescu, Florin. București: Editura Meridiane, 1979.

Carroll, Lewis - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, illustrations: John Tenn, Macmillan, 1865, PDFreeBooks.org.

Carroll, Lewis - Alice in Wonderland. Translation: Elisabeta Gălățeanu, illustrations: Mabel Lucie Attwell. București: Editura Tineretului, 1958.

Carroll, Lewis - What Alice Found There, illustrations: John Tenn, Macmillan, PDFreeBooks.org, 1871.

Carroll, Lewis - Through the Looking-Glass, illustrations: John Tenn, Macmillan, PDFreeBooks.org, 1871.

Crișan, Ana Maria - The Anagram of Imaginary Architecture: Metamorphosis - Reassessing the Temporal Paradigm in Architecture, PhD thesis, 2012

Pallasmaa, Juhani - The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. West Sussex: Academy Press; 2nd edition, U.K., 2005.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300771h.html, accessed: 02.03.2012.

Thill, Scott - Bright Lights Film Journal, November 2003 | Issue 42, http://brightlightsfilm.com/42/alice.php, accessed: 02.03.2012.

Illustrations: Digital artwork, Copyright Maggie Taylor, Almost Alice Series, 2008; illustrations included in the Alice's Adventures in Wonderland edition, Lewis Carroll, Modernbook Gallery, Palo Alto, 2008.

In front of the Jean Nouvel's The Golden Angel image, stretched over the entire height of the Tower located in ^Smichov2, Prague, we are suspended between the reduced scale of the body and the over-dimensioning of the city. We are witnessing a detachment of the architectural scale from the MACRO and MICRO concepts, simultaneously influenced by the visual determination as well as by the sensory perception. What meanings may hold the small or large graduations, when the only constant entity refers to the body and the only variable is the architecture?

In dealing with the order of colossal, we relive the early years of our life, when we could not climb a bench and we were living in a world too big for us.

Beyond the function of the representation of the monumental, we find a primary perception of the dimensions and of the uncertain materials. The visual influx of the fantastic from the last decades contributes to this condition where the body may be as large/small as a rabbit or a cup.

Juhani Pallasmaa notices that architecture should "tame the unlimited space and facilitate its occupation", while helping us "to tame the time and dwell in a temporal continuum"^3. Time and space becomes the determining couple in architecture, being preferred to the image; the built environment is a subjective translation of the personal connections with the environment as architecture re-determines itself according to the experienced perceptions. The reposition of the modern and contemporary human in space resumes the old philosophical questions related to house and body: the House as an inner dimension; the House as a projection of spatial experiences; the House - allegorically in corpore; the House - a frame in the scenery design perception, where the spaciousness is corporeally determined/assimilated. Throughout history, the theories put frequently in relationship the body and the space in a mathematical determination to the parts, with a specific representation of the proportions between the man and the built environment.

In the religious representations of the Middle Age, man appears as the dominant entity of the space/framework through an artifice of psychological manipulation, where the characters in the foreground are magnified according to their importance. The pictorial images apparently illustrate in "transaction" the architectural object and the characters at a much larger scale than they are in reality. Giotto di Bondo-ne reintroduces the spaciousness-setting, where the characters are inserted over the background-type passive architecture, as in his reference works in the upper Basilica of Assisi and Santa Croce, in Florence.

In the Legend of St. Francis - the Miracle of Crucifixes, Giotto amplifies the human proportion in the house, minimizing the importance of the architectural fra-mework. We find a direct relationship of subordination in Ognissanti Madonna, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena (c. 1310). We find a similar phrase in terms of the body-house in the works of Ambrogio Lorenzetti, for instance, in Effects of Bad Government in the^City4, (1337-' 39).

In Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative^Eye5, Rudolf Arnheim remarks the particular typology of representation: the represented constructions are being clipped (cut off) while architecture remains a body layer with an unique contextual role - "The Invention of the child endures throughout the ages, so that even in the very realistic art of Dürer or Altdorfer, the Holy Family houses in a building without the front wall, which is camouflaged in a non-persuasive way as a collapsed wreck".

Architectural representations evolve to-wards Renaissance and Baroque, bringing man to his proper scale and integrating him into space as a constituent part. The House, as a three-dimensional space, begins to develop in the representation as a corporeal projection in terms of anthropometry. Following the tradition initiated by Vitruvius in the 1st century B.C., in the 15th century, man has become the complete measure of the universe, through the work of Leone Battista ^Alberti6. On the one hand, he is Leonardo da Vinci's universal man - the Vitruvian Man - in 1490, the perfect man; on the other hand, he is the model of symmetry and proportions in Mary Shelley's movie Frankenstein. The man is behind the plan type geometry in Renaissance and becomes once again, in 1948 and 1955, Le Corbusier's Modulor, the anthropometric unit of things. In particular, we note the focus of Leonardo da Vinci beyond adjusting the formulae of Vitruvius and Alberti, the double framing of man in a circle and a square - two different centers of the body "size/magnitude" and "gravity", two distinct architectural ^{relationships7}. The magnitude depends upon space occupation, contrary to the gravity that places the body in an indestructible relationship with the horizontal plane. Not incidentally, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in The Little^Prince8 described the position opposite to home through the first attribute of space-size "at home is so tight" - although it was on the infinite, horizontal surface of the B621 asteroid. The same reduced three-dimensionality was metaphorically illustated by the Tree Man in the three painting set The Garden Of ^Eden9. Hieronymus Bosch was interpreting the belly both as inclusion relation and as tortionary aaggression, reminding such the torture mecanisms used in Middle - Ages the bronze taurus -, respectively, the oversized birdcage.

The advertising campaign for Lavazza in 2011, in a game of the commercial image that speculates the size according to its importance, approaches the scaled character of Lewis Carroll (Alice) as a Vitruvian Man, inscribed in a cup. In an iconic interpretation, the spatial subordination is the measure of all things. The Vitruvian Man is reinterpreted in the originar sense of geometry; it is the measure of things that change their substance according to him. The whole campaign rests on this game of human scale, following the trend set by other advertising versions that update the fantastic world of "Alice in Wonderland", for instance: the column signed by Annie Leibovitz for Vogue US, in December 2003.

In 1865, in Alice's Adventures in^Wonderland10, What Alice Found^There11 and Through the^{Looking-Glass12}, Lewis Carroll sees the main character growing and shrinking, having a fantastic dimension, related to the architectural spaciousness (real plan). The ratio body-scale appears in a typical stance in the imaginary, where - in the context of growth - the real body relates to a form of the House. The optical shift produced at the end of the 19th century is determined by his fascination for curiosities, as we note in the works of Joseph Cornell, that include architecture in miniature worlds: Pink Palace (1946-'48), Setting for a Fairy Tale, (1942). The illustrations, signed Maggie Taylor for the Modern book Gallery edition of Alice's Adventures in^Wonderland13, retrace as a background the typology of the Victorian house that is to be found in almost all film adaptations after Lewis Carroll. The dark atmosphere of the rigid house folds on the dark interiors in Antony ^House14, built at the beginning of the 18th century, the location of the filming of Alice in Wonderland, directed by Tim ^Burton15. With deep roots in the 19th century (Lewis Carroll), the cinematography, in its horror productions, usually sees dollhouses most frequently in their originate form, as Victorian house forms. The visual hint incorporates the unconscious fear of man that cannot find his place in the world, for whom the scale of things changes alongside with his growing up process. In the context of distortions of the body, often as a result of growth, the authentic architectural space becomes tight, lacking spaciousness. In 1920, Le Corbusier brought in architecture the scale of the sleeping wagon as the proper scale for the necessary, sufficient, hygienic housing, a manifesto of modernism, of the minimal Interior. In his designs we can perceive a fragmentation, a scrimmage of the repetitive elements that must fit into a space, in a frame(The Fall of Barcelona-Chute de Barcelone, 1939/1960). The Modulor, as the inner scale of things, determines one of the real conflicts of architecture that does not make the difference between the minimal scale and the comfortable scale in the Living Unit at ^Marseilles16 in 1952. In an earlier vision, in the Weissenhof ^Complex17 from Stuttgart, in 1927, Le Corbusier interpreted the compressed function as a visual artifice of spatial expansion. By minimizing the "useless" space, the bedroom was reduced to a mobile unit that could be folded, while the living space was amplified. A number of examples from the contemporary architecture speculate the tight space as being essential, necessary. In the archetypal House vision, MVRDV designs the interiors of social housing as having a minimal widening. The entire Didden ^Village18 dwelling in Rotterdam, Netherland (2002-2006), works on the principle of the compressed space, the idea being representatively illustrated in children's bedrooms. The children's room materializes the "tight" space as an extension to the sleeping place. The bedroom used by the little ones becomes a small box, the oversized window acts as a trap door that gives onto the roof. In the context of the spatial imaginary of the body-house couple, Alice in Wonderland is the reference that describes the growing up as an aggressive process in space, where the built environment becomes small. The novel, and subsequently the film version directed by Tim Burton, develops archetypal architectural images, later replayed by Guillermo del Toro in El Laberinto del^Fauno19 . As I have previously mentioned, the architectural imaginary projection comprises, most of the times, its own corporeal perception as a spatially subjective reflection of one's position in the built world. The House does not appear in the Alice in Wonderland as the main character, but it is the environment where the fantastic is introduced by the couple body-house. The story starts with the growing and shrinking of the little girl in the inner space, a room that is the distortion of the common perception about the human scale. In 1955, the psychiatrist John Todd remarks the "imaginary" changes of the perception - visual, auditory, tactile - described by Lewis Carroll as being more than a spatial illusion.

Remember that the writer was suffering from migraines and he was familiar with the psychiatric interpretation of perception disorders. AIWS syndrome (Alice in Wonder Land) describes the psychiatric disorder by the double alteration of perception, both corporeal and visual, as the scale of objects/limbs modifies. The distorted corporeal image, the erroneous perception of the various parts of the body, the oversized hands and head frequently accompanied by the loss of sense of time mentioned by John Todd and Lewis Carroll, are associated with the state of spatial and psychological discomfort. In the mid-20th century, the Alice in Wonderland myth is designed on purpose from psychedelic perspectives in black and white cinematography and photography; we refer, in particular, to the 1966 film version of director Jonathan ^Miller20. The influence is manifested as a definite visual preference, amid the experiments in photography and literature of the time: Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley, Psychedelic Experience by Timothy Francis Leary, The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The architectural vision, as it will be redesigned by director Tim Burton in 2010, is that of the Victorian house seen as a space dominated by chiaroscuro, it is a world of photographic experiments, a display of curiosities.

In terms of the House, the inner space is seen in Miller's film as a prison, a box that cuddles imperceptibly around the child that grows and no longer sees the surrounding world with the eyes of innocence.

Scott Thill, in Bright Lights Film Journal, wrote: "In his assured hands, Alice in Wonderland is not merely a fantastical tale of caterpillars, mice, and bloodthirsty queens looking to off some heads, but rather a journey of self-realization and maturation for a young British girl locked in a Victorian nightmare filled with, [...]adults executing matters of consequence...."^21. The director's interpretation sends to the change of scale, which operates alongside with Alice's growth: "The house-prison shadows begin to close around the growing child, and it seems to me that was exactly what Dodgson was thinking when he described the two adventures of Alice, one in the Mirror Land, the other in Wonderland"^22. In the context of changes in perception, we are witnessing an atypical dynamics: the time-impossible space crossings are outdated by new roadways-crossings through the looking glass, by the permeability of the materials, by the spatial changing of the built architecture according to the artifices of the perspective (visible in the film industry). One of the typical successions in the Alice in Wonderland plot is abandonment of the space. The interior does not increase simultaneously and does not change their determined reports, while retaining the real appearance and the scale of the objects and the furniture. The House becomes a pointless box and, as a result, the architecture ceases to bear the body that can no longer dwell in it, directing it towards new milestones of reality. Apparently antithetical to the world of Alice, the universe asteroid B621 where the Little Prince lives is too tight, is described by the spatial attributes of the built frame, although, paradoxically, there is no house on the new planet, it is just "home". "Where's "home to you"? [...] The little Prince utter then with much seriousness: - It's nothing. In my home it's so tight. And, a slight melancholy, he added: -Where the sheep see with your eyes can't get too far..."²³ The story of the Little Prince about his childhood, innocence and solitude starts from the visible appearances of ^{representation24} and speaks about a type of clarity typical for the childhood to perceive the world and relate to others, to approach the space, to identify with the objects. The difference between House and Home, as described by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, is interpreted as the exclusion of the built shell; the home becomes the owned space, marked, in an almost originate sense by the daily activities. The universe of ^B62125 asteroid is focused, "tight", described paradoxically through spatial attributes. Little Prince brings the existential architectural space at a minimum abstract, symbolic. The space, although opened, has the "Privacy" proper to the singular, to the unrequited space that belongs to a single person. The spaciousness conditioned by the dimensions of the body