The Cancer Homunculus Part 2 Project 2021 Samuel Tan National University of Singapore | Singapore The Cancer Homunculus interrogates the alienated condition of the chronically ill body, specifically of cancer. Against the traditionally metaphorical instrumentalisation of the body in architecture, this project proposes an alternative model for alienated bodies that treats them literally as a condition concerning their disappearing agency. Internal to the body, cells begin to disobey their biological prerogative. External to the body, it is often innocently expressed in an over-enthusiastic offer of help from family and friends. Spatially, the struggle to claim agency can be thought of as a territorial tussle. Architecturally, the struggle does not limit itself to the traditional boundaries of building, appropriating even spaces of the home as newly contested ground both hostile and alienating.It is at this scale, between body and bedroom, that the project operates as an intervention. Conceived as a set of knitted ‘walls’, the enclosure reclaims the bedroom reconfigured for treatment. These walls act upon and react to the patient, her effect on them perceivable through the warping of the grain and grid of the knit. Ultimately, The Cancer Homunculus rejects architecture’s typical remits of intervention- as-building, insisting that comfort for alienated bodies must be designed like the bodies themselves— at scales slippery and ambiguous. Samuel Tan Tutor(s)