A As Photographed Posi Nt Next to the Scale Model of A
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Performing Masculinity In 1962, Hugh Hetner ‘a as photographed posi nt next to the scale model of a modern building, echoing the portraits of Mies van der .4 Robe aiad Le (.orbusier taken a fbw years earli.er, Indifferent to the camera and ignoring the viewer, Hcfncr’s eves seem intent on setting tip a privileged connection to the building. H is body turns toward the model, his arn.s e..mhrace it, suggesting bonds of crc. ation. between the two, We see him g.esturi.ng toward the m.odei with an elongated object as if to draw our attention to sonic par ticular detail or open one of its little ‘a indows. But this portrait dffersm some re.spects fro.m the canonical tepresentation. of. the modern architect: The elongated object was neither a pencil nor a drafting FIgure Li Hefner pen. but a pipe jhad he seen he horbusicrs), and wCh the first Playboy Club mockup to he Hefner was iiot an arc hitec.t htit built in Los Angeles. The origi th.e Ibunder of the adult magazine cal photograph 5Opeared in Buddi,g News, Playboy, posing ne.xt. to a model of the Playboy Club arid Hotel that ime 7. 1962 larawing by Antonio Gaglianoi was to be built in los Angeles in the 19605. Hefncr’s architect pose ‘a as not a farce, Rather, it revealed the architectural intentions behind what was an ap.parentiv banal erotic publication. Playboy ‘a as much more than print and girls ‘a ithout bikinis. In the iq os and ‘6os, the magazine had man aged to create a series of spaces and publicize, them so relentlessly through the media th.at they bad corn to create nct oniy a new popular erotic utopia. but also to radically transform the uses arid techniques of the domestic space of the Cold War years. Playboy had popularized the designs for th.e. “Playboy Penthouse Apartment,” ‘Kitchenless Kitchen” and “Rotating Bed” that later offe.imrig •materiahz.ed in tIm 19 cp rec.ortstruction of the P.iayboy Mans.ion. This “f 2 room ]Love Palace,” as it wa.s hilled, would insp.ire. the set for the first reality s.how in television history, broadcast in 19cc), and beca.:me the setting for innumerable p.hotographs destined for the r.aa.gazine ‘s pages. Flefn.er hii.nseif defi..ned the nature of the project.. as f(dlows 1 wa.nted the house to be a dream’house, . place where one could work and have, fun wthou..t tf..e trouhie and conflicts of t’he. outside world, ins.ide, a s:[cgie man had ahsoiute control over his er.vi.ron lit I ould hanft night itO o d cc ri i ning a film at in idnight and ordercri a dinner at noon, having appointments in the mddie .f t.i:ie. nrght. and rofnantic encounte.rs in the afternoon it was a haven and a sanctuarv,. While the rest of the world sec..rned to he out of control, ever thin insd.e the Playboy House was perfcct. That was roy plan. Be:ing larougiat up ill a very repressive and conformist manner, I created a universe of m own where. I wasfree to hve. and love ma was that. roost peopi.e can only d:rca.rn lihout This was the st2rt of an unprecedented rnediamrchitecture operin Hon deplos d during th 1960% Pup ho1 s atH d an am hipt hgo of nightclubs and hotels throughottt urban e.nclaves in A.rnerica and Europe. and filled the pages of its magazines i.t.h reports Figure 1,2 La Conbus . iOn hojdjn ‘ai . gimnipses. i.nto. , the, inhabited intel icms of these singular. arcOtectuaj of modaf a hghnse budding . circa ‘‘ 1950. (Poppenfiato/Getty Inages), piacen “i his dual process of construction and media cisseni:na tion ctilmninated with the move from the. CTicago .M.ansicn to Los Angeles and the restoration of Playboy Mansion West in i971. Par from being sinaply an erotic. niagazine, Ply/boy forms part of the arc.hitec.tural imaginary of the se.cond half of the twentieth ce.ntur. Playboy is the mansion arid its. parties, the trop1cai grotto and the underground gi.ass.wafle d. games room. that lets guests watch the Bunnies swimming naked i.n the pool; it i.s the round bed • here Heftier frolic.s with the Playmates; His the bach or pad, the private jet, the club with its se.cret rooms, the gardem zoo, the se.cre.t castle, anti the urban oasis. Playboy wou.ici become. the first “porriotopia” of the mass media age. PLA’BOY ARC.HLTC.TLJRE. s the architect Rev ncr Banham pointed out in o 6o, Plan travel agencies, merchandising television programs,. film, video, boy had done n.u(.)re fdr architec.tur e and des.ipn in the. United the Internet, and vide.o games. invent