Sex and Buildings

Modern Architecture and the Sexual Revolution

Richard J. Williams

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781780231419
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Massive modern skyscrapers, obelisks, towers—all are structures that, thanks to their phallic shape, are often associated with sex. But other buildings are more subtly connected, as they provide the frameworks for our sexual lives and act as reminders of our sexual memories. This relationship between sex and buildings mattered more than ever in the United States and Europe during the turbulent twentieth century, when a culture of unprecedented sexual frankness and tolerance emerged and came to dominate many aspects of public life. Part architectural history, part cultural history, and part travelogue, Sex and Buildings explores how progressive sexual attitudes manifest themselvesin architecture, asking what progressive sexuality might look like architecturally and exploring the successes and failures of buildings' attemptsto reflect it. In search of structures that reflect the sexual mores of their inhabitants, Richard J. Williams visits modernist buildings in Southern California, the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, the Playboy Mansion in Chicago, the Seagram in New York, communes from the 1960s, and more. A fascinating and often funny look at a period of extraordinary social change coupled with aesthetic invention, Sex and Buildings will change the way we look at the buildings around us.

References

Introduction

1 E. Perel, Mating in Captivity: Sex, Lies and Domestic Bliss (London, 2007).

2 You have to imagine the word ‘sex’ spoken by an upper-class Scot.

3 S. Freud, The Penguin Freud Library, vol. VII: On Sexuality, trans. J. Strachey (London, 1991), pp. 101–11.

4 Richard J. Williams, The Anxious City: English Urbanism at the End of the Twentieth Century (London, 2004).

5 M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. R. Hurley (New York, 1990), vol. I.

6 J. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, 1990); C. Paglia, Sexual Personae (New York, 1992); R. Scruton, Sexual Desire, A Philosophical Investigation (London, 1994). There is unexpected commonality between Scruton and Foucault: both understand sex as primarily a social product, not a biological one.

7 H. Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 6 vols (Salt Lake City, UT, 2004).

8 Ibid., vol. VI, p. 3.

9 H. Havelock Ellis, The Task of Social Hygiene (Boston and New York, 1916).

10 A. Forel, The Sexual Question: A Scientific, Psychological, Hygienic and Sociological Study (New York, 1931), p. 13.

11 Ibid., p. 443: ‘sexual excesses in the country are more conformable to nature. Apart from marriage, we meet with concubinage, infidelity and sometimes prostitution, but these excesses are never widely spread in small places where everyone knows each other . . .’.

12 S. Zweig, The World of Yesterday (London, 1943), p. 77.

13 See account of Sitte and agoraphobia in A. Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2000), pp. 25–50.

14 M. Mead, Male and Female: A Study of the Sexes in a Changing World (London, 1949), pp. 325–41.

15 Ibid., p. 329.

16 A. C. Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia, 1948).

17 J. Gathorne-Hardy, Alfred Kinsey: Sex, The Measure of All Things (London, 1999); Kinsey, dir. B. Condon (American Zoetrope/Myriad Pictures, 2004).

18 Kinsey, Sexual Behavior, p. 607.

19 Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. I.

20 Ibid., vol. I, p. 3.

21 Ibid., vol. I, p. 28.

22 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (London, 1927), pp. 122–7.

23 Le Corbusier, The Modulor: A Harmonious Measure to the Human Scale, Universally Applicable to Architecture and Mechanics (Cambridge, MA, 1954).

24 This argument is developed in more detail in Williams, R. J., Brazil: Modern Architectures in History (London, 2009), pp. 63–94.

25 O. Niemeyer, As curvas do tempo (Rio de Janeiro, 1999).

26 R. Bofill, L’Architecture d’un Homme: Entretiens avec François Hébert-Stevens (Paris, 1978), p. 54.

27 Ibid.

28 R. Bofill and J.-L. André, Espaces d’une vie (Paris, 1989), p. 190.

29 ‘Walden 7 by Taller de Arquitectura, Ricardo Bofill’, ga Houses, 1 (1976), pp. 18–35.

30 Forel, Sexual Question, p. 448.

31 J. Engel, American Therapy: The Rise of Psychotherapy in the United States (New York, 2008).

32 Frasier (Grub Street Productions/Gramnet Productions/Paramount Network TV, 1993–2004).

33 W. H. Masters and V. E. Johnson, Human Sexual Response (Toronto and New York, 1966); S. Hite, The Hite Report: A National Study of Female Sexuality (New York, 1976).

34 L. V. Marks, Sexual Chemistry: A History of the Contraceptive Pill (New Haven, CT, and London, 2001), p. 193: ‘One woman, for instance, put the drug in her vagina, and another confused the term “oral” with “aural” and placed the pill in her ear.’

35 H. Gurley Brown, Sex and the Single Girl (New York, 1962); H. Gurley Brown, Sex and the Office (London, 1965).

36 Cosmopolitan, CLXXII/4 (April 1972), centrefold.

37 See E. Fraterrigo, Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America (New York, 2009); also C. Pitzulo, Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy (Chicago, 2011).

38 The People vs. Larry Flynt, dir. M. Forman (Phoenix Pictures, 1996).

39 L. Flynt, An Unseemly Man: My Life as a Pornographer, Pundit and Social Outcast (London, 1996).

40 C. Hakim, Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Cap...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• one The Care of the Body
• two Inside the Orgone Accumulator
• three Communal Living
• four Phallic Towers and Mad Men
• five Pornomodernism
• six The Hotel
• seven What Would a Feminist City Look Like?
• eight Queer and Other Spaces
• Epilogue
• References
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Photo Acknowledgements
• Index