"Sometimes,” wrote Charles Lindbergh in his 1953 flight memoir, The Spirit of St. Louis, “the world from above seems too beautiful, too wonderful, too distant for human eyes to see.”
And sometimes, it looks like a bunch of genitals.
— slate.com
4 Comments
When i was in high school, maybe earlier, the girls would giggle and everything was a phallic symbol. They just discovered that. So when a writer from SLATE giggles her piece on the keyboard ( masturbating? ) I see just how dumb internet journalism can be.
There are more sophisticated ways of finding sexual imagery in forms and not by accident. Adrian Stokes later writings under the influence of psychologist Hannah Segal describes visual expression in terms of smoothness of breasts, phallic symbolism, wombs and vaginas. The symbolism is a connection to our basic needs and relationships expressed in tactile surfaces.
Obviously Glen Small's Biosphere is made that way on purpose, it's a philosophical choice of his that is motivated aesthetically from a feel and touchy sensuality found in all his forms. As if the sexual nature of nature and humankind needs to be explicit.. Ethically Small thinks that sex would make a better and more human world. So do alot of of artists. writers. No so much architects.
D H Lawrence comes to my thoughts.
Like D H Lawrence works and his symbolisms that evolve towards a similar aesthetic / ethic. I am thinking of his neglected novel St. Mawr., written while Lawrence was living in Taos, New Mexico. A sort of sexual transcendence can happen where mankind and nature come together as one.
Freudian Slip?
But the bigger problem is that I'm sure there were tons of people who had noticed it before the design was finalized. Why didn't anyone speak up? The case of Emperor's New Clothes is too prevalent in the design industry.
I can just picture a bunch of 20-something intern at the firm giggling, "Looks like a fanny! Haha! OK, play along. I don't care, they don't pay me shit." These CAD monkeys probably just kept pushing them to look more and more like genitals.
Which goes back to the lesson of the Frank Lloyd Wright situation - always be nice to your staff.
"Good afternoon, sports fans. We are coming to you live from Vagina Stadium..." does have a certain ring to it.
Does anyone else see the difference between an unintended visual pun and a real psych-emotional connect to nature and eros. There is not enough sex designed into architecture. The rigid posturing & posing by architects gives way to banal, boring, impotent self expressions. It is design crime. Where is the sexual intellectual when we need 'em.
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