Building Sex: Men, Women, Architecture, and the Construction of Sexuality

by Aaron Betsky

Buildings have always been an expression of human sexuality. In this book, architecture critic and curator Aaron Betsky takes a look at the man-made world and concludes that it is just that: made by men and not women. The structure of buildings and the layout of cities in the modern world have almost always been determined by men, and the abstract and alien order of grids and columns that has resulted imprisons us in a way of living based on repression and, in some cases, oppression. By contrast, it is women who create the interior spaces within these man-created environments. Comfortable, beautiful, seductive, and logical, these interiors act as areas of escape, self-definition, and sometimes even revelation.

Drawing on a wide range of architectural examples, from African mud huts to modern apartment complexes, Betsky explores what effects this division of architectural labor has had on our sensibilities and, indeed, on how we relate to one another as men and women. He believes that although it has always been thus, we do not have to live within this dichotomy between the exterior and the interior, the made and the lived, the masculine and the feminine, forever. It is possible, says Betsky, to create "spaces of liberation, spaces in which we can re-construct our selves and our world".

Genres: Architecture, Design

Hardcover

First published July 1, 1995

About the author

Aaron Betsky is an American critic on art, architecture and design. He was the director of Virginia Tech School of Architecture + Design until early 2022.
Trained as an architect and in the humanities at Yale University, he is the author of over a dozen books, including Architecture Matters, Making It Modern, Landscrapers: Building With the Land, Scanning: The Aberrant Architectures of Diller + Scofidio, Queer Space, Revelatory Landscapes, and Architecture Must Burn. Internationally known as a lecturer, curator, reviewer and commentator, he writes the blog "Beyond Buildings" for Architect Magazine. Director of the 11th Venice Architecture Biennale, he has also been president and Dean of the School of Architecture at Taliesin (originally the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture), director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute (2001-2006) the Cincinnati Art Museum (2006-2014), and was founding Curator of Architecture, Design and Digital Projects at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1995-2001). As an unlicensed architect, he worked for Frank O. Gehry and Associates and Hodgetts + Fung. In 2003, he co-curated "Scanning: The Aberrant Architectures of Diller + Scofidio" at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Reviews

[Ruo Jia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not so solid as scholarship, just a collection of materials and reflections, I wonder if this speaks to the condition of architecture or if it lends any value (there isn’t also any structure that returns or coherent

[Mills College Library]

720.82 B564 1995