"The Intimate House", a speculative proposal responds to the ‘touch crisis’ that comes along as a challenge with the Covid-19 pandemic. The proposal looks at offering an opportunity to rethink work-from-home for the sex industry.

The pandemic has forced us to think about how and who we touch more than ever before. For most of us it’s been more than six months since we shook hands or hugged a friend. In every human interaction we have outside our homes, we are now forced to focus on keeping our distance from other people leading to a much-felt ‘touch crisis’. While the rest of the world has adapted to screens and zoom fatigue that comes with it, we wonder what happens to an industry that thrives on touch.

The sex industry, which is shrouded in taboo, continues to experience hardship, loss of income, increased discrimination and harassment incited by the pandemic. Amidst this touch crisis, thousands of sex workers have no other option but to continue working, placing their health and lives at risk to support themselves. Without financial and social support, sex workers are slipping through the cracks. The long-term solution may require government policies to aid the sex industry, but with our proposal we explore a possibility of immediate respite by creating a space that allows a sex worker to transform their homes into their workspace, as an exciting experience that is in tandem with the health and safety guidelines set in place during and post-pandemic.
Just as the sex industry, design too can suffer from a persistent taboo that masks any erotic connotation. Sex may often be on our minds, and is an undeniably important, innate human need, but rarely is the subject dealt with artistic flair or a design eye. We believe that the sensual is always present in design. Through this ‘intimate house’, we also explore the secret life of design objects, lighting and spaces, and bring to life their erotic charge.

Intimate House

For this exploration we chose a common Soho walk-up apartment, in the red-light district of London, as a basis for our interventions. Homeworking for a sex worker inspired us to re-look at the furniture commonly found in a house and to tweak them such that it transforms into a house that is as much a liveable and a visual pleasure as it is a sexual one.

The client embarks on a captivating journey on their entrance, exploring phases of sex as defined spatial experiences – building up from excitement, intrigue, leading to foreplay and eventually to a climatic ending. A cozy niche behind the staircase, allows for ‘the romantic’, a Romeo & Juliet moment. This is followed by ‘the raunchy’, a staircase along which the shadows seduce one’s fantasies; ‘the sinful’, a space for bondage and teasing between drapery that plays with perception, and for ‘the up close’, a bedroom and a ‘ring’ made for a no touch version of the act of penetration.

This house is an immersive adult playground that tantalizes and titillates, enticing visitors to interact with the various spatial experiences and connecting with various phases of human sexuality in a safe, indirect touch-oriented environment.

KOOZ What prompted the project?

AK | EF | RB | SL "The Intimate House" is a response to an open competition, Davidson Prize 2021, posing questions about ‘Home/Work – A New Future’. To us as a team, it meant us asking ourselves, what is it about the pandemic that has affected us all irrespective of our geography? The answer was quite easy, we were all craving human contact – a sense of warmth, the need to freely touch another person. While feeling the ‘touch crisis’ it’s still easy for us to adapt to the new ways of going about work life, but in this situation what happens to an industry that thrives on touch for their livelihood?

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

AK | EF | RB | SL Through this proposal we are re-thinking the work from home situation for the sex industry. As we were working on the theme of the competition, we realised that possibly the worst hit industry by the pandemic is the sex industry. As we researched more and more, we realised that they are not only struggling to make ends meet, it was nearly impossible for us to imagine the dilemma of having to be in close proximity to another person given how fearful we ourselves were of as little as shaking another person’s hand through the last one year.

For this exploration we chose a common Soho walk-up apartment, in the red-light district of London, as a basis for our interventions. We attempt to see how we could simply tweak the interior architecture of the house along with the objects and furniture commonly found in an apartment to make sure it is liveable yet is capable of transforming into a beautiful space full of fantasy, an adult playground that brings out one’s deepest sexual desires.

KOOZ How and to what extent has the current pandemic shaped and affected the way you approach the built environment?

AK | EF | RB | SL The current crisis has made us more humane and empathetic towards our society and community at large. We now realise more than ever what isolation really is and what it’s capable of doing. This in some ways highlights the failure of our cities. We all got so reliant on built spaces for social interactions that the focus on recreational activities out in the open were lost along the way. It has highlighted how much farther we got from the basic elements of existence. The past year has been an eye opener.

Spending so much time at home, on the other hand, has raised questions on the way the built environment has shaped the living and working environment. The huge amount of people working from home during the pandemic is showing our houses are often not fit to accommodate working. There is a new need to live with less while making it more. While at the same time, home working is questioning the role of work spaces in the future. A topic we approached through the lens of a sex worker, in the Intimate House.

KOOZ How has this situation redefined the way we as individuals interact with architecture? How should we respond as architects?

AK | EF | RB | SL This situation has brought about a new need of the hour that is to build spaces keeping people at it’s centre. Spaces that are capable of building an emotional connection that is greater than just awe.
The other thing is flexibility, we are seeing a growing need for the built environment to be made more flexible. Flexibility allows change that not only helps increase the lifespan and utility of a building but also helps in less consumption, which in turn allows us to take better care of the planet. Flexible spaces are also capable of enhancing the interaction between the user and the built environment, which then makes the experience of occupying this space more engaging.

The ‘fear of touch’ will also be something that will possibly guide many material changes. The emphasis very quickly shifts onto materials that are easy to clean, even if not they at least give the perceptions and psychological satisfaction of being hygienic. In our project we made sure that all detachable items are easy to clean and can within a blink of an eye separate spaces and shift between being a home or a work space.

KOOZ What are the opportunities which have arisen from this "new normal" that we are currently inhabiting?

AK | EF | RB | SL A phenomenal amount! There will surely be an avalanche of PhD topics about this topic in the future; it’s been a surreal experience. When what we perceive as “normal” changes at the blink of an eye, there are going to be a bunch of savvy entrepreneurs who will see dollar signs all around them, and the sex industry is typically the first to adapt to new technologies and environments.

When the internet became popular in the 90s, the porn industry took note, while in lockdown we have seen a surge in “VR sex” as well as an influx of Onlyfans accounts from the “boys/girls next door”. It would have been easier for us to piggyback onto the virtual porn industry, however we did not want to suggest that the traditional brothels would become obsolete, when they could be adapted to this “new normal”. This opportunity also felt more contentious; it’s apart of our public realm and it raises debate over the rights and safeties of sex workers. Another bonus is that there’s no internet lag when you’re being seduced by someone in-person.

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

AK | EF | RB | SL Such a taboo subject cannot be represented with crisp architectural illustrations. From the get-go, we opted for an art style with a cartoonish charm, which focuses on the actions and emotions of the two characters and their interaction within their immediate spaces. The beauty of this loose cartoony style is that there are no set rules over how the characters needed to look. We thought it would have been clichéd to draw a hunky, hyper-masculine male figure having wild sexual experiences with a lingerie model. Instead, we have our bashful hairy male character sporting a lockdown belly, who is introduced to a voluptuous older woman who oozes confidence and experience. We then selected two contrasting colours to focus the viewer onto this pervasive topic. Blue represents the cool, relaxed tones of an evening setting which is then offset by the sensitive warm tones of the pinkish-reds.