SEX AND ARCHITECTURE

A HYSTORY
"It is obvious, to me at least. that sex is really our reason for living - our primary urge is to replace ourselves  on this planet. I admit that this is only a part of the personality, but it is one that is insufficiently explored, especially in relation to art and architecture - it is going to be one of the determining factors in forming one's attitude to design, or indeed to anything, even roadsweeping. It seemed interesting if someone went through the history of society's attitude to sex to see if one illuminates the other. 
"In classical eras, Greek and Romans, sex was very free; they had a liberal outlook and few repressions. In periods tending towards expressionism, such as Middle Ages, the attitudes to sex were restrictive; both in medieval as well as Victorian times there was an incredibly inhuman attitude to sex. I shall now try to relate the way that society has changed these attitudes. 
"The Greeks were very free towards sex - Greece in the 4th century B.C. was perhaps the most pleasant of all ages to live in. Thre was a certain amount of of homosexuality but no one can agree on how much; an older man had a boy as a love, but all the books of the time say that if the man corrupts the boy, then this is wrong. Thus usually there were no sex relations between man and boy - although there must have been exceptions sometimes." 
The Greeks had socially-accepted outlets for the sexual urges of man, and the whole outlook of their society was very balanced. 
" The link between sex and violence is very strong, and sadism and masochism are inseparably linked; they dealt wirth it very successflly with Dyonisian festivals, when people got drunk and had orgies, ending in the tearing apart of the goat. The goat signified a mythical king or priest, since in earlier age, legend had it, one of these would have been sacrificed. This channelled all their violence in socially-acceptable way". 
We do not have any outlet for man's latent violence, although the force of it is very strong in this century. 
Sex, tolerated int the first part of the Old Testament became a sin in the Jewish faith, and this doctrine was adopted by the early Christians: 
"One of the things they much quoted was the sin of Onan which they condemned as masturbation but in fact was coitus interruptus; masturbation is like a litmus paper: if you want to judge a society's attitude to sex, just mention masturbation and if they curl up and die then you know you're living in the wrong age. 
"Christ has nothing whatsoever to say about sex; whether that is a criticism of him or not I do not know. It is interesting to speculate that perhaps he did say something and that is was suppressed afterwards. After he died Paul eventually took over, and became the head of the Christian Church; he has been much mis-quoted recently and has become a sort of arch-enemy to sex liberation. He had certainly a load of guilt where sex was concerned; but in writing a set of rules for the early church he was scrupulously fair and made it quite plain what he thought he had divine authority for and what he was merely giving as his opinion. Certainly he was the man who said that sex is an unfortunate necessity, but at least he was quite scrupulous in his writings. 
The Fathers of the Church mede thins very tight; there is a continual history of restriction and even torture. But they were doing it for what they thought was people's good. 
"There was a strong rearguard action, the mass of the people permanently fulling against the Fathers. It took the Church over a thousand years to batten down this. 
They realised that the earth had to be replenished and unfortunately to do this sexual relations were necessary, but it was regrettable that sexual pleasure should come from it. 

chemise cagoule

"There is history of increasing encroachment onto sexual matters, a denial that sexual pleasure is permitted. There were many regulations, such that, for example all irregular positions were forbidden. They invented in the later Middle Ages a garment called a 'chemise cagoule' which was a sort of hair shirt that covered the body, with just a single hole so that husband could inseminate his wife; all contact was eliminated. Also sexual relations were forbidden on a large number of days in the calendar, something like sixty or seventy were left. Any form of sexual activity not concerned with the begetting children was forbidden of course; and as Kinsey has shown an enormous amount of other sexual activity is normal. And so you immediately get feelings of guilt, and with such a load of guilt violence breaks out." 

Marcantonio Raimondi, I modi, 1527

Only in Italy was there a liberal attitude, and this of course was where the Renaissance started, with freedom of expression in architecture, as in all fields.
There could  be no better guide than the attitudes to sex if one is seeking the essence of the characteristics of a society, and obviously the character of an age will be reflected in tis architecture.
The Greeks believed in measure in all things, and of course this is apparent in their architecture as well as in their attitude to sex. The Romans on the other hand did not have such a straightforward outlook, and this is evident in their buildings. 
"The early Christians started off with crusading fervour; sex does not come int it very much and you can see this in their architecture. At St. Apollinaire in Ravenna there is a long row of saints above an arcade of columns and semi-circular arches, and they all have gaunt stern faces. There is no articulation or relief  in the frieze, just this determined procession of fanatical images, like their creators. 
"When the Dark Ages come in architecture fades out, woth the advent of the Romanesque phase architecture is fairly rational, although crude and primitive. The Church had not yet screwed men down. Then you get the brief glorious moment of the beginning of the Gothic period, about 1130, which is almost classical, this happens to coincide with a period of liberalism in sex teaching, something called proto-Renaissance.  Things seem to be getting more human, for the Renaissance really does mean humanism. There was a brief flowering of creativity and liberalism." 
But about this time the Church succeeded in getting control over men's lives, after gaining in power for a thousand years. 
"For me architecture from about 1300 onwards - for the remainder of the Gothic phase - becomes impossible to understand or appreciate, it becomes screwed up and hysterical. In England it was not too bad, buildings were no more than just ugly. But in Germany and Spain it became really repulsive. It was contorted and hysterical as society was hysterical." 
"The nineteenth century was screwed up and repressive, and produced no architecture worthy the name. It's interesting just for its curiousness, that's why we like it. The exceptions to this are products of logical thought, such as the great bridges." 

George Grosz, drawing from Ecce Home, 1923

In the twentieth century we have had great architecture following a period of sexual freedom. There was the period of the Weimar Republic in Germany, when the only really good style of architecture of the century evolved.
As soon as the Nazis came to power it all ended. Architecture in the United States is pretty frantic today, it reflects very much the pattern of sexual behaviour. 

Whole Earth Catalogue, 1968 edition

"Guilt shows in every thing, in the products of an age; guilt is caused by damming things up, by repressive attitudes. Repression and censorship in fact permit the exploitation of sex.  They give rise to sick attitudes in Society, it becomes rotten at the core and responses are distorted. This can be seen in advertising today and the methods it uses, mock-temptation." 

[M. Jenner _ megascope two 1965]