"Rapunzel's Titillating Observation Tower", "Elizabeth Taylor's Hire-a-Hubby Mart", "Lady Godiva's Passion Pit", "Aphrodite's Seed Bank": the names of some of the buildings imagined and designed by Raphaela Rose for her "Auckland Strip" project sound intriguing and hilarious at the same time.
Rose graduated last year from the University of Auckland's School of Architecture and Planning with her dissertation project "Sex(uality) & the City: Counteracting The Cock-Ups Of Auckland's Main Strip".
The project was inspired by the city of Auckland where, as a result of the Prostitution Reform Act 2003, plans were drawn for the Chow Brothers' "Super Brothel" to be built in a central location (plans were dropped in 2014).
Rose carried out an intricate research combining linguistic analysis, media studies and spatial mapping: while the title of the project moves from the sexualised Las Vegas Strip, the content has a precise starting point in the theories of architectural historian Beatriz Colomina. Rose was particularly interested in the research project led by Colomina on how Playboy used architecture and design to shape a new sexual and consumer identity for the American man and a new form of masculinity. Further readings and references for the "Auckland Strip" incuded Guy Debord, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Elizabeth Grosz, Beatriz Preciado and Rem Koolhaas.
The project – currently on view at Glasgow's Lighthouse, Scotland's Centre for Design and Architecture (until 26th July) – consists in a series of maps, plans and drawings, plus a collection of thirteen 3D printed ceramic models in candy coloured shades representing a fun park themed by local sex scandals.
In a press release about the event at The Lighthouse Raphaela Rose stated: "The exhibition suggests the possibilities of employing architecture as an instrument of social and political intervention. Consequently, it proposes a speculative urbanism rather than pragmatism we have come to know in architecture. It seeks to promote a positive environment in the contested sexual politics of the city."
Rose explores through her project notions of sexual representation in the build environment, and issues such as sexuality, spatial misogyny, exploitation and biopolitical control in a urban patriarchal environment.
The sexual territories defined in the project map adult entertainment, but also question sexuality and pleasure, age and ethnicity, the proliferation of male spaces and contemporary manifestations of sexuality being artificial and premeditated.
Though small, the exhibition at The Lighthouse is interesting since Rose employs architecture as a satirical tool to tell a urban fable about gender using graphics that at times evoke the patterns of the Memphis Milano group.
The buildings in a pastel colour scheme and the cartoon-like graphics end up acting as a social commentary on the sexualised metropolis of Auckland city, prompting viewers to wonder in which ways the perception of sexuality and sexual economy have an impact on the built environment. Quite interestingly Rose's project also brings up another comparison: while fashion heads towards a genderless direction (well, in the '70s it was called unisex…), cities, and therefore architecture, are still filtered through a gender-oriented perspective.
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