Ilayda Tank

The Architecture of Anorexia

The oscillation between starvation and gorging exists as a gravitational pull within us , manifesting as eating disorders . Our bodies have become buildings meant to be torn down once inhabitable, or undeserving of its residents. The architecture of anorexia is constructed on this one tenet of our economy, deservance. Another capitalist mantra, “sing for your supper”, bears the implication that, should a voice falter, the body must go to bed hungry. Once a voice wavers, and the thing – building or body – proves itself undeserving, it must relinquish all claims to space in the modern landscape. This dynamic emerges from the contemporary notion of space which, which for the modern subject, exists solely in a capitalist context of worth. Buildings of worth assume space our this landscape, and the self-imposed starvation by its people mimics the de-construction – or clearing of space – of “un-worthy” buildings, irrespective of any intrinsic value they may have to the people.

Prophet Muhammad
“Whoever breaks a fast during Ramadan without an allowance or illness, even if he fasted for the rest of his life, it would not make up for it.”
(Hadith: al-Tirmidhi)

There is a strong argument that capitalism has developed into a faith, and can no longer simply be described as an economic order. Our religion lies in the market, our rituals in labour, and our sins in failure to produce or consume. If we understand capitalism as a religion, and not an ideology, the tradition of disordered eating is akin to an act of worship. But unlike Christianity or Islam, Capitalism offers its believers no forgiveness. There exists no promised land, only the promise of ever-lasting expansion: a continuum of spatial colonization. Another area this religious devotion manifests itself is within the climate crisis, and more specifically, our inability to grasp our fate. Historically, we have been conditioned to expect punishment for our sins. However, with capitalism as a religion, the practice of consumption will never be regarded as such. Therefore climate change can never truly be real in the modern mind.

The God of capitalism is starvation Himself; and this self-inflicted rite of passage serves as a symbol of loyalty to, as Simon and Garfunkel would have it, “the Neon God we made”. In feudal times, following the Black Death, the proletariat experienced a sudden agency on account of the barren landscape, the sheer space that death allowed meant that there was a shortage of people, not land. Today, the opposite is true. Contemporary architecture, in its nature, channels movement and organizes bodies: funneling us through space, directing us toward entrances and exits often grossly disproportionate to our bodily size. Our embodiment suffers a void, as we become fragmented minds in bodies adrift.

Philosophically, there is a sense in which spatial voids are vital for a people to transcend. A blank page. The absence of a pre-ordained meaning, such as the funneled movement architecture dictates, allows us to control our own mobility. The decades following the Black Death were a lost opportunity for emancipation; the world transitioned, or rather a war was waged in favor of, the capitalist order. Its architecture regards voids as lost capital, whose space must be optimized.

In many ways, these building’s architecture reflects Nietzsche’s True World Theory, where we model our behavior on an ‘ultimate reality’, an ideal separate from human perception and existence. Even Scandinavian interior-design represents (what I deem) is an unhealthy obsession with cleanliness that never truly left the European collective consciousness. Aspirational realities are an embedded tradition within architecture, a strong state is reflected in brutalism, while capitalist vascular architecture is, as coined by Jesse Seegers, meant to convey a “conspicuous consumption”. Architecture is ambient in its coercion. It is, like the human body, an unavoidable art form. While you have the choice to engage with a painting or song, our buildings, like the body we are born in, are not something we can consent to. It constructs our spatial experiences, during which architects have constructed a dome of disorders. Grand buildings, and their brutal, unapologetic colonization of public space is a style purposefully “presented in monumental and dominant scale in its physical context”. This is a truth architects – and Nazis – instrumentalised. The latter’s “architecture was renowned for their “upper, richly decorated zones (…) frequently used to emphasize the irrelevance of a small man before the superiors.” Bodies are experienced as authoritarian in the totality of grandness. The skewed body-building dialectic that is so prevalent in cosmopolitan cities mirrors Karl Marx’s warnings of ‘the bodies alienation under capitalism’. However, I would argue that – not only are we alienated by our “larger than life architecture” – we actively model our consumption of food on its spatial understanding.

John Vervaeke describes meaning as the desire to connect with something we “wish to exist, even when we do not”. In pre-capitalist times, death was regarded as a natural process, not the disruption it has come to represent. He identifies three components of meaning: coherence, significance, and meaning. Buildings with clear social or spiritual purpose, like a church or a local AA meeting space, serve this longing. But once they fail to turn a profit, once they are deemed “worthless” by the noen god we made, they must be torn down, replaced, all to make space for a worthier cause. Body-mass is now regarded in the same way. Once we are worthless, we no longer have claims to space: so we must starve. In traditional religions, bread was eaten to atone for sin. Today’s faith demands its rejection, we are compelled to throw it up.

Should meaning be derived from something that outlives us, cremation is another painful reminder of capitalist spatial politics. Neither our bodies nor our building will remain once we die. For what is our worth without its capital-producing potential?

However, one could take this argument and spin it. The rejection of expansion for expansion’s sake, an agent’s withdrawal of agency, challenges the logic of architecture, and capitalism. Thus, aanorexia may actually be quite counter-cultural. The sense of control inspired in anorexia may be attributed to the re-claiming of agency through the renunciation of space as an end to itself. Controlling our size expresses a bodily sovereignty and thus anorexia becomes the manner of reclaiming the means of production: our bodies. Essentially, the stubborn insistence to self-express through self-inflicted oppression. Is it really worth it?