Archinect - Features

Object Sexuality, or: the humans who fall in love with buildings

2016-05-18T12:39:00-04:00

I’m not sure how I first heard about “object sexuality,” the self-designated term employed by individuals who have sexual and romantic attraction to objects such as buildings. I think I Googled, “sexual attraction to buildings” since the theme for April was “Sex” and Archinect is an architecture website. I quickly fell into an internet wormhole.

Beatriz Colomina on "Playboy Architecture" and the masculine fantasy

2016-05-11T10:38:00-04:00

Playboy gets lip service as a leader in the sexual revolution, a vanguard publisher of emerging talent in fiction and interviews, and of course, a historic showcase for sexy ladies. While the publication has since lost its centerfolds, it is now being celebrated for its role in architecture and design – establishing both of those fields as firmly within the Playboy’s domain. Now on display at the Elmhurst Art Museum, “Playboy Architecture: 1953-1979” presents photos, films, architectural models and archival issues that illustrate how the ruling designs of the era fueled Playboy’s masculine fantasy, and the other way around.

Getting in the mood for One-Night Stand LA #2: the Rendezvous

2016-04-30T11:29:00-04:00

One balmy Los Angeles night last spring, throngs of architecture aficionados descended on a dingbat motel in the MacArthur Park area for what was billed, alongside amatory promotional material, as a "One-Night Stand for Art and Architecture." For a single evening, the trysting place was transformed into a series of distinct, room-size installations rendered with 3D-mapped projections, robotics, or simple 2x4’s. On May 14 of this year, the project will be reprised in the same location but with different curators and a new roster of participants. I chatted with the organizers to get the low down on what to expect from One-Night Stand LA: the Rendezvous.

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.