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Published within half a century from each other, French manual The Corset Through the Ages (1893) written by Ernest Léoty and the Swedish housing investigation The Family that Outgrows its Home (1941) led by social researcher Brita Åkerman constituted two landmarks of the sexo-political discourses for the construction of the sexualized body and the regulation of gender and family politics. While the French corsetier presented the stay as a technological and social mold of the feminine body that had its routes in antiquity, Åkerman was amassing one of the most thorough collections of knowledge on residential spaces in order to penetrate and modify daily life and social relations within the Swedish domestic realm.

This article juxtaposes two apparatuses external to the body —the corset of the Victorian period and the Swedish research-based domestic space of the postwar years— that were aimed at regulating the feminine and masculine anatomy and its movements, imposed physical and sexual literacy and instigated procreative conducts. By looking into the scientific discourses governing each mechanism, their specific technologies and the instructional knowledge designed to deploy them, this study seeks to chart how orthopedic politics developed during the 19th and 20th century through disciplinary exoskeletons have helped to invent, map out and fix the somatic fictions of sexual epistemology that constituted the basis of the biopolitical modern regime.

Through a close reading of garment patterns, housing plans, scientific texts, how-to manuals and usage guidelines, the article discusses Foucauldian models of biopolitical power and the administering of life as a tool for architectural analyses. Based on this proposition, it reflects on the centrality of sex and sexuality in modern ortho-architectural apparatuses and rises critical questions about their intervention into the biological and social structure of our contemporary society.

Rather than confirm existing identities and conventions, we believe architecture can be most effective when it allows us to become some- thing else by imagining and fabricating alternative models of inter- action towards a better future. In that sense architecture is one of the most powerful creative disciplines of world-making available.

La Unidad Vecinal de El Taray (1962-1964) fue encargada por la Cooperativa Pío XII para un escarpado solar en la cara norte de la ciudadela de Segovia. Por su organización alrededor de espacios colectivos, así como por sus galerías abiertas y conexiones aéreas, el conjunto ha sido relacionado con el Neobrutalismo y las teorías del Team 10. Sin embargo, más allá de las etiquetas, puede decirse que El Taray es consecuencia de una imperiosa necesidad de adaptación a la topografía, a los requerimientos funcionales y a la escasez de recursos. Todas estas condiciones pondrán a prueba la inventiva del joven Aracil hasta producir un buen número de avanzadas soluciones que sesenta años más tarde aún dan cuenta de su frescura y pertinencia. De entre ellas destaca su esquema socioespacial, un sofisticado tejido de circulaciones y significados ambiguos que hacen que el conjunto de viviendas se difumine entre lo exterior y lo interior, lo lejano y lo cercano, lo colectivo y lo individual. El presente artículo pretende superar la tradicional lectura del caso desde la clasificación tipológica o la asimilación a corrientes arquitectónicas coetáneas para ofrecer una actualización crítica que pone el acento en su condición liminal como clave de su sostenibilidad social, material y urbana. Para ello lo vincula al presente analizándolo desde la idea de sistema habitable que extiende su influencia a la comunidad que lo habita y al contexto en el que se inserta.

The Neighbourhood Unit of El Taray (Segovia, 1962-1964) was commissioned by the Cooperative Pius XII for an sloped site on the north-east edge of the citadel of Segovia. Given its fragmented layout around collective spaces as well as the way it makes use of aerial connections and galleries, the complex has been typically linked with the British Neobrutalism and the experiences of Team 10. However, beyond its adherence to a certain movement, we can state that El Taray is the consequence of a pressing need for adaptation to topography, to functional requirements and to material scarcity. These conditions will challenge the creativity of the young Aracil motivating him to devise a good number of advanced design solutions that sixty years later still prove their freshness and relevance. Notable among these is its socio-spatial scheme, an intricate network of significances and circulations that blurs the housing complex between the exterior and the interior, the distant and the close or the collective and the individual. This paper seeks to overcome the traditional reading of El Taray —from the idea of typology or the assimilation to contemporary architectural movements— to present a critical update that emphasizes its liminal condition as key for its social, material and urban sustainability. To this end, El Taray is linked to the present by being analysed from the notion of habitable system that spreads its influence to the community that lives in it and to the context in which it is inserted.