Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 12

Popular Culture Review
As any casino/resort or retail client will affirm in their design brief: “The design is
to attract the crowds and seduce them to stay.”
Some of the defining characteristics of sensual architecture include:
•
Imparts an aura of sensuousness, through the interaction of materials,
forms and spatial exploration
•
Fires imagination
•
Sparks off encounters
•
Sensitizes people to sensuality
If that is accomplished, people will buy, consume and most importantly: enjoy.
Additional elements of sensual design include:
•
Variety: multi-sensory interplay of form and space, color, texture and light
•
Eyecatching elements: symbols, playful ways of showing off
•
Interplay of peeps, glimpses and vistas: ambiguity stirs imagination
•
Concealment and revelation: secrecy, the contradictory interplay of veil
ing and unveiling, covering up and opening out, luring in and fending off.
Ex: Christo’s wrapping of the Berlin Reichstag in 1995 — the cool sensu
ousness of the gigantic drapes touched everyone through its aura of mys
tery
•
Gratify the tactile senses: trigger emotional and physical sensations
•
Create possibilities to withdraw: nooks, niches, cozy comers, drapes:
transcience
•
Variable lighting. People can be choreographed and lured like moths to
the light. Light creates emotions and enhances spatial and physical sen
sations
Attractive spaces of movement include: corridors, staircases, ramps,
thresholds. These are the spaces of the senses and the spaces of society, the dances
and gestures that combine representation of space and the space of representation.
Zaha Hadid’s Moonsoon Club expresses a visualization of seething passions: power,
violence, fierceness, bmtality, versus tenderness and devotion.^ Bodies not only
move in, but generate spaces by and through their movements. Bodies carve all
sorts of new and unexpected spaces through fluid or erratic motions. Architects
always dream of channelling obedient bodies along predictable paths and occa
sionally along ramps that provide striking vistas, ritualizing the transgression of
bodies in space.
However, space is not simply the 3-dimensional projection of a mental
representation, it is something that is heard, felt and acted upon . The pervasive
smells of rubber, concrete, the taste of dust; the discomforting mbbing of an elbow
on an abrasive surface; the pleasure of fur-lined walls, the icy sensation of feet on