Chapter 2: Sexual libertines

The private realm is a space that is a driving form of pleasure; eroticism is presented in the shape of a sensorial architectural experience where seduction and strategic design are tools for fantasy and desire. From the 18^th century until the 20^th Century the boundaries between interior and exterior were continuously tested, subjecting the body to freedoms of sexuality and liberation whilst biopolitcal ideals of new controls and disciplines were exerted over society. Modern pornography emerged in the form of cyberspace throughout the 20^th century; Foucault argued that whilst some may see this as a transgressive practice it became one of the most paradoxical techniques through governmentality in the production of sexual and gender identities.

La Petit Maison

The cabinet in the 18^th century was a place of retreat, its ornate and luxurious decoration being greater than that of the bedroom chamber, it is a space of extreme privacy as one defined, ‘for private business’[81], it is a variation of spaces that can be distinguished and one of these is that of the boudoir. In 1758 in the novel ‘La Petite Maison’[82] by Jean Francois de Bastide he included two boudoirs that translate an irresistible charm, ‘it is useless to name for the women who enters them, for the mind and the heart understand in harmony there’, it is a space that upon entering arouses whoever inhabits it. Nicolas Le Camus de Mezieres wrote in 1780, ‘The Analogy of This Art With our Sensations’[83] he formulates the boudoir as ‘the seat of sensuality; it is there that a women seems to concoct her plans, or yields to her desires’[84], a space for extended desires that arouses the body through decoration such as the mirrors for stimulation and the circular shape of the space, ‘corresponding to the female body and corresponding to acts of love’[85]. The boudoir of the French Enlightenment was a private space of sexual experimentation where objects within space acted as stimuli for the libido. The boudoir was an emblem of French Libertinism, of allusion and provocation and contradictions between, ‘sentiment and luxury, intimacy and ostentation, the secret and the public’[86], seen as an effective sexual hideout for the dandy. The gap between public and private life in the mid 19^th Century widened and the boudoir was a space that become largely disconnected from the house, returning to its original roots as a bourgeois female retreat. Because of the ornate objects from Middle Eastern cultures it still remained a space that become a, ‘fantasy space in the which the erotic ‘other’ was allowed, not in the form of flesh and blood, but in the realm of the imagination’[87], displacing the codes of the previous erotic narrative of the boudoir.

Playboy’s Electronic Boudoir

Playboy began the ‘pharamacopornographic regime’[88] in the year of 1953 after World War Two, transforming the spaces of the domestic into an urban haven of ‘free love and life’, a control and sanctuary from the outside world, as Hugh Hefner coined it ‘A Room of ones own’[89]. The 18^th and 19^th century spaces of pleasures transformed into the 20^th Century electronic boudoir away from political and nuclear threats of the Cold War and an effective sexualization of technologies that derived from the war, ‘erotic spaces where heterosexual, middleclass men could reclaim there sovereignty’[90], effectively incubating male sexual desires. The Playboy bed was an extension the mind and body through the machine transforming the meaning of working, communication and sex. The boudoir functioned as a space that Michel Foucault termed a ‘biopolitcal incubator’[91], a libido experimentation of what would become the modern sexual sole within the Private Room. It can also be likened to that of The Petit Maison and cellular isolation of monastic disciplinary cells, ‘disciplines of the tiny in which a new form of power acts through detail’[92], therefore the confinement of the body within the boudoir would produce a ‘truth-production regimes that characterized European development of the private room from the Renaissance onwards’[93], a habitat of inclusion like that of the segregation of the hippy commune from the political regime, evoking the sexual freedoms of the individual. The discourse of the Playboy narrative was a rejection of the nuclear family through ‘transforming the American heterosexual man into a play the traditional domestic space that the governmental doctrine after World War Two. This was a liberation of the body from domestic ideology, the biological architecture acted as a ‘surrogated womb’, a projection of masculine based ideals that underplays the erotic dimension and sublimates the female desires to the males in these environments however it effectively demolished the traditional relationship of femininity and domesticity. Like that of the Oikema the Playboy architecture uses specialization techniques and visual power as a subversion of control acting as a ‘counterspace that challenged the traditional models of specialization of power that enshrine the heterosexual dwelling’[94], where in the culture of America in the 1950’s and 1960’s this was at the root of consumption and reproduction. The emergence of ‘pharmacoporno capital’ ignited the tension between the biopolitical power of ‘body-control regimes’[95] and that of the sexual revolution.

Adolf Loos wife’s bed

Adolf Loos designed a bedroom for his wife in 1903 in the private space of their house, it was a space of purity where white draperies and angora rabbit fur rugs flowed through the room as it was, ‘an architecture of silence, of a sentimental and erotic approach’[96], this defined the psychological status of the room. The lighter materials used by Loos reflected the most private parts of the house compared to darker colours that signified central and public spaces of masculine areas, effectively a private boudoir that opposed the heavily dark and erotically ornate traditional interiors. The use of the rabbit rug clings around the bed, effectively placing the nature of the animal around where his wife’s female body will lie as it, ‘was the ultimate intimate space and was so direct and immediate in addressing an archaic drive and instinctive needs’[97], thus entwining nature and sexuality. The archaic emblem of the fur reflect the ornament within the space, ‘it is an intellectual/material ornament rather than a graphic/material ornament’[98], according to Loos the need for adornment and ornamentation that is considered elementary to eroticism should be repressed. The ornament was what Loos gave to women for a signification of eroticism that resulted in an unnatural love however, ‘If it were natural, the women would be able to approach the man naked’[99], therefore the purity of Loos wife’s bedroom displays a consciousness to the female body compared to its, ‘reduction to ornament that was denounced as a sign of the immorality of the age’[100], where erotica and true sensuality lost its strength.

Rudolf Schindler The Kings House

The architect Rudolf Schindler, mentored by Adolf Loos in 1921 build the Kings Road House in West Hollywood Los Angeles, one of the first modernist dwellings build with a tilt-slab construction. The architect had a extreme distaste of traditional institutions therefore created a space of a shared communal living experience and characterized this formulae as a, ‘cooperative dwelling space for two young couples’[101], where each individual would have a private studio, a bathroom per couple and two adjacent open roof terraces with baskets for sleeping with a communal kitchen. Inspired by the devoid ornamentation and outside to inside spatiality of Frank Lloyd Wright the creation of a space open to nature Schindler produced a, ‘three dimensional interlocking house and garden’[102]. The large studio rooms encompassed concrete walls on three sides whilst the fourth remained an open glass front exposing and unifying the body to nature as a, ‘honest exposure’[103], whilst the structure of the house was designed with moveable partitions. The boundaries between outside and inside were broken down, as the house merged within the natural landscape, this project effectively anticipated the communal lifestyle of the sexual revolution to come.

Modus Vivendi of Hippy communities

A countercultural life began with the hippy communities of the 20^th Century with communal living that emerged between 1962 and 1966. It relieved the sexual prejudices of post war America and adopted the concept of ‘free love’ like that of Fourier’s Phalanstry that is limitless, offering a radical alternative to suburban America and rejection of the establishment. One of the first communes was that of ‘Kerista’ in the early 1960’s that were, ‘uninhibited practicing existentialists, especially noted for their practice of free love, but also pioneers in smoking marijuana and proclaiming an unabashed pursuit of hedonism’[104] this was a community of ethics and of deliberate pleasure. Foucault states in the History of sexuality that, ‘society has been absurdly condemning itself for falseness and silence for over a century, In doing so the society has been strangely denouncing the power it has exercised in an attempt to apparently liberate itself from the very laws that make it function’[105], this stems from the 19^th century science of the refusal to openly deal with sex, only interacting with its perversions. Between the discourse of truth and fear based upon concerns of public health in that time period, ‘sexual science tried to prevent any true rational knowledge about sex from emerging’[106], therefore both reinforce each other in the fight for liberation that continues. The counterculture defined basic ideals that, ‘pleasure is good, and not immoral’[107], this then created a hedonistic engineering within the communes. Timothy Leary, a theoretician of hedonism proposed that raising the hedonic index through this engineering would result in, ‘designing one’s life for pleasure through chemical turn-ons and turn-offs’[108], Leary saw this activated through marijuana where ‘living for pleasure instead of living according to the punishment reward system that an up-tight society wants to keep us all strapped in’[109]. The counterculture of Hedonism was criticized by William Braden concerning its strategic motives within the community that, ‘hedonism could enslave as easily liberate, as a technetronic dictatorship’[110], this anti-rationalist element can be defined in Charles Fourier’s Phalanstery where both rural communities make a, ‘forceful refutation of the rational, of objective consciousness, contending that Western culture’s insistent dependence on objectivity vastly diminishes its quality of life’[111], moving away from the interpersonal relations and power of the cities and modernity.