for the purposes of constraint is a distinctive category, formally defined by the couple container- content. The more than enough unlimited unlimited space of Little Prince and the insufficient one of Alice in Wonderland, both tailored by the measure of man, are radical depictions of the corporeal-spatial imaginary which reflects the architectural projection through the prism of inner moods. The House is interpreted as a materialization of one's personal limitations, a reinterpretation of Heidegger's Dasein. It is the originating frame the body comes into contact with, in a privileged sensory perception, the tight House whose awareness is amplified by the spatial constraint. Man, as the scale of things, changes his substantiality reported to the architectural environment in Alice in Wonderland, becoming the plot line for the fantastic dimension. Symbolically, he overcomes the measure of the things that may no longer fit him, the world becomes too small - the issue of the contemporary perception in progression. The material room, that is surpassed, is no longer subject to human scale; it does not increase within the meaning of the Modulor, it does not explode or break down; it merely becomes insufficient, limited for the purposes of constraint. The fantastic dimension is given by the visual difference between the frame and the content - Alice grows expanding in a room - in the end, denying the determination of the construction. The House becomes too small to include both the body and its aspirations. Complementary, the architectural space becomes a tactile, haptic frame, where the body becomes overly-sensitive in front of its limits. "Soon her eye fell on a little glass box that was lying under the table: she opened it, and found in it a very small cake, on which the words "EAT ME" were beautifully marked in currants. "Well, I'll eat it", said Alice, "and if it makes me grow larger, I can reach the key; and if it makes me grow smaller, I can creep under the door: so either way I'll get into the garden, and I don't care which happens!"^26""27

** Maggie Taylor(born 1961) is a photo-grapher and digital artist, settled in Gai-nesville, Florida, United States. Her specific perspective expressed in photo-montage have strong surrealistic influences developed over a double major in Philosophy (Yale 1983) and Photography (University of Florida 1987). The works can be found in various collec-tions including: The Art Museum, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, The Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ, The Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, The Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, AL, Musée de la Photographie, Charleroi, Belgium; Museet for Fotokunst, Odense, Denmark, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, NationsBank, Charlotte, NC, and the Prudential Insurance Company, Newark, NJ, etc. www.maggietaylor.comwww.maggietaylor.com

1. Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, illustrations: John Tenn, Macmillan,1865, PDFreeBooks.org.

2. Jean Nouvel, Golden Angel Tower, Prague, 2000. Jean Nouvel, specula-ting the local folklore, embedded the guardian angel image on the building corner facade looking over the river Vltava and Vysehrad ruins. The reproduction depicts the actor Bruno Ganz, the "angel" of the Wings of Desire movie, by Wim Wenders, 1987. Critically perceived in terms of scale, materials and iconography, the building has proposed the unification of four existing buildings under a large curtain, with a height of 32.5 m.

3. Juhani Pallasmaa - The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. West Sussex: Academy Press; 2nd edition, U.K., 2005.

4. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Effetti del Buon Governo in città, 1338-1339, Sala della Pace, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena.

5. Rudolf Arnheim - Art and Visual Perception. O psihologie a la văzului creatorului, 2nd edition, translation: Florin Ionescu, Polirom, București, 2011, p. 198.

6. Alberti, Leon Battista - On the Art of Building. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1991.

7. cf. Keele apud Michael John Gorman - STS 102: "Leonardo: Science, Technology, and Art", Stanford University, accessed: 05.12.2011 - http://leonardodavinci.stanford.edu

/submissions/clabaugh/history/leonardo.html

8. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300771h.html, accessed: 02.03.2012.

