Description:
A reader flipping through this lavish architecture book, who happens to miss the occasional suggestive photograph, will be surprised to read Christian W. Thomsen's sometimes overheated but wonderfully entertaining and provocative text. Describing a gloomy, Dickensian structure, he refers to "the tingling sensuous charm of these houses"; "Every pore of these ... warehouses, some of them unfriendly and yet some tremendously theatrical, still exhales the perspiration from heavy manual labour...." Stark, black-and-white photographs of castle turrets are accompanied by Thomsen's fluid exposition on the "relationship between architecture and eroticism" in the stories of the Marquis de Sade, who spent much of his life imprisoned in one dungeon or another. This fascinating book pulls together such seemingly polar opposites as 18th-century French pleasure-palaces and Heikkinen-Kokonen's 1994 Finnish Embassy building in Washington, D.C., under the rubric of the sensual in our built surroundings. In such chapters as "Bath Culture and Sensuality" and "City Ambience and Sense Appeal," he deconstructs society's physical structures to demonstrate the deep fundamental appeal of enclosures, openings, fountains, textures, surprising angles, and thrusting, pointed, rigid towers. Ultimately, Thomsen's message is a humanist plea for sensitivity to, and respect for, our physical natures and desires. Writing of the impoverished, chaotic conditions of most of the world's cities, he laments the "ugly, repulsive, insensitive, depraved, [and] arbitrary" state of most urban architecture, and finds it a "cause for infinite sadness." Thomsen's utopian vision is, ultimately, of an environment that can provide "happiness and enjoyment." --Peggy Moorman
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