Archinect - Features

Tectr: Tinder for architecture?

2016-04-29T10:45:00-04:00

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.

The gimp room, the padded cell, the medical office: inside the world of Kink.com

2016-04-26T10:02:00-04:00

“If you do your job right then no one will notice,” it’s been said. There may be no better exemplar of this truism than the work that goes on behind the scenes of a porn film. In the heat of an onanistic moment, the last thing you want to think about is bad design. Yet, an adult film is very much a designed object – particularly when it comes to the elaborate structural and fantasy elements involved in BDSM and kink.

Screen/Print #41: "Family Planning" from Harvard Design Magazine

2016-04-22T09:45:00-04:00

It’s among the worst clichés of architectural writing: towers are phallic; stadiums (or just any project by a certain recently-deceased icon) are vulval. But what about when the architects themselves describe their project in genital terms? And, in particular, when they take inspiration not from some heroic idea of rigidity, but rather acceptance of a more prosaic state of flaccidity?

Transparent Motives: the ins and outs of sex-specific architecture

2016-04-15T08:20:00-04:00

If sex is the ultimate form of openness, then the architecture designed specifically to facilitate it could, up until recently anyway, be described as opaque. Even those more flagrant hot spots, like Emperor Nero’s Domus Aurea or Japan’s ubiquitous love hotels, tended to be built to obscure their purpose, at least from the outside. Indeed, it is only within the last few decades that the notion of sex as an activity that could be displayed, or at least not obscured, has come into a more public architectural vogue. Transparency, in its boundary blurring form, is a defining characteristic of architecture for sex.