The first book to survey the use of performance by architects, Bodybuilding proposes a new counter-canon of building innovation

Looking past the unbuilt utopian projects of the modernists or the postwar avant-garde, the authors of Bodybuilding delve into actually produced works of architecture fortified by performance: Arata Isozaki’s dancing robot-buildings at Osaka Expo ’70, Charles Moore’s live-TV design sessions or Toyo Ito’s staged dioramas for department stores. Since the financial crisis of 2008, which sent construction rates plummeting, young architects have embraced performance more explicitly―and Bodybuilding grounds these new practices within a century of efforts to construct or critique architecture via performers’ movements and actions. Bodybuilding features more than 30 case studies, plus rare archival documentation of actions by Ugo La Pietra, Lawrence and Anna Halprin, Lina Bo Bardi and others. The book also includes essays on Ricardo Bofill’s theatrical stagings in unsold apartments; Coop Himmelblau’s development of bio-activated interactive objects; and Mabel O. Wilson and Bryony Roberts’ production of parades to undermine architecture’s racist legacies.