iARCH

Pleasure often escapes the framework of culture because it is a difficult experience.pleasure may not only be experienced as frivolous fun and joy within the limits of cultural codes, but also as a transgressive bliss that is non-cultural, unspeakable and lethal for the subject. 


Pleasure is all too often associated with consumption, something the advertisement industry is keen to exploit. By following one's own desires and tastes, the consumer experiences a freedom that does not have to give any justification whatsoever, as the striving for pleasure is the only aim. 


Nowadays, we are overwhelmed with terms referring to happiness and fun. This turn to enjoyment is, in the cultural world, practically inescapable.


"People often fall in love with people with qualities they respect but don't have themselves: The intellectual gets together with the practical person, or the practical person gets together with the spiritual person. People try to balance themselves out. And some of the same thing goes on with architecture: People who are feeling chaotic inside will be drawn to very calm environments. So you can tell a lot about what's missing about people by looking at the styles of architecture and design they love."


n 1978 Bernard Tschumi published an essay , The Pleasure of Architecture in which he used sex as a characterizing analogy for architecture. He claimed that architecture by nature is fundamentally useless, setting it apart from "building". He demands a glorification of architectural uselessness in which the chaos of sensuality and the order of purity combine to form structures that evoke the space in which they are built. He distinguishes between the forming of knowledge and the knowledge of form, contending that architecture is too often dismissed as the latter when it can often be used as the former. (http://www.calendarlive.com/galleriesandmuseums/cl-et-happiness11oct11,0,4017629.story)


"Our sensitivity to our surroundings,may be traced to a troubling feature of human psychology: to the way we harbour within us many different selves, not all of which feel equally like 'us.' " Each setting draws out a different self, some better and some worse, "We turn to wallpaper, benches, paintings and streets to staunch the disappearance of our true selves." (http://www.calendarlive.com/galleriesandmuseums/cl-et-happiness11oct11,0,4017629.story)


It's an almost Proustian way of considering what a room or building does to us. It's a way of looking at architecture from a very psychological point of view , and asking, 'What is it that, ultimately, we're looking for in a satisfying environment?' I suppose there are analogies to be drawn as to what we're looking for in a satisfying personal relationship. In some senses, what we're looking for is a confirmation of things we aspire to but don't necessarily have all the time.


The pleasure of architecture can also be called as the architecture of happiness, and seduction , Architecture takes different forms and disguises also known as masking, as a tool of seduction. Architecture uses facades structural elements e.t..c as disguise for their play in the game of seduction. a good example would be, shopping malls and regular shops , with attractive displays of their products, or by using attractive means of architecture such as aesthetic finishes and forms , this disguise creates desire's of certain types in a person, the desire to buy what is being displayed.






Architecture is also known as the profession where architects create dreams into spaces. creates environments that are at once destinations and a means of transport to new worlds, new experiences.  Architects are known for crafting a vital form of vernacular architecture and design, one that crackles with the kinetic energy of the avant-garde, the shimmer of Hollywood, the sensual mystery of a far off, yet somehow familiar, place. Some architects have garnered accolades for a signature design strategy that seduces, entertains, informs, and inspires.







Many architectural theorists eroticise buildings. The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, from 1499, takes the Renaissance metaphor between buildings and bodies to its ultimate conclusion, and depicts characters admiring and fondling buildings as though they were lovers. Already indigenous builders had viewed columns as phalluses, and doorways as vaginas, but it was the Renaissance metaphor that opened the way for the countless erotic analogies that theorists of architecture have espoused since. A selection of these are brought to bear in the analysis of Andrew Blake’s(a porn movie director) work, to
demonstrate: 1. that architectural history and theory can inform our understanding of the workings of adult films, and 2. that adult films, strange as it seems, are an especially suitable medium through which to articulate architecture’s sexual dimension.(http://www.beeldend.be/unknownpleasures.html)







The architectural theorist Aaron Betsky coined the term “queer space” to classify a type of space that is fundamentally geared toward (homosexual) orgasm. “The goal of queer space is orgasm,” Betsky writes. It is the space in which your body dissolves into the world and your senses smooth all reality into continuous waves of pleasure. It is an unreal space with no endurance, and yet is very real. 









Buildings have always been ready sponges for meanings their designers would not have intended. It would be absurd to imagine the first Ionic column being fashioned by an Ionian builder with it in his mind to create a feminine order to answer the masculine order of preceding Doric style temples. A lag of centuries existed between the creation of the Doric and Ionic orders and them acquiring their genders, ostensibly via Vitruvius’s writings. Likewise, the Latin Cross church plan was already well established before Francesco di Giorgio demonstrated its likeness to the shape of the body. Jacques Lacan makes a similar point with his famous illustration depicting a pair of toilet doors that are identical in every respect, except for
their labels, “ladies” and “gentlemen”. Gender is a cultural construct that our imaginations project upon toilets, just as we project the image of Christ’s body upon the plan of a church, or penis-like attributes onto an obelisk when it is filmed alongside a masturbating women in an Andrew Blake film.



Baroque and Rococo style buildings are synonymous with exuberance. Art history has traditionally treated each as a debasement of Classicism. It is thus noteworthy that buildings in these styles are commonly used for fetishistic and sadomasochistic scenes in some porn movies.



Architecture can seem like a puritanical field, populated by wowsers, serving equally worserish patrons. If that were exclusively true, then the literate use of architecture to pornographic ends, would be plainly blasphemous. However, if we disregard for a moment the profession’s practitioners - who, in fairness, are usually pressured into conservatism because of the public nature of their art, and by the fact that even more conservative lenders are usually involved in its financing - and look solely at the discipline’s theorists, we find a number of individuals who are far less restrained.
According to one, Catherine Ingraham, “it is precisely the absence of sexuality in traditional conceptions of architectural space that gives us the first clue to its presence.”11 Architects have pretended, she argues, that their art form is purely concerned with technological and economical matters, when all the while things that are taken for granted, like the placement of doorknobs at roughly the height of the genitals, betray a sexual dimension to the way humans design and interact with their buildings.





References :http://www.beeldend.be/unknownpleasures.html
                  http://www.calendarlive.com/galleriesandmuseums/cl-et-happiness11oct11,0,4017629.story
                  http://www.redroom.com/publishedwork/pleasure-the-architecture-and-design-rockwell-group-               
                  http://archipreneur.blogspot.com/2008_06_01_archive.html
                  http://www.eroticarchitecture.com/