Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 10

Popular Culture Review
Thus a building is not architectural because it seduces (i.e., the casino
design), or because it fulfills some utilitarian function, (as does the office build
ing). Rather, a building becomes architecture because it sets into motion the op
erations of the unconscious. It stirs emotions. Spaces of pleasure are irrational:
hypnotic and unconscious, serious and sacred, frivolous and profane, forbidden
and divine. Spaces of pleasure are rhythmic sequences of expansion and contrac
tion, elegance, extravagance and exclusiveness. They are showy, theatrical, and/or
mystical. They offer secrecy and a search for knowledge. They are bewildering
and luring. Some of the best examples are sacred buildings, or places of consump
tion: reso rts, retail stores, restaurants, cinemas, theaters or exhibition design. They
attract and seduce, delivering what the heart desires. It is no wonder that the
shopping mall became the female temple of the 1960’s.
“One can dream of making the bodies of buildings as sensory as human
bodies. Of making rooms—the spatial cavities within buildings—as intensely sen
suous as one’s own body cavities: an architecture to see, hear, feel, an architecture
for the sensual imagination.”^
Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture sought to break down the distinction
between order and nature, inside or outside, and the functions of separate rooms.
Le Corbusier’s cave-like rooms open up into sanctuaries of light hidden deep in
side sculptural forms. Light undulates and creates spatial experiences, accentuated
by intense colors. Antonio Gaudi’s work displays all the elements of fluidity, mys
tery, joy, sensuality, and organic design that move you and make your spirit soar.
Frank Gehry’s architecture uses the symbol of the fish, a slippery, asexual,
yet sexually evocative element, as inspiration and metaphor for his luring and
bewildering architecture. The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is a sensational dis
play of organic, flowing, rounded and austere geometrical shapes, anthromorphic
scale and technical abstraction. Juxtaposing smooth, cool, glistening, soft, subtle
or voluptuous surfaces. The building is accented by rhythmic sequences of expan
sion and contraction, elegance, extravagance, crudeness and exclusiveness. It con
ceals before it discloses, while revealing mythical, bewildering arrays of settings
and encounters. It is showy, theatrical, cheerful, secretive. It moves the visitor to
new spiritual discoveries.
Santiago Calatravas’ structures are held in a magical state of suspense;
the tension becomes visible, the movement is like a dance, while the structures are
veiling and unveiling. Coop Himmelblau’s architecture expresses an aggressive
eroticism through violent confrontations and collisions. Just as eroticism is the
pleasure of excess rather than the excess of pleasure, so the solution to sensory
space is the imaginary blending of the rules of architecture and the experience of
pleasure. Just as the sensual experience of space does not make architecture, the
pure pleasure of the senses does not constitute eroticism. On the contrary, the plea-