Sex and Buildings

Sex and Buildings PDF Author: Richard J. Williams
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780231415
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
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 themselves in architecture, asking what progressive sexuality might look like architecturally and exploring the successes and failures of buildings' attempts to 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.

Sex and Buildings

Sex and Buildings PDF Author: Richard J. Williams
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780231415
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Get Book

Book Description
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 themselves in architecture, asking what progressive sexuality might look like architecturally and exploring the successes and failures of buildings' attempts to 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.

Building Sex

Building Sex PDF Author: Aaron Betsky
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Buildings have always been an expression of human sexuality. In this book, architecture critic and curator Aaron Betsky takes a look at the man-made world and concludes that it is just that: made by men and not women. The structure of buildings and the layout of cities in the modern world have almost always been determined by men, and the abstract and alien order of grids and columns that has resulted imprisons us in a way of living based on repression and, in some cases, oppression. By contrast, it is women who create the interior spaces within these man-created environments. Comfortable, beautiful, seductive, and logical, these interiors act as areas of escape, self-definition, and sometimes even revelation. Drawing on a wide range of architectural examples, from African mud huts to modern apartment complexes, Betsky explores what effects this division of architectural labor has had on our sensibilities and, indeed, on how we relate to one another as men and women. He believes that although it has always been thus, we do not have to live within this dichotomy between the exterior and the interior, the made and the lived, the masculine and the feminine, forever. It is possible, says Betsky, to create "spaces of liberation, spaces in which we can re-construct our selves and our world".

Sex of Architecture

Sex of Architecture PDF Author: Diana Agrest
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
This book brings together 24 provocative texts that collectively express the power and diversity of women's views on architecture today. This volume presents a dialogue among women historians, practitioners, theorists, and others concerned with critical issues in architecture and urbanism.

Pornotopia

Pornotopia PDF Author: Paul Preciado
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1942130260
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Published for the first time in 1953, Playboy was not only the first pornographic popular magazine in America; it also came to embody an entirely new lifestyle through the construction of a series of utopian multimedia spaces — from the Playboy Mansion and fictional Playboy’s Penthouse of 1959 to the Playboy Clubs and hotels appearing around the world in the 1960s. Simultaneously, the invention of the contraceptive pill provided access to a biochemical technique that separated (hetero) sexuality and reproduction. Addressing these concurrent cultural shifts, Paul Preciado investigates the strategic relationships between space, gender, and sexuality in popular sites related to the production and consumption of pornography that have tended to reside at the margins of traditional histories of architecture: bachelor pads, multimedia rotating beds, and design objects, among others. Combining historical perspectives with contemporary critical theory, gender and queer theory, porn studies, the history of technology, and a range of primary transdisciplinary sources — treatises on sexuality, medical and pharmaceutical handbooks, architecture journals, erotic magazines, building manuals, and novels — Pornotopia explores the use of architecture as a biopolitical technique for governing sexual relations and the production of gender in the postwar United States.

The Future of Architecture in 100 Buildings

The Future of Architecture in 100 Buildings PDF Author: Marc Kushner
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476784930
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
The founder of Architizer.com and practicing architect draws on his unique position at the crossroads of architecture and social media to highlight 100 important buildings that embody the future of architecture. We’re asking more of architecture than ever before; the response will define our future. A pavilion made from paper. A building that eats smog. An inflatable concert hall. A research lab that can walk through snow. We’re entering a new age in architecture—one where we expect our buildings to deliver far more than just shelter. We want buildings that inspire us while helping the environment; buildings that delight our senses while serving the needs of a community; buildings made possible both by new technology and repurposed materials. Like an architectural cabinet of wonders, this book collects the most innovative buildings of today and tomorrow. The buildings hail from all seven continents (to say nothing of other planets), offering a truly global perspective on what lies ahead. Each page captures the soaring confidence, the thoughtful intelligence, the space-age wonder, and at times the sheer whimsy of the world’s most inspired buildings—and the questions they provoke: Can a building breathe? Can a skyscraper be built in a day? Can we 3D-print a house? Can we live on the moon? Filled with gorgeous imagery and witty insight, this book is an essential and delightful guide to the future being built around us—a future that matters more, and to more of us, than ever.

