Will the art of arranging the space in which our bodies move remain impassive in the face of the great challenge of sexual attraction and the unbridled senses? Will the act of building remain refractory to any playful and erotic will?
Today, it is open to question whether we might not be able to hatch a new epistemic, a way of thinking about the city, of building and telling the human experience in a space that is infatuated with sensuality.

The project aims at a celebration of desire, and also deals with the place of sexuality and eroticism in the contemporary city. It stimulates the erotic imagination and influences sexual behavior through spatial devices. Openly narrative, our architecture intervenes on the whole city by invoking – more than a radical project – a labyrinthine experience open to scenarios that only have the right just to a hidden and shameful existence, today.

If the labyrinth embodies the ode to wandering as understood by the situationists, it is for us a stimulating, performative and initiatory figure, made up of unexpected events, encounters and new possibilities. Through this erotic journey, the project aims to bring to our approach a non-figured response, an openness to questioning. It is then necessary to propose strong, clear and denunciatory symbolic gestures, while adopting an architecture without injunctions. Thanks to this more global approach, the project can have a real social impact, because the buildings, open to scenarios that have no right to exist in cities, could thus be liberating.

It is an architecture that blurs what is offered to us as evidence and proposes to get out of the binarisms and norms around which spaces are built without necessarily breaking away from them completely. It is to open a spatial breach which will allow the infiltration of an existing order by constructing a potential for disturbance; but it is also to create spaces of non-control of the body, leaving numerous possibilities for appropriation by interventions that do not direct it but awaken it.

It is high time to be reconciled with the carnality that has been sacrificed for too long. The architecture thus secreted will serve as a springboard for the imagination and will allow the inhabitants to become actors of an inclusive spatial eroticism that is still largely unfulfilled. True «drag-building», our project interferes in the city, plays on appearances to deconstruct and invites us to drift.

The project was developed at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Bretagne during the course held by Prof. Can Onaner & Mathieu Le Barzic.

KOOZ What prompted the project?

CV | ALG This subject was an opportunity for us to address an issue that is still too few dealt with by the architectural world today. For too many years, eroticism has been misinterpreted by society; it has often been felt as murky, crude, psychotic or plasticised. For this reason, much of society – including the architectural practice, which deals with bodies and senses – has often refused to consider and analyze eroticism as a source of power, knowledge, stimulation and fulfilment, confusing it with its opposite, pornography.

Indeed, the city is the very place where the question of the coexistence of bodies unfolds, where the manifestations of the body in public have gradually been domesticated, civilized and intimized. The enclosure of public spaces and private fallback, as well as the success of dating apps, are increasingly threatening the very vocation of the place as a spatial configuration of physical rapprochement.

Today, the city is punctuated by pornotopic pockets that depict sex in a controlled, localised environment, and submitted to the rules of capitalism. Contemporary hypocrisy is such that pleasures are architected in closed spaces to erase sensitive desires from the public space. If we wanted to tackle this question of sex and the body in our society, it is essentially because it is full of paradoxes. When capitalism appropriates the image of the body, spreading it to excess, fantasy and desire face the frustration of a sexuality that is no longer anything but image and performance. Thus, through the poetics of desire, we wanted to question the possibility of approaching an architecture that does not restrict eroticism.

KOOZ What questions does the project raise and which does it address?

CV | ALG If the starting point is based on the reaffirmation of an uninhibited and respectful eroticism, we felt important to ask ourselves which architectural fiction could emerge from a free and undisguised acceptance of the place of the body and sex in the city. We then asked ourselves how architecture could embody the fantasies of a society in permanent contradiction regarding its relationship to the body and to sex? But also what place should be given to the actors and actresses of this sexuality in the city?

