ABSTRACT
Architects are increasingly confronted by the ambiguity of a new materiality, and a reconsideration of the conceptual technology of Baroque body agents which aided an architect's imagination by incorporating sensation, movement and materiality in a cohesive metaphysical project heightens the possibilities for the material imagination to play an expanded role in today's designs. Taking Virginia Woolfs Orlando as a literary model, this chapter incorporates a collection of fictional narratives from the viewpoint of a 579-year-old body agent who has witnessed the historic Baroque era referred to here as Putto_1435. With their specific, empathetic and catalytic qualities, body agents aid designer's material imaginations: their performance bypasses qualitative neutrality by encouraging wonder in an adventure in perception. The fused nylon powder that results from the SLS process, a corollary of the digital design image, is without overt, sensual qualities, but Putto_1435s presence is an insistent catalyst to adventurously explore and imagine possible relationships between particular bodies and new materialities.
