Research Catalog

Building sex : men, women, and the construction of sexuality

Title: Building sex : men, women, and the construction of sexuality / Aaron Betsky.
Author: Betsky, Aaron.
Publication: New York : William Morrow, [1995], ©1995.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Request in advance	NA2543.W65 B48 1995	Off-site

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Description

xix, 236 pages : illustrations; 25 cm

Summary

Buildings have always been an expression of human sexuality. In this book, architecture critic and curator Aaron Betsky takes a look at the man-made world and concludes that it is just that: made by men and not women. The structure of buildings and the layout of cities in the modern world have almost always been determined by men, and the abstract and alien order of grids and columns that has resulted imprisons us in a way of living based on repression and, in some cases, oppression.
By contrast, it is women who create the interior spaces within these man-created environments. Comfortable, beautiful, seductive, and logical, these interiors act as areas of escape, self-definition, and sometimes even revelation.
Drawing on a wide range of architectural examples, from African mud huts to modern apartment complexes, Betsky explores what effects this division of architectural labor has had on our sensibilities and, indeed, on how we relate to one another as men and women. He believes that although it has always been thus, we do not have to live within this dichotomy between the exterior and the interior, the made and the lived, the masculine and the feminine, forever.
It is possible, says Betsky, to create "spaces of liberation, spaces in which we can re-construct our selves and our world."

Subject

Note

Bibliography (note)

ISBN

0688131670

LCCN

94034019

OCLC

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries