Designing latent aphrodisiac virtualities. The iconic, allegoric and empathic approaches to erotic architecture

Although intimacy plays an enormous role in people’s lives, architecture has mainly ignored the role space could play in it. While the relevance of eroticism, sex and love has been traced at the urban scale, showing their relationship with cultural processes and social dynamics, the potential influence at the architectural scale has been scarcely investigated. The paper frames and organises the few approaches that can be detected in architecture when speaking of eros. It shows how they vary from very conceptual to practical, marking their theoretical background and identifying their champions, possibly arriving at clarifying the relation between shapes and meanings. In fact, the alternatives are analysed and explained using a set of diagrams showing the “paths of meanings”, or the relation between the form, the expected (by the architect or others) meanings and the receiver. The three alternatives highlight how difficult it is to define erotic architecture univocally. Still, at the same time, show that some conceivable paths of meaning can, indeed, realise it. The concluding paragraph traces a possible design approach that surfs through the frame, changing the final aim, defining eros through the once-called “latent aphrodisiac virtualities,” and exploiting the natural potential of the form. That is, its being endlessly significant, displaying different meanings for the (informed, in this case) individual, and the rest of the casual users, in a continuous innuendo.