Sex and Buildings

Modern Architecture and the Sexual Revolution

Richard J. Williams

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781780231044
• eBook ISBN:
  9781780231419
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

How, over the last century, have changing ideas of the body and sexuality influenced the design of buildings? And how, in turn, can certain structures influence the bodies within them? We invariably think of towers as phallic, but there are countless other ways buildings connote sex. The built environment provides the framework for our sexual lives; places and structures can act as reminders of our sexual histories; interior design can both embody and trigger erotic fantasies. Since Freud, Western societies have given sex an unprecedented centrality in public and private lives. The relationship between sex and buildings matters now more than ever. 

Part architectural history, part cultural analysis and part travelogue, Sex and Buildings explores how sexual attitudes appear in architecture. It asks what a sexually progressive architecture might look like – and how we understand some architectures as repressive. In search of the revolutionary, the enlightened and the buttoned-up, this book tours California’s modernist houses, the Playboy Mansion, Brazilian love hotels, 1960s communes and the architecture of Mad Men. Their relationship to evolving attitudes towards the family, women and homosexuality is assessed along the way, as well as the sexual theories of Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Reich, Betty Friedan, Michel Foucault, Esther Perel and many others.

A thought-provoking and highly readable look at a period of extraordinary social change coupled with aesthetic invention, Sex and Buildings offers a unique perspective on the buildings that surround us.

To hear the Times Higher Education book podcast with Richard J. Williams please click here.

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