Tota Mulier in Utero - The Woman is a Womb

The site of the project is the female body as a place. The woman as a place origins in the chora (derived from the Greek word for both womb and space/place). The chora creates ‘unformed amorphous origin of all morphology…transmuted by/for analogy into a circus and a projection screen, a theatre for fantasies.’ (³) The woman’s womb is the inner frame that contextualises the surface image of the foetus. The womb is the first ever environment where we originate from, where we take shape before we even gain consciousness or position within society, culture or state.

The project would like to raise questions about the womb as a spatiality and whether it represents a negative space which is at once limitless and claustrophobic, an inescapable but unknowable point of
origin. Or whether is the ultimate space, ‘the federal reserve cave’? (⁴)

The pregnant female body becomes the site for the architectural project with its all physiological, psychological, emotional and material transformations. (Fig. 1)

The mother can feel constant tumult as the baby hiccups, flexes her body and tests with elbows, knees and feet the limits of her inner space. The baby becomes a bulky, impertinent, spirited presence within the maternal-feminine body, simultaneously an integral part of her and an independent entity.

The project would like to expand the limited metaphors used to illustrate pregnancy. The author would like to find a highly spatial language which would allow the project to evolve into a tangible quality.

In order to achieve more immaterial, metaphysical approach to the area of interest the female body as a place would be observed beyond the pregnancy. The woman as a place, as an envelope and container and the way the maternal-feminine remains a place separated from its own place, hence re-envelopes herself within herself twice – as a woman and as a mother. The female body would be witnessed as a served place where the man and the woman are able to stay contained/enveloped. A place which transmits itself from one envelope to another, modifying itself moment by moment. The woman as a habitat for both matter and nature. The mother-innkeeper as an environment and the foetus as its occupant.