Arch Erotica

There are certain special moments in architecture when it can be considered erotic. The slit, which corrupts the continuity of the plane and announces an intimacy that explodes from the inside out, inviting you to penetrate it with your gaze. The great empty hall, over which one imagines all kinds of playful and lascivious activity, just like the lying body waiting for the erect counterpart to fertilize it—a phallic action par excellence. Or the stone kitchen table, a polished surface shaped by the veins of the earth, over which dough is stretched, and bodies lean when victimized by the desire that arises uncontrollably in the middle of cooking time. But the truth is that any and every object and space can house the erotic.

Erotic, in architecture, does not allow a direct correlation between form and content. A room covered in pink plush with holes and dildos distributed along the wall is not necessarily more erotic than a monotonous dentist’s waiting room. In the same way, excess—so associated with what is voluptuous and sexual—does not immediately characterize an LGBTQIAP+ architecture, much less does plastic rigor define a masculine and rational space. These correlations are nothing more than historical processes of fixing values onto certain spatial forms. The room with stoic décor is not masculinist because it dispenses with excess. It is masculinist because culture has defined that the rational belongs to the realm of the masculine, and the irrational (excess, ornament, accumulation, emotion, etc.) belongs to the feminine universe. And it is in this binarization of spatial qualities that architecture participates as a sexual device. The typification of space is the result of a historical process through which architecture fixates meanings.

It is also in the everyday dimension of architectural practice—repetitive, ordinary, exhausting labor—that the libidinal drive of life mysteriously emerges. Like any human endeavor, architecture, on bad days, feels ungrateful to me: a toxic relationship. But on good days, architecture and I have an immense afternoon of lasciviousness, under an eternal five o’clock sun. The erotic in designing concerns two key moments that precede the building itself: the commission, architecture’s initial dialogue with the world, a precondition for its creation; followed by the necessary reconnection of the mind with the hand (or the foot, the elbow, the mouth), the ignition of the creative act. It is impossible to produce architecture alone.

Design is always designing for, and with, someone. A collective, diplomatic action involving the client, contractor, materials supplier, condo board, city, etc. Material determinants are the wind against which, or in favor of which, one designs. But they are never enough to explain architecture. Creation fights against the grain to re-imagine the human drama. The more these economic, social, cultural, and political arrangements become the background rather than the figure, the more intuition takes over the creative process. The greatest works are imagined in the unknown—a contextualized unknown. It is walking in the dark, but a dark that is this dark, and not that dark. Transforming the rational act of analysis into the creative act of synthesis, passing—or rather, gestating—this difficult contradiction within the body of the creator-architect. More than in any other art, architecture generates this foundational tension from which creator and creature merge. It does not simply reproduce its conditions of production, but itself produces the possibilities of a new existence. And, in this irrational process of rationality, we reconnect with the erotic of life. What we do invites the interlocutor to participate in their own process of occupation, enjoyment, completeness, and deciphering, constituting a dialogical relationship of affection—a loving dialogue.

As for the connection between thought and action, mind and muscle, it is worth evoking the foundational question of the reflexivity of the “hand that touches the other hand,” so beautifully described by Merleau-Ponty. The chiasm between subject and object, subject and world, no longer exists. In the case of the cerebral conception that is drawn on paper via muscular memory, we are also talking about reflexivity, since the graphite on the sheet exists only as a material fact through the action of the whole body. And this wholeness of the body is incomplete without the prostheses through which we draw, the instruments that are no longer external to us, but rather complementary organs, or rather, supplements that completely transform the body’s boundaries. The creative act is always an act of returning to the body that folds in upon itself. Delirium is dissociation, but delight is being in completeness, body-world. The drawing is then an expression of this rejoicing, not a mere technique of representation. In these rare moments of brain- muscle connection, it is when I lie down, erect, soft sun on my skin, and I enjoy being an architect.