Architecture comprises sensuous, even erotic elements. In this ground-breaking book the authors undertake the first-ever examination of this aspect of architecture. Having introduced us to the concept of sensuous architecture, the book presents us with a chronological analysis, starting with the summer residences on the Loire and in Germany, and continuing with discussions on English landscape garden and the Marquis de Sade's torture chambers, before coming full circle with immaterial: media architecture and cybersex. "Sensuous Architecture: The Art of Erotic Building" lends insights into the cultural history of the bathroom, the erotic symbolism of towers and grottoes in various cultures, and anthropomorphic architecture. Examples of particularly sensuous residential buildings are certain to provide architects and their clients with stimulating ideas. In a chapter on present-day urban ambiences, the author argues that personal well-being and the general quality of life in our cities depend on architecture satisfying both the mind and the senses in equal measure. Painting, sculpture and wrapping art, as well as the relationship between architecture and eroticism in film, are examined. The book concludes with a plea for an architecture of the senses.
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
A reader flipping through this lavish architecture book, who happens to miss the occasional suggestive photograph, will be surprised to read Christian W. Thomsen's sometimes overheated but wonderfully entertaining and provocative text. Describing a gloomy, Dickensian structure, he refers to "the tingling sensuous charm of these houses"; "Every pore of these ... warehouses, some of them unfriendly and yet some tremendously theatrical, still exhales the perspiration from heavy manual labour...." Stark, black-and-white photographs of castle turrets are accompanied by Thomsen's fluid exposition on the "relationship between architecture and eroticism" in the stories of the Marquis de Sade, who spent much of his life imprisoned in one dungeon or another. This fascinating book pulls together such seemingly polar opposites as 18th-century French pleasure-palaces and Heikkinen-Kokonen's 1994 Finnish Embassy building in Washington, D.C., under the rubric of the sensual in our built surroundings. In such chapters as "Bath Culture and Sensuality" and "City Ambience and Sense Appeal," he deconstructs society's physical structures to demonstrate the deep fundamental appeal of enclosures, openings, fountains, textures, surprising angles, and thrusting, pointed, rigid towers. Ultimately, Thomsen's message is a humanist plea for sensitivity to, and respect for, our physical natures and desires. Writing of the impoverished, chaotic conditions of most of the world's cities, he laments the "ugly, repulsive, insensitive, depraved, [and] arbitrary" state of most urban architecture, and finds it a "cause for infinite sadness." Thomsen's utopian vision is, ultimately, of an environment that can provide "happiness and enjoyment." --Peggy Moorman
Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German
Original Language: German
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