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 to clarify 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 different paths highlight how most expected erotic dimension are far from being perceivable, while the most effective ones are strongly related to the individual most profound desires and unconscious feature that the designer can, indeed, explore and concretise. Furthermore, this final alternative – leading to the possibility of designing “latent aphrodisiac virtualities” – also exploits the natural condition of forms: their being potentially endlessly significant, displaying different meanings for the (informed, in this case) individual, and the rest of the casual users.