Sex and Buildings Modern Architecture and the Sexual Revolution

226 Pages·2013·8.221 MB·English

by  Williams, Richard J

SEX AND BUILDINGS

SEX BUILDINGS
AND
Modern Architecture and the Sexual Revolution
Richard J. Williams
reaktion books
Published by
Reaktion Books Ltd
33 Great Sutton Street
London ec1v 0dx, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2013
Copyright © Richard J. Williams 2013
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of
the publishers.
Printed and bound in Great Britain
by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Williams, Richard J., 1967–
Sex and buildings: modern architecture and the sexual revolution.
1. Architecture and society –History –20th century.
2. Architecture, Modern –20th century –Case studies.
3. Sexual ethics –History –20th century.
I. Title
720.1’03’0904-dc23
isbn9 781 78023 104 4
Contents
Introduction 7
one The Care of the Body 27
two Inside the Orgone Accumulator 48
three Communal Living 64
four Phallic Towers and Mad Men 85
five Pornomodernism 107
six The Hotel 128
seven What Would a Feminist City Look Like? 146
eight Queer and Other Spaces 167
Epilogue 188
References 195
Bibliography 209
Acknowledgements 217
Photo Acknowledgements 218
Index 219
Morningside, Edinburgh. Middle-class tenement housing built c. 1878, photographed in 2012.
Introduction
For their authors, most books are in some way therapeutic.
This one is no exception. Its origins lie in the middle of what was
in retrospect probably a textbook mid-life crisis, during which I started
to dislike everything and everybody around me. Family became a
monstrous set of rules and regulations, most of which were apparent
only after they had been transgressed. The city in which I was living,
Edinburgh, came to resemble a prison. Walking out into the street
in my neighbourhood, Morningside, a Victorian suburb on the south
side of the city, felt like nothing so much as a walk around the jail
yard, and I felt as if its grand nineteenth-century villas had been
purposely designed to express authority and keep watch on their
inhabitants. Twenty-first-century Morningside was every bit as
repressive as Freud’s Vienna. I felt angry and frustrated a lot of the
time, and spent a lot of time trying – with some success – to make
other people feel the same way.
Like generations of middle-class men before me, I quickly
decided the problem was sex. With two small children, a full-time
career and a wife with another full-time career, life was largely a
matter of psychological survival from day to day. There was an acute
shortage of time for anything other than meeting the most basic needs
of food, shelter and sleep. (As the psychotherapist Esther Perel wrote
in Mating in Captivity, which quickly became a favourite, sex loves
to waste time.1) I did the usual things middle-class people do in
these circumstances. I tried various kinds of psychotherapy, and
mood-altering medications; I read a lot of sexually libertarian theory
– R. D. Laing, Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse – and would bore
people with it at any opportunity. I became a little too easily convinced
of Freud’s theory of repression, and its underpinning hydraulic theory
of sex – and, worryingly, I started to think if I didn’t have more sex
7
Sex and Buildings
I might, literally, explode. I fantasized about the existence of a libidinal
paradise elsewhere, far from Morningside (there wasn’t one, of
course). In the end, both I and my family just survived, shrugged
and moved on.
The episode did however produce a sustained reading around
a problem that seemed to have been little explored. My temporary
loathing of my surroundings was driven in part by a belief that what
they policed was sex. Morningside’s very architecture seemed to be
repression written in stone. Each apartment and each house was
designed for one family; each had carefully determined public and
private faces, and a carefully determined outward image of propriety.
The repression I thought I saw in the everyday architecture of the
city was only underlined further by the density of churches in the
area, not abandoned as they would be in any sensibly secular city but
thronged every Sunday, each one offering its own unique proscription
of the libido. ‘Holy Corner’, a big neighbourhood intersection, had no
less than five churches, all with big congregations. Edinburgh seemed
sometimes the very model of the nineteenth-century bourgeois city,
brought uncannily to life. In Morningside, there was no sex. Sex, the
joke went, were what you carried coal in.2These borderline psychotic
thoughts about Morningside were probably brought on by reading
too much Laing, a Scot with a similar loathing of his surroundings.
But they led reasonably to some broader, and I still believe sensible,
speculations about sex and architecture. If Morningside was the
model of the sexually repressed city, what would the sexually liberal
city be like? What would its buildings look like? How would its
inhabitants behave? What was the role of architecture in conditioning
sexual behaviour? Had such a sexually liberal place ever existed?
I was prepared to accept that my starting point was actually wrong,
or to put it another way, Morningside evidently didhave a libido,
just a rather closeted one. But it was clear that a more sexually open
city would have started from a different architectural model.
But what did I mean by sex? Initially this seemed straightforward:
some kind of act involving the genitals leading to orgasm, most likely
involving another person, in my case most likely of the opposite sex.
That was certainly the working idea of sex, an idea that was also, in
mystate of mind at the time, driving me crazy. As an intellectual
project, sex needed to mean something broader. As you will see,
I use the word ‘erotic’ and its derivatives more frequently here,
referring to ‘erotic’ spaces, ‘erotically charged’ buildings, ‘eroticism’
8