Interview by Evelyn Steiner
What made you decide to research the role of architecture and design in Playboy in the first place?
I was looking at the architecture of the 1960s and 1970s with my students at Princeton, and kept noticing that bibliographies of many architects include articles from Playboy. Later, I was talking to Hans Hollein about his time as an editor of the magazine Bau in Austria and he told me that his Playboys were confiscated on the frontier when he went to Moscow for an article. I was very intrigued. Furthermore, when we were working on Archigram, I noticed a Playboy in their “Survival Kit” in the Living City exhibition. After a while I thought I should look into it more, but I was not prepared to discover how important both architecture and design were for the magazine!
Although promoting very open-minded and progressive ideologies and ideas, Playboy clearly objectifies women. Did your feminist side ever give you qualms of conscience about doing a Playboy exhibition?
Yes, of course there are all these issues. But it also objectifies men, it even feminizes them turning them into designer objects with the right clothing, grooming, fragrances, and equipment. It is important to realise that the story is more complex. To do a systematic study of Playboy was also useful to understand that the magazine was very progressive in many ways.
It promoted modern architecture and design at a time when other interior magazines were extremely conservative; they criticised the architects of the European avant-garde, like Mies, as being “the threat to the next America.” Playboy was also progressive in defending the city when it was being abandoned and left to poor people and minorities. Also, it was in favour of abortion, against capital punishment, and supported the black power movement – for example, Playboy interviewed Martin Luther King, Jr. In fact, we should take it more seriously as pornography is only a small part in the magazine. It is a design magazine with some nudity.
The Playboy man was an indoor man; the interior was his retreat from the tension of the Cold War era. Today, dangers such as terrorism and the NSA spying scandal seem even more threatening. Can you observe a kind of equivalent revival of the interior today?
If anything, Playboy anticipated the future to come, in which we would retreat more and more into the interior. With its fascination for new technology and gadgets, it predicted that the interior would be expanded through new media technology, that the whole world would come inside and that we would inhabit this hybrid space of the physical and virtual. Even the question of surveillance was predicted in Playboy: the magazine itself was under surveillance by the FBI because it features drugs and nudity. Also, the Playboy mansion itself was like a Big Brother house with all these TV screens where you could see what was happening in every room. People were often represented in the magazine through a view from a camera or an eye above – and the architecture promoted in the magazine often reinforced this idea of surveillance, for example by praising the “open plan” because you could prepare a cocktail while keeping eye contact and conversation with the young girl in the living room so she doesn’t change her mind and leaves. Surveillance and seduction are mixed and that attitude is very pervasive in our age of social media today.
Beatriz Colomina is an internationally renowned architectural historian and theorist who has written extensively on questions of architecture and media. Colomina is Professor of Architecture and the Founding Director of the interdisciplinary Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University.
Her numerous award-winning books include Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994), Sexuality and Space (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992) and Architectureproduction (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988), Cold War Hot Houses: Inventing Postwar Culture from Cockpit to Playboy (co-edited with AnnMarie Brennan and Jeannie Kim, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004), and Domesticity at War (Barcelona: ACTAR and MIT Press, 2007), Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines (co-edited with Craig Buckley), and Manifesto Architecture: The Ghost of Mies (Sternberg Press, 2014).
The exhibition Playboy Architecture 1953-1979 is on show at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt on Main until April 20th, 2014.
The bachelor pads promoted by early Playboy were fully equipped control stations to seduce women. Today, bachelor pads seem to be inhabited by the cliché male hip-hop star or cliché gay man. But a female equivalent of this kind of hedonistic architecture is still missing… how come?
You’re right! I’m sure there are examples, but they don’t exist in popular culture. Some years after Playboy emerged, Cosmopolitan with Helen Gurley Brown as chief editor became a magazine for modern single career women. It advised young women not to stay virgin until marriage but to experiment with and enjoy sex without guilt. Their first issue featured the birth control pill! Similar to Playboy, the magazine promoted the city and gave advice for interior decoration – but it catered to a different economic bracket, and the advice was much more quaint: the reader should go to a flea market to buy a lamp and a carpet in order to decorate her own little coffee corner. It’s incomparable to the bachelor pads that Playboy promoted, which were a kind of modern Gesamtkunstwerk.
In the exhibition you emphasise the seductive potential of architecture. Have you ever been seduced by design or architecture?
I think architecture is all about seduction: you have to seduce the client, developer, contractor, press, politicians, and you have to seduce the user which includes the citizens that walk by your building. I’m laughing because at the next Venice Biennial, entitled “Fundamentals”, the plan, the floor and the ceiling are considered to be the fundamental parts of architecture, but seduction is as fundamental as all the other elements.
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