Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 8

Popular Culture Review

Male symbols in architecture are stereotypically phallic: lighthouses,
watchtowers, observation towers, office towers, ivory towers, drilling rigs, televi
sion towers — symbols of power, potency, strength and beauty, success, ambition,
fashion and outstanding achievement. This is architecture as a thing of the mind, a
dematerialized or conceptual discipline with its typological and morphological
variations.
According to Mary McLeod: “All that is mystical, dark, otherworldly”
are examples of female symbols in architecture.^ Take caves, for example: myste
rious, organic, assymmetrical, bizarre, orgiastic, suggesting warmth and security,
coziness, a place to hide, embryonic life. This is architecture as an empirical event
that concentrates on the senses, on the experience of space.
“Physicality and joy, play and pleasure, illusion and dream are the do
main of Eros. Those are the wonderful dimensions beyond rationality and func
tionality, which we have largely lost in today’s architecture,”^ except for a few
outstanding examples of architecture by, for example, Frank Gehry, Calatrava,
Zaha Hadid, Philippe Starck, and Kas Oosterhuis.
Currently Oosterhuis and Le’na’rd exploit actual technologies, turning
buildings into dynamic bodies. They envision that buildings will become fluid in
form and behavior. In the hands of “keyboard cowboys,” design geometry be
comes endlessly elastic. In the coming decades, buildings will evolve genetically
and transform from mute platonic structures into responsive folded volumes ab
sorbing, digesting and generating flows of information and energy. The new sen
suous architecture fulfills its obligations in terms of functionality, but beyond that,
fulfills multisensory qualities and increases the spiritual and physical wellbeing of
its participants. Users are no longer Just occupants, they are socially aware, critical
and creative. Sensual buildings increase the spiritual and physical well-being of
their occupants.
Philippe Starck’s architecture is at times metaphysical and surreal, at times
enigmatic, but always full of role reversals and the negation of rules and estab
lished relationships. The only rules making up Starck’s own “rules” appear to be
those of contradiction and transgression. The translation of this restless state does
not take place in a merely literary/descriptive fashion, but occurs in terms of a
strong emotional involvement, and relies on the empathy, the dynamic relation
ship that can exist between objects and people, and between people themselves.
“We must correct ourselves with mysteries, absurdities, contradictions, hostilities,
but also with the generosity that our environment offers us”(6). Starck does not
want his architectural designs to possess autonomous values, but to be stimuli,
“fertile surprises,” for the fulfillment of better living conditions. He sees his role
as a dual one: to be didactic and provocative.