Radical Cities

Radical Cities PDF Author: Justin McGuirk
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1781688680
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
What makes the city of the future? How do you heal a divided city? In Radical Cities, Justin McGuirk travels across Latin America in search of the activist architects, maverick politicians and alternative communities already answering these questions. From Brazil to Venezuela, and from Mexico to Argentina, McGuirk discovers the people and ideas shaping the way cities are evolving. Ever since the mid twentieth century, when the dream of modernist utopia went to Latin America to die, the continent has been a testing ground for exciting new conceptions of the city. An architect in Chile has designed a form of social housing where only half of the house is built, allowing the owners to adapt the rest; Medellín, formerly the world’s murder capital, has been transformed with innovative public architecture; squatters in Caracas have taken over the forty-five-story Torre David skyscraper; and Rio is on a mission to incorporate its favelas into the rest of the city. Here, in the most urbanised continent on the planet, extreme cities have bred extreme conditions, from vast housing estates to sprawling slums. But after decades of social and political failure, a new generation has revitalised architecture and urban design in order to address persistent poverty and inequality. Together, these activists, pragmatists and social idealists are performing bold experiments that the rest of the world may learn from. Radical Cities is a colorful journey through Latin America—a crucible of architectural and urban innovation.

Condemned Buildings

Condemned Buildings PDF Author: Douglas Darden
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
ISBN: 9780910413633
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
Condemned Building is one of our most requested out-of-print books, so we've done a special limited edition reprint (only 750 copies) to meet the ongoing demand for this book. Not long after this book was published, the only one on the work of this gifted architect and delineator, Doug died of leukemia. Fans and friends, including legions of students, quickly bought up the remaining copies, and the difficulty of finding this book has undoubtedly only increased its appeal. Doug said that these projects were "the underbelly of canonical architectural principles and forms", and indeed many are dark, brooding, or sexual in nature: a "kamasutra with the negative." The book covers ten projects, in model, drawing, and "psychoanalytical" text. Douglas Darden taught at Harvard, Columbia, and most recently the University of Colorado at Denver. He was a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome. He is sorely missed, but we're happy to be able to offer his book once again.

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire PDF Author: Will Hermes
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374533547
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
Chronicles five epochal years of music in the Big Apple against a backdrop of the period's high crime, limited government resources and low rents, tracing the formations of key sounds while evaluating the contributions of such artists as Willie Colón, Bruce Springsteen and Grandmaster Flash.

Living with Buildings

Living with Buildings PDF Author: Iain Sinclair
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 178283446X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
'A remarkable book; surprisingly gripping and often very moving ... at once disorientating and illuminating.' - Robert Macfarlane We shape ourselves, and are shaped in return, by the walls that contain us. Buildings affect how we sleep, work, socialise and even breathe. They can isolate and endanger us but they can also heal us. We project our hopes and fears onto buildings, while they absorb our histories. In Living With Buildings, Iain Sinclair embarks on a series of expeditions - through London, Marseille, Mexico and the Outer Hebrides. A father and his daughter, who has a rare syndrome, visit the estate where they once lived. Developers clink champagne glasses as residents are 'decanted' from their homes. A box sculpted from whalebone, thought to contain healing properties, is returned to its origins with unexpected consequences. Part investigation, part travelogue, Living With Buildings brings the spaces we inhabit to life as never before.

Gothic Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole

Gothic Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole PDF Author: Matthew M. Reeve
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271086599
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Gothic Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole shows that the Gothic style in architecture and the decorative arts and the tradition of medievalist research associated with Horace Walpole (1717–1797) and his circle cannot be understood independently of their own homoerotic culture. Centered around Walpole’s Gothic villa at Strawberry Hill in Twickenham, Walpole and his “Strawberry Committee” of male friends, designers, and dilettantes invigorated an extraordinary new mode of Gothic design and disseminated it in their own commissions at Old Windsor and Donnington Grove in Berkshire, Lee Priory in Kent, the Vyne in Hampshire, and other sites. Matthew M. Reeve argues that the new “third sex” of homoerotically inclined men and the new “modern styles” that they promoted—including the Gothic style and chinoiserie—were interrelated movements that shaped English modernity. The Gothic style offered the possibility of an alternate aesthetic and gendered order, a queer reversal of the dominant Palladian style of the period. Many of the houses built by Walpole and his circle were understood by commentators to be manifestations of a new queer aesthetic, and in describing them they offered the earliest critiques of what would be called a “queer architecture.” Exposing the role of sexual coteries in the shaping of eighteenth-century English architecture, this book offers a profound and eloquent revision to our understanding of the origins of the Gothic Revival and to medievalism itself. It will be welcomed by architectural historians as well as scholars of medievalism and specialists in queer studies.