9. Hieronymus Bosch, The garden of Earthly delights, or The Millennium, oil on wood, triptych, 220×389cm, 1503-1504, Prado Museum, Madrid.

10. Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, illustrations: John Tenn, Macmillan, 1865, PDFreeBooks.org; Carroll, Lewis - Alice in Wonderland, translation: Elisabeta Gălățeanu, illustrations: Mabel Lucie Attwell. București: Editura Tineretului, 1958.

11. Lewis Carroll - What Alice Found There, illustrations: John Tenn, Macmillan, 1871, PDFreeBooks.org.

12. Lewis Carroll - Through the Looking-Glass, illustrations: John Tenn, Macmillan, 1871, PDFreeBooks.org.

13. Maggie Taylor illustrations for Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, author: Lewis Carroll, Modernbook Gallery, Palo Alto, 2008.

14. Antony Estate, Torpoint, Cornwall, PL11 2QA; early 18th century. Peisagistic resort signed by Reginald Pole Carew, Humphry Repton (c. 1790), accessed: 03.02.2012 -http://www.gardensofcornwall.com/outdoor-kids/antony-house-and-garden-p133063

15.Alice in Wonderland, directed: Tim Burton, screenplay: Linda Woolverton, after novels by Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 1865, and Through the Looking-Glass, 1871, production: Walt Disney Pictures, Roth Films, Team Todd, Zanuck Company, 2010.

16. Le Corbusier - Unité d'habitation, Cité Radieuse - Marseilles, France, 1952.

17 Le Corbusier, Complex Weissenhof, Stuttgart, 1927.

18. MVRDV, Didden Village, Rotterdam, Netherlands, 2002-2006.

19. El Laberinto del Fauno, directed, screenplay: Guillermo del Toro, coproduction: Estudios Picasso, Tequila Gang, Esperanto Filmoj, in association with: Sententia Entertainment, Telecinco, OMM; 2006;

20. Alice in Wonderland, director: Jonathan Miller, production: BBC, Jonathan Miller. Screenplay Jonathan Miller, after a Lewis Carroll novel, 1966.

21. Scott Thill - Bright Lights Film Journal, November 2003 | Issue 42, http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/42/alice.php, accessed 01.02.2011;

22. Jonathan Miller, apud Scott Thill, Bright Lights Film Journal, November 2003 | Issue 42, http://brightlightsfilm.com/42/alice.php, accessed: 02.03.2012.

23. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300771h.html, accessed: 02.03.2012.

24. The irony in the introduction of the book, the Boa snake representation parable, refers to the author's own experience, respectively youth failed studies in architecture.

25."The little prince's home planet is the asteroid B612ˮ- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - Le Petit Prince, http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300771h.html, accessed: 02.03.2012.

26. Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, illustrations: John Tenn, Macmillan,1865, PDFreeBooks.org.

Alberti, Leon Battista Alberti - On the Art of Building. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1991.

Arnheim, Rudolf - Art and Visual perception. A psycology of creative sight. Translation: Ionescu, Florin. Bucharest; Meridiane Printing House, 1979.

Carroll, Lewis - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, illustrations: John Tenn, Macmillan, 1865, PDFreeBooks.org.

Carroll, Lewis - Alice in Wonderland, translation: Gălățeanu Elisabeta, illustrations: Mabel Lucie Attwell. Bucharest: Youth Printing House, 1958.

Carroll, Lewis - What Alice Found There, illustrations: John Tenn, Macmillan, PDFreeBooks.org, 1871.

Carroll, Lewis - Through the Looking-Glass, illustrations: John Tenn, Macmillan, PDFreeBooks.org, 1871.

Crișan, Ana Maria - The Anagram of the Imaginary Architecture. Metamorphosis - Revaluing the Time Paradigm in Architecture, Phd thesis, 2012.

Pallasmaa, Juhani - The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. West Sussex: Academy Press; 2nd edition, U.K., 2005.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300771h.html, accessed: 02.03.2012.

Thill, Scott - Bright Lights Film Journal, November 2003 | Issue 42, http://brightlightsfilm.com/ 42/alice.php, accessed: 02.03.2012.