what Hugh Hefner called States than had Home and tarde’n maga/ine. From i9 , almost Playboy had managed to pop every issue of t.he magazim had inciude.d a full-color spread o.n. a “D.isneyia d for aduit.n”4 And H.efner himself was the architecture, featuring Playboy’s own interior design and decor architect of this multimedia erotic cabaret. He had somehow projects. While other US magazines like I ours Home Journal or understood that in order to sculpt a .nen asc.ui.ine suhjectiv invent a House Beauti!dl launched a postwar crusade against the architee itv, one had to de.s.iyn a ha dtat: to cre...ate a space and tore of Mies van der Robe and l...e Corhusier, believing it to be series of practices and uses Of the domestic that could funct ion loreign to the American tradition, Playboy was publishing glowing as te.c.hnbha.bits of the male body. Transforming the A.merican articles on Mics, Walter Gropius, Philip Johnson, Frank lloyd heterosexual man mm a plavbm meant also inventing a new Wright, and Wallace K. Harrison, and its pages were a medium erotic topos as an alternative to the suburban family home that for the “simple, functional and modern” designs of Fames, Saa was the dominant heterosexual space in postwar North Ameri rinen, Nelson, Bertoja, and Knoll. During the Cold War, Play can culture, This required getting inside the walls 0f the sub boy had become a platform br spreading domestic architecture urban house, penetrating every private. horn e. in.. A.riierica and and design as masculine consumer goods for the new American inoculating first via the magazine and then through the I V, popular culture, a virtual space that only unfolded through text and m.ages center of a multinedia Far from questioning the validity of the representation of By i 9s2, the magazine had become the 1-lugh Homer as an architect and defending architecture as art network with soft ten c.ies spread throughout North A.meri exclusively professional or academic practiceS what I propose here can’s urban fabric, from newsstands to television stations, clubs, is to validate the photograph’s performative power to produce and hotels, was. photographed meaning and accept Hefner’s pose as a deliberate declaration of In 1962 — the same. ear in which Hefner principles. Here is the risky initial hypothesis that I will test in posing as an architect— Siegfried Giedion. the most influential these pages: It is possilale to see Hugh Hefner as a pop architect architec,tu.rai historian of the mid-twentieth ce.ntury, coined sec and the Playhay empire as an architectural multimedia produc the term “Playboy Archteeture in the introrluction to the tion company, a paradigmatic example of the transformation of ond edition of his best- seib.ng book Space, Time and Architecture, architecture through the media in the twentieth century, If Bea Giedions classic text was part of a titanic effbrt— also involving — generate triz Colomina is right in pointing out that “what makes modern authors like Emil Kaufmann and Nikolaus Pevsner to architecture modern is not its functionalism or use of materials, a n w histnriography of architecture that could account for the hut its engagement with the media,’9 we can afflrm that not only emergence of the “modern tradition as the culmination of the did Playboy make an exemplary contribution to the ‘moderniza technical, scientific, and tecton ic progress o:f modernity. Giedion tion” of architecture (luring the Cold \Var, hut it also operated as san American postwar architecture as a threat to the niatenializa of an authentic multimedia architectural production company that Con of the “grand project” that had borne within it the spirit What spread its model of urban, postdomestic, sexual utopia through Furopc’an civilization, from the Parthenon to I.e Corbusier. that threat an unprecedented dissemination that spanned from the press to is strange. is that Giedion should have decided to call the Chicago and Los Angeles mansions, as well as clubs, hotels, “Playboy Architecture”: as Contemporary’ architecture, is regarde.d by’ some as a .fashion a.nd. as an America.n arc.h.iteet xpre just the: transformation of porn into po’pul.ar mass cu.Iture — as :ed it many designers who had adopted the fashonahle aspects Giediun may have sensed, it w’as also a frontal attack on mod.ern o.f the. “lnternat.iorial Style” now ikund the fkshion had worn dome:stic.ity and the t.’.raditio’.nai rela.tionsh’i’p thin and, were engaged in a romantic h’etw’e.en ge’nder, sex, orgy.