Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 13
Spaces of Seduction
a cold wet granite floor; the echo of a hall. The architect designs the set, writes the
script and directs the actors.
“We should dream of weaving together a new realm of male and female.
A world in which interior and exterior spaces flow together, structures dissolve
into surface, comfort and abstraction are intertwined.”^ There is another architec
ture, the architecture of weaving and trickling, the architecture of deceit, conceit,
and seduction. An architecture of pleasure, full of secrets, contradictory interplays
of veiling and unveiling, where spatial relationships trigger physical and emo
tional sensations.
Let’s create and request spaces that challenge the traditional distinctions
between outside and inside, between the planned and the experienced, between
artificial and natural and between the useful and pleasurable: spaces that seduce
and arouse desire: temples of pleasure. “It is not we who have to change to live in
Architecture, but architecture which has to react to our movements, our feelings,
our moods, our emotions in such a way as to make us want to live in it...”^
Architecture is the ultimate erotic act. Carry it to excess and it will reveal
both the traces of reason and the sensual experience of space.
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Liza Hansen
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
Wolfgang M eisenheimer, Ad, no.9: “Architektur und m enschlicher Koerper,”
Duesseldorf, 1982, p. 88.
Aaron Betsky, “Building Sex,” New York 1995, p.l30.
Mary McLeod, “Architecture and Femininity.”
Gunter Feuerstein, “Eros - Architektur - Sexualitat,” in: Der Architekt, 2/1987, 91 -96,
quotation p. 91.
Wolfgang Meisenheimer, “Zur Einfuhrung in den Themenkreis,” in: Architektur und
Menschlicher Koerper, Ad,no.9, Dusseldorf 1982, p.l4.
Alfredo Arribas, “Architecture and Design. Arquitectura y Designo,” 1986-1992, text
by George Bertsen, Tubingen, Berlin, 1993, p. 42.
Zaha Hadid, “Moonsoon Club in Sapporo, Japan,” in Internationales Interior Design,
1991/92
Aaron Betsky, “Building Sex,” New York, 1995, p. 9.
Coop Himmelblau, “Architektur ist jetzt. Projekte, (Un)bauten, Aktionen, Statements,
Zeichnungen, Texte, 1968-1983,” Stuttgart / New York 1983, p. 173.