Architecture, a chair, a bed and Playboy

 The stage is huge, the room can hold more than 700 people, but it's not quite full. The stage has an overhanging cardboard or plastic frame and is illuminated by blue and red spotlights, the colors of the event. The moderator announces the architects and they emerge from the audience onto the stage as if they were going to give a concert, and then they present. The title of the event is Congreso Colombiano de Arquitectura y Urbanismo, but it would be more accurate to say simply Congreso de Arquitectos. It is October 2023. Many of them stick to the plan: this time it is to narrate how and why a social architecture project was done; they show photos, talk about materials, times, impact. Others, many more, speak in the first person: how I did it and why I did it. They start their presentations with their biographies and stay there. One of them speaks in plural, but in his presentation he brings photos taken by others and selfies showing constructions or materials and him in the foreground.

In 1962 Hugh Hefner, with his hair still very black, a suit of the same color and cufflinks with the illustration of the Playboy bunny, asks to be photographed next to a model of a modern building that he points out as if he were the one who can explain the reason for the windows or the ten floors. He poses as an architect. A few years earlier, in blue ink, there is a portrait of Frank Lloyd Wright wearing a pork pie hat with a wide lapel and looking where men look when they are told to look at infinity. It is accompanied by the following headline: The Builder, Frank Lloyd Wright intents to be the greatest architect of all time and is followed by an article written by Ray Russell, who also liked to write fiction. Frank Lloyd Wright poses as a playboy.

The first edition of Playboy magazine, published in December 1953, had Marilyn Monroe on the cover; it was a black and white photo of her smiling and waving with familiarity under the red lettering announcing that this was PLAYBOY. Inside, there was a color photo of her naked on a red cloth (advertised from the cover, of course) accompanied by an editorial written by Hefner, a story from Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron, an excerpt from Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, an article on jazz and another on how expensive and unfair divorce was to men's pockets. In addition, a series of photographs showing the must-have design of a modern office, a man's office, of course. A seed.

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What ensured the success of this magazine that would later become a television channel, lingerie and merchandising brand, game developer, hotel, mansion and makeup company was the cover of Marilyn Monroe and the promise of more nude and beautiful women printed with the highest possible definition; but the modern design, present in that final article, would be forever linked to the contents and the way of thinking that Playboy sought to establish in (initially) American society. Entertainment for Men was the magazine's slogan for 65 years, until 2018 when they changed it to Entertainment for All. Entertainment for Men was not just a reference to its erotic content, it was a statement of a principle: Playboy was going to give the modern man the content he needed to create for himself a domesticity, a social life, an environment, an office, hobbies and topics of conversation that made sense for a life detached from family, in a constant search for pleasure and imminent bachelorhood. That creation, of course, began in architecture, with the container.

But it wasn't enough to say that modern design was cool, nor was it enough to feature named chairs, tables and bookcases in most of their editions: they had to make readers crave that lifestyle, those neat, dark houses, that designer furniture; they had to turn architects and designers into pop figures. So they did it in the same way they transformed women into playmates, making playboys out of those men.

The July 1961 issue of the magazine features designers George Nelson, Edward Wormley, Eero Saarinen, Harry Bertoia, Charles Eames and Jens Risom sitting on chairs and a table they created. They pose, look at the camera, cross their legs, and even Saarinen, sitting on his Womb chair, is smoking his pipe. Years later, in June 2011 the cover of Playboy shows model Pamela Anderson wearing a black silk corset and next to her breasts shown in profile a headline: The interview: Frank Gehry. In the book Pornotopia, researcher Paul B. Preciado notes, “Playboy published glowing articles about Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Philip Johnson, Frank Lloyd Wright, or Wallace K. Harrison, and used their pages to spread the word about Gehry. Harrison, and used its pages to support 'simple, functional and modern' designs (...). During the cold war, Playboy had become a platform for disseminating architecture and design as central consumer goods of the new American popular culture,” he writes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the congress of architects, which was held in a small city in Colombia, one of the invited guests spoke about magical realism, emergency and ephemeral architecture. It is a poetic, functional project. In the middle of his lecture, he says that projects like his receive a certain amount of media attention and that this does not bother him at all.

