Modern Design as Seen through the Lens of Playboy Magazine
Architects throughout the modern era have displayed their fantasies through their designs and their obsessions with how women have inhabited them. Take for example Corbusier’s infatuation with Eileen Gray and her home, E. 1027. Plagued with unconfirmed tales of how he broke into her home to paint murals on the white walls in the, he was also known to publicly downplay the home's design, while conversely praising it in a series of unreciprocated love letters to Gray. In the same vein, while Adolf Loos stood firmly against architectural decoration, he perhaps supported the elegance of women acting as a human ornament, an assumed notion in his envisioned home for the French Entertainer, Josephine Baker. The unbuilt proposal took on the form of a black and white striped solid which located a glass pool at the center of the space, forcing Baker to catch the male gaze of other occupants.
© Humen Tam, 1962
Architects throughout the modern era have displayed their fantasies through their designs and their obsessions with how women have inhabited them. Take for example Corbusier’s infatuation with Eileen Gray and her home, E. 1027. Plagued with unconfirmed tales of how he broke into her home to paint murals on the white walls in the, he was also known to publicly downplay the home's design, while conversely praising it in a series of unreciprocated love letters to Gray. In the same vein, while Adolf Loos stood firmly against architectural decoration, he perhaps supported the elegance of women acting as a human ornament, an assumed notion in his envisioned home for the French Entertainer, Josephine Baker. The unbuilt proposal took on the form of a black and white striped solid which located a glass pool at the center of the space, forcing Baker to catch the male gaze of other occupants.
The relationship of sensuality and space doesn’t stop with the provocative desires of these three men, but lives on in one of the world’s most famous publications, Playboy magazine. Perhaps best known for its significance as a vanguard in the sexual revolution with its promotion of masculinity, the magazine also illustrated a showcase of swanky glass bachelor pads standing high above Beverly Hills that pushed forward a debonair lifestyle punctuated by modern design. As a generator of a glamorized lifestyle, the magazine highlighted architectural titans including Mies van der Rohe, Bucky Fuller, and Eero Saarinen, and made them palatable to a general audience.
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