Project named Urban Yoga is, by the words of it's author Ana Humljan, actually an architectural experiment intended to analyze space potential and the connection between human body, architectural structures and urban settings. This exploration has been documented by a series of photographs in which the author poses in a white bodysuit, striking various yoga positions in unlikely urban scenes. The photograph series has later resulted in a photo book.
In context of questioning how our bodies inhabit urban spaces, this project does not bring much novelty. For more than half of a century now we are able to witness a spectacle in which human body engages the built environment in a dynamic way based on improvisational thinking - skateboarding. Open to the experience, skateboarders have not only developed new ways of moving through space but blurred the lines between right and wrong in the form-function relationship. In the //All is fair in love an war// style. Seeing the city as a landscape instead of user-manual operated machine, opens that possibility for improvisation. The exchange between the user and architecture is not fixed but plastic, changeable and each time a little bit different.
This flexible relationship between architecture and program is explored at large by architects such as Tschumi and Koolhaas. Insisting in the first place on event and program, they use open structure theory and programmatic diagrams as tools to create an architectural framework that supports dynamic relationships between movement, program, and space.
These concepts are important because we now live in a complex environment that is highly activated and full of uncertainty. As architects we can offer guidelines in form of spatial configurations that hold the possibility for improvisation and offer kind of possibilities about which people didn't think before.
Still, architecture is a medium that is slow and it is important to know that, to solve a problem, ti isn't always necessary to have an "open structure" but an open mind.
