FETISH

Is having someone determine the way you should live your everyday life, the ultimate submissive life experience?

Synthesizing and erecting, are one of the main tasks of an architect among exploring and creating fantasies into their clients. Architects are trained to do it and it is in their natural ability to control and predict as many variables as possible when designing. It forces them to dominate multiple areas of culture which combined with technical knowledge makes this profession an empowering one. The self necessity of being published makes the Architect survive and appealing to the main audience. 

This urge reaches further more than being recognised among piers, they portrait themselves as icons that regulate not only the visual and spatial but also sensorial aspect of life. This compilation of skills creates on them, ego trips that imply branding and imposing what they think it could be a “new social order”, alluring with their images and visualizations. Self-centered architectural drawings, renders, diagrams, concept images, photos..., symbolic modes of representation, penetrate the readers imaginary, capturing their clients into submissive cleanliness projects and fantasies. From minimalist to complex fetishes, these pieces of worship inhabited the fist of their master being translated to their clients into forms of pleasure taken to an abnormal mode of entrapment. 

Their Master Designs not only mask the privatization of life when shooting concrete, or jerk of layers of plaster but also create the sufficient scenario for intimacy and ultimately sex. Perfect cages that not only protect the inhabitant from its exterior conditions but also its “vessel” from his user forcing their captivities to be submitted sometimes to very specific living rules. New landscapes where sexuality and space live in perfect symbioses are created. The human body and their genitalia as premise can embody cavernous sections or protruding constructions where need, desire, obsession and self gratification are extremely explicit in most of their iconic designs.

Alternative patterns to already established roles and other possibilities for living is what triggers their necessity of existence. The aptitude to predict the future and being able to apparently control it, allows them to design a third option, where seductive utopic scenarios and futuristic perspectives challenge common boundaries and this puts them in the category of transgender figures, never being conformed in ordinary notions but moving between them.

"Before it can defend the body architecture must defend itself against the body, by ordering it.”– Mark Wigley in “The Housing of Gender”

Image Description:

Casting, 201260 x 90A series of inkjet prints on coated paper, molding the artist´s genitals with a fireproof aluminum sheet, scale 1:1.Revealing the negative space of the original reference, providing the possibility of filling a potential void, like a fetish does. 

Casting #1, 2012 Isometric view of an unrealized project, a house designed by Adolf Loos for Josephine Baker, 1927: revealing how the architect tried to design apertures and blank spaces in the house’s facades in order to hide or unveil the desirable body of Josephine.  

Casting #2 , 2012 The bedroom designed by Carlo Mollino for the Casa Devalle, 1939, at the beginning of the second world war trying to superimpose his vision of living, shaping, molding and sexual desires on his clients’ bedroom.

Casting #3 , 2012 Self-portrait of Philip Johnson wearing the PPG building,1996, erecting this post-modern icon as a crown being the perfect statement for the masturbatory dimensions and egocentrism of architectural stardom.

2012

Weimar, DE

Publication: Horizonte, Weimar, DE Issue #5, Fetish

Author: Diogo Passarinho

Artwork by Eric Stephany

Photos by Ludovic Jecker