Our project clearly aims to reconcile cities and sexuality by proposing ‘erotopias’, real parentheses that generate urban pleasure. In opposition to schematic and authoritarian planning, we are developing a new poetics of the city; we are opening up new possibilities, outside categories and identities. We imagine new forms of stimulation and agitation, intended to create spaces of liberation in the heart of the city. We claim spaces with erotic dimensions, in a way to transform the city into a sensory, loving and erotic playground. An initiatory journey of self-discovery and discovery of others, urban exploration – which we also call the « dérive », a concept theorized by the situationists – is therefore essential in this process of excitability of the senses.

KOOZ How does the project aim to redefine the relationship between body and architecture?

CV | ALG Our architecture houses spaces of non-control of the body, leaving many possibilities of appropriation through interventions that do not control it but stimulate it. We claim, for example, the necessity of shadow and intimacy, of multiple and sensorial architectural forms, welcoming the body in their folds, hollows, cracks and blurring their limits. The individual can then venture into a discontinuous architecture, pierced, interrupted by orifices, channels and pores. We therefore invoke a sexuality considered primarily as an event, a punctuation: the fortuitous encounter between body and form.

KOOZ How does the project deploy the notion of acts and theatrical references for its statement? What props does the project explore and engage with to redefine this relationship?

CV | ALG Before our project materialised, the work of the text was a tool for invoking the subjective fantasies of each person. For us, words are the very foundation of eroticism, which is why we decided to introduce each of our proposals in writing so that everyone could call upon their own subjective imagination.

In the continuity of this writing work, we have ventured into the narration of our different architectural proposals by submitting 5 acts – our 5 projects – .
Through this method, we wish above all to include the spectator in this process of interpretation. This approach focuses on the experience and the poetic attitude of each of these projects, which invite to the « dérive », like real labyrinths of desire.

The 5 acts mentioned were also subsequently linked to some principles guiding our 5 architectural proposals, which were then experimented with in a sculptural manner:
– Discretion [Act I] – Subversion [Act II] – Revelation [Act III] – Initiation [Act IV] – Ecstasy [Act V]

KOOZ What is for you the power of the architectural imagination?

CV | ALG Regarding this project, our imagination gradually modulated itself around the question of narrative, but also around the question of image. Throughout the process, we gradually became aware of the importance of the iconographic function of eroticism. Thus, instead of seeking for a pseudo-photorealism in the representation of our project, we voluntarily exploited the abstraction of the image to illustrate this fiction of ours.
These digital drawings that we have made, we have also witnessed them. As Sam Jacob points out, by collaging, we observe the drawing emerge, we consume it, as much as we create it; the meaning and associations between the images entered into constant movement.

In our collages, eroticism is most often suggested; the image leaving the characters at the very moment when they are about to physically realize their love. We freeze the image by provoking the desire for the event, by using imagination at the expense of the explicit. In the manner of Pasolini in “Theorem”, we suggest postures, gestures, believing in their evocative potential.

KOOZ How does the project approach the role of the architect within our contemporary society?

CV | ALG Our project is above all a positioning, an invitation to reflect on the topics surrounding eroticism, but also on inclusiveness in architecture, which is too often influenced by the binary visions we have of space. We challenge identity-based approaches to space – such as public-private or masculine-feminine – through architecture, which is an important force in the construction of gender, but also in its deconstruction. We create fluid, subversive spaces of freedom and multiplicity, which can be described as queered spaces.

These are a conscious act of resistance and a rupture in the social fabric. By queering architecture, we mean resisting its use as a tool of oppression by reappropriating space as a tool of transformation. This master thesis project is therefore a testimony to our architectural vision. For us, architecture and fiction are above all analytical, critical and subversive tools that allow us to shed light on various contemporary issues in order to dissect their resolutions. We therefore wish to position ourselves between different fields, where architecture would no longer be an end in itself but a stimulating tool, an agent.

Bio

This master thesis is a work by Camille Valette and Alexis Le Gallo, realized in 2020, when they were students at École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Bretagne in Rennes (France). They are currently working as interns in Berlin for Camille (Atelier Fanelsa) and Toulouse for Alexis (Bétillon & Freyermuth) and continue to work together, 1700km away, on a small number of common projects.