Beatriz Colomina, the Spanish researcher and architect who has dedicated her life to thinking about the intersections between architecture and illness, architecture and sexuality, architecture and private space, and architecture and the media, had already pointed out that “what is modern in modern architecture is not functionalism or the use of materials, but its relationship with the mass media.” At the time Playboy appeared, the American decoration, architecture and design magazines of the time, such as Home and Garden or Ladies Home Journal, had embarked on a fragile crusade against modern design developed in Europe, which was characterized by practicality and clean lines, contrary to the pompous American tradition. Playboy disregarded that aesthetic fidelity and dictated that a man had to own and furnish a house to seduce in it and that this was only possible by following the hipsters and, perhaps, wearing a dark red silk robe. 

In the summer of 2016, the halls of the Elmhurst Art Museum, in the United States, were populated by furniture and household objects. On view were the Diamante chair that Harry Bertoia had designed for Knoll in 1952, the Mariposa chair designed by Argentineans Antonio Bonet, Juan Kurchan and Jorge Ferrari for Le Corbusier, and the orange Nesso lamp that Italian designer Giancarlo Mattioli made for Artemide in 1967. What were these characteristic objects of modern design doing on display there? What were the plans and models that complemented this display referring to? And why were there pictures of naked girls? The exhibition, curated by Beatriz Colomina and doctoral students from the Media and Modernity program at Princeton University's School of Architecture, was titled Playboy Architecture 1953-1979 and not only showed how the contents of Playboy had turned architects and designers into characters and their creations into objects of desire, but also how this type of design was translated into the language of Playboy. That is, how they planned to take these modern and sensual ideas out of the two dimensions of print and turn them into living rooms, rooms with circular beds, apartments, recreational homes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On display, for example, were models of the Playboy house for bachelors, plans of the Playboy penthouse and illustrations of the Playboy house for weekend hideaways. One of the first such projects to appear in the magazine was the penthouse apartment, which was reviewed in the October 1956 issue and featured what would later become icons of architecture and design in the Playboy universe. The sofas and beds had controls on the sides to operate entertainment systems, the walls were in dark wood and brick and featured the coffee table that Isamu Noguchi designed in 1944 and the Eames LCW chair covered in cowhide; each display, of course, came with the shopping guide. The project for a Playboy town house that appeared in the May 1962 issue was one of the more detailed proposals; in the living room, for example, there was a built-in bar cabinet accompanied by two T chairs, a 1952 design by William Katavolos for Laverne, over which hung Duck Pond, the oil on paper that Dutch painter Willem de Kooning had done in 1958. Nothing was antique. Neither was the Tulip chair that Erwin and Estelle Laverne had launched in 1958, nor the entertainment wall with televisions and speakers, nor, of course, the most important object in the entire house, which did not bear the signature of any European, but was an icon established by the greatest playboy: the round, rotating bed.

Hugh Hefner was an atypical man in many ways, especially compared to the post-war American male; one of the biggest differences is that his vision of masculinity was not anchored, as other publications described and encouraged, to being an extreme creature who loved the outdoors and adventure; for Hefner the playboy, the only kind of man worth being, was an indoor being. This was symbolized in many ways in the pages of the magazine and later in other products derived from the brand, but the object that best synthesized it was the round, rotating bed. The English writer J. G. Ballard, in his glossary project, said that for him furniture, as many think of fashion, was the external constellation of our skin; following this he found it regrettable that the bed, despite being one of the priority external constellations, had been given so little time of imagination, especially in the West. Hefner thought similarly, so he had a huge round bed made that revolved and was slightly technical so that he could attend to his editorial, economic and pleasurable affairs from the same place.

 

 

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​​​This bed was first based in the Playboy mansion that was built in Chicago in 1959 and then moved to Los Angeles to a palace with 22 rooms that had a game room, zoo, courts, a waterfall and a generous swimming pool; the house became the starting point for a reality show, a photography studio with multiple scenarios and an experience center for fantasies. Of course, it was a space full of modern furniture and a place to extend the publication that sought, as Preciado states, to initiate the middle-class American man in the management of his multiple sexual encounters in a single space and to present “sex as an object of consumption par excellence among an avalanche of design objects that are also consumed erotically”. If the invitation was to play at staying in the house, it could not be, then, just any house made by anyone and filled by chance. It had to be aspirational and appetizing. To that encounter with masculine domesticity we owe, then, that even today architects and designers see their objects and buildings also as editorial projects and pose in front of them, perhaps without a silk robe, but with a certain playboy-like haughtiness.

 

A Spanish version of this article was published in Bacánika in 2023.