Playboy Architect?

Hey, if you're in Maastricht, the Netherlands anytime between now and February next year you can see an exhibition about 'Playboy Architects'.

So we're talking about sex, drugs, architecture and design.  Not in the context of Howard Roark or any other starchitect of our day today, this fun wee exhibition is around the research of Beatriz Colomina, a professor at the Princeton University School of Architecture and founder of their Media and Modernity program, who has been studying the connection for the past three years.  Beatriz Colomina is an architectural historian and is the author of several books which a total dork like me super likes; ‘Sexuality and Space’ (1992), ‘The Sex of Architecture’ (1996) and ‘Domesticity at War’ (2007) to name a few.

The show sets out to illustrates how cities, buildings, interiors, furniture and products have always played an important role in the fantasy world of Playboy. The erotic spreads framed in a back drop of the modernist hard core from Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Buckminster Fuller, Moshe Safdie, and Paolo Soleri, etc, etc,etc. Colomina’s program is taking a stance that,  the sexual revolution and architectural revolution are inseparable as Playboy helped to reshape masculinity with the influence of architecture and design.

The exhibition illustrates how inextricably intertwined in the pages of the magazine and uses the archived imagery to demonstrate how architecture and design played a crucial role in the Playboy fantasy world and in reverse how Playboy came to influence the world of architecture through the medium of mass public exposure.  Interviews, articles, drawings, and glossy spreads featuring an array of architects along with the perfected photographs of women, created 'a revolutionary and seductive cocktail for its masculine readers'.

I think this show could be super fun. It also reminds me that I need to work on my focus in all my personal projects instead of just letting the verbal diarrhoea flow and discrediting myself at every opportunity.