If you've ever blushed at the veiny ridges of 8 Spruce Street, or wanted to trace the outer lip of the now shuttered design for the Tokyo Olympic Stadium, Tectr may be for you. The 18+, NSFW experimental dating/hookup game, designed by Silverstring Media, pairs users with architectural structures, from empty foyers to ramrod straight skyscrapers.

Submitted by Claris Cyarron to be featured as part of our special editorial focus on Sex, Tectr is, in the words of its creators, "a game about thirsty architecture, buildings that want you inside them. Find your matches, see if you're compatible, and hook up with some feisty real estate."

Compatible on Linux, Windows and OS X, Tectr is very much a playful experiment. Each user chooses an identity, such as "Building Inspector" or "Brutalist Scum," a gender (it/they is a valid choice), and then "yr junk," which can be "gorgeous" or "amazing," depending on your genital selection. The users then interact with building profiles, such as "Born Hard" or "Foyeur."

Users select the right icon for a match, the left icon for a pass. Each "structure" has its own version of erotic talk, integrating building puns with full-on descriptions of various sex acts. The users are provided with choices of pre-written dialogue that encourage various, er, outcomes. If flirting is successful, the program provides an address for a physical meet-up.

More conceptual frottage than hardcore satisfaction, Tectr was created in under 36 hours as part of a game-creation convention earlier this year. As created by a company that helps designers and developers flesh out and realize their gaming/storytelling ideas, Silverstring's Tectr seems most successful as a parody of the tacky reality of online hookup culture, while simultaneously trumpeting a bodily appreciation of architecture.

Here's Cyarron's description of Tectr:

Although the whole idea turns about the humorously surreal personification of buildings as sexual beings, Tectr is more than just a satirical look at contemporary dating apps and sexuality. First of all, Tectr is earnest erotica. It fell to me to do write the script and dialogue, and it was my first attempt ever at writing erotica; I wanted to do a good job of making it sexy. I was bit surprised by how readily, and in what ways, the settings and structures of our contemporary life readily eroticize themselves.

Of course, architecture is a vehicle for, and projection of, desires that have nothing to do with shelter. While reducing those desires to sexuality is crude and more than a bit Freudian, it turns out to be instructive, because it brings to the surface some of the desires for self-actualization that we project onto the built environment, as well as the ways the built environment has been used to project social pressure or desire onto us.I was a bit surprised by how readily, and in what ways, the settings and structures of our contemporary life readily eroticize themselves.

Another idea we tried to bring into & explore with Tectr was the notion that apps, social networks, and videogames – digital (but meaningfully inhabitable!) structures that we have created to serve our base desires – have a structure and a spatiality of their own that can be explored. We spent quite a while considering Tinder and its gayer, more forthright cousin Grindr as modern day houses of pleasure, and the spatially powerful left-or-right mechanism of traversal and choice. A hallway of valenced commitment and access to the right and a swift exit to the left. It may be flatter and more abstract but this architectural decision is at least as communicative, ideological, and transparently horny as Ledoux’s phallic floorplan.

For Ledoux, the building must always speak directly to its function. For the architects of Tinder, there are two kinds of people – those attractive enough to want to engage with, and those who are not. Two pools, spatialized and represented by their relative direction to your phone. Both structures of space-making are inflexible, oh-so-exploitable, and tragically representative products of their times. We hoped to encourage such thoughts by making the conversation between sex, app, and traditional architecture, between desire and space, as explicit as possible (pun most certainly intended).

Tectr was selected from an open call for submissions to be part of Archinect's special April 2016 theme, Sex. Interested in submitting your own work? Our current open call is focused on Help – find more info here.