INFORMATION of 13 February 2014

Transcription

1 INFORMATION of 13 February 2014 Frankfurt am Main PLAYBOY ARCHITECTURE, February 20 April 2014 Deutsches Architekturmuseum DAM, Schaumainkai 43, Frankfurt am Main, First Floor EXHIBITION OPENING: Fri, 14 February 2014, PRESS CONFERENCE: Thu, 13 February 2014, GUIDED TOURS: On Saturdays and Sundays Miss November in B.K.F Hardoy Chair, Grupo Austral, Playboy, November 1954 Playboy Enterprises International, Inc. OPEN: Tue, Thu Sun \ Wed \ Mon closed ABOUT THE EXHIBITION 2 SUBJECT AREAS IN THE EXHIBITION 3 COINCIDING PROGRAM 5 PUBLICATION / IMPRINT 5 COMING SOON / CONTACT 6

2 PLAYBOY MAGAZINE AS INFLUENTIAL PROMOTER OF MODERNISM From February 15, 2014 Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM) in Frankfurt/Main is hosting the exhibition Playboy Architecture, , curated by architectural historian Beatriz Colomina from Princeton University. Having previously been on show in Maastricht and Rotterdam, a concentrated version of the exhibition will be on display for the first time in a German-speaking country. The exhibition highlights the major role the US magazine Playboy played in the dissemination and promotion of avant-garde architecture from the 1950s through the 1970s. The magazine featured articles on innovative and visionary architectural designs from the first edition in 1953 through the late 1970s, thus becoming an important conveyor of avant-garde design currents. With original editions of Playboy, models, furniture, and design objects the show traces how a magazine that is known primarily for erotic photography introduced a mass audience to the world of modern architecture and design. Famous for its centerfolds and nude images, the magazine stands just as much for highbrow articles and interviews by and with famous intellectuals. With regard to literature, music, the fine arts and, not least of all, sexual morality and political issues, for example, the magazine adopted a progressive, pioneering stance. The fact that it also published numerous articles about avant-garde architecture, wacky futuristic interiors, and design classics, is less well known. Leafing through the magazines one comes across architecture icons such as Moshe Safdie s Habitat 67 complex or Buckminster Fuller s utopian architectural visions. In between one encounters series of photographs, in which designer chairs by Charles Eames, Eero Saarinen, and Harry Bertoia steal the show from the playmates sprawling over them. Alongside seductive images, interviews with and portraits of renowned architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright theoretically also provided access to avant-garde architecture. Playboy also featured designs, illustrated with colorful sketches, of the perfect retreat for a weekend for two and designer bachelors apartments. The magazines served as a source of inspiration for readers when it came to designing their own four walls and contained specific guidelines on what to buy, such that anyone could enjoy their own urban, progressive interior. This way subscribers were raised in contemporary living and the art of furnishing also introduced to the male domain for the first time: Design-savvy bachelors became a role model for an entire generation. Playboy s promotion of modern architecture and design transcended American shelter magazines, which favored traditional furniture and vernacular architecture. Given its extraordinary distribution, it actually did more than any professional architectural magazine, or even the Museum of Modern Art, in championing the cultural importance of modern design to a mass audience. In retrospect, Playboy was arguably the single most influential promoter of modernism to an American audience. PRESSINFORMATION Page 2

3 EXHIBITION IS ORGANIZED IN FIVE SUBJECT AREAS The exhibition is organized in five subject areas which reveal how architecture and design were brought to readers in a myriad of ways. The individual chapters boast numerous illustrations and transport visitors to visionary architectural designs that go far beyond the conservative idyll of the single family dwelling. Numerous pieces of furniture, models, video clips, and music round out the Playboy universe. Archive The heart of the exhibition is what is known as the Archive, in which an original copy of every edition of Playboy from 1953 through 1979 can be perused. Bachelor Pad At the very center of the Playboy lifestyle was the pad. Conceived in response to the generic suburban home, the Playboy Pad was designed for professional bachelors. Playboy began with speculative designs for the architecture of seduction: an urban penthouse, townhouse, or vacation home. A married reader could fantasize about such an escape pad in the city or even carve out a small quasi-bachelor space within their suburban home. By the 1960s, the emphasis shifted from offering imaginary Playboy Pads to documenting real ones. Many found houses and interiors were absorbed into the Playboy fantasy by spectacular photographs with seductive models eagerly demonstrating the architecture s potential for entertainment, leisure, and, above all, temptation. Playboy s Penthouse Apartment, a lavish 12-page vision of the ultimate bachelor pad, published in the September and October issues of 1956, was the most popular feature up to that time even surpassing the Playmates and it drew hundreds of letters from readers requesting information on where they could buy the furnishings pictured in the layout. Speculative renderings of Playboy Pads in the early issues soon gave way to features on real pads. Radical houses by a wide range of prominent architects were appropriated as evidence of the new lifestyle. Profiles of these architects, along with literary figures, politicians, and other model playboys educated and inspired readers, as did buying guides, and tutorials on equipment. Chairs One of the simplest and most conspicuous ways for the playboy to show his sophistication was by modernizing his apartment with contemporary furniture. Playboy filled its pads and centefolds with chairs by such designers as Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen, Harry Bertoia, Roberto Matta, Frank Gehry and Archizoom, guiding readers in the procurement and positioning of modernism s most fashionable furniture. Photographs of nude women in modern chairs enticed men to buy the furniture. The chairs facilitated intimacy Saarinen s womb chair and Archizoom s Mies Chair embracing desirous Playmates and were seductive in themselves Saarinen s tulip chair mirroring the arc of a woman s back and the organic sections of Matta s Malitte chair engaging themselves provocatively. PRESSINFORMATION Page 3

4 City The playboy is urban. He does not look for entertainment out-of-doors thrashing through thorny thickets or splashing about in fast flowing streams. Instead he operates from an office building, a high-rise penthouse, and, in the twilight hours of the electric night, from the chicest bars and clubs. Hefner s hometown of Chicago shaped the Playboy experience more than any other city. Its architecture inspired the imaginary bachelor pads and exclusive key clubs, its streetscapes and vistas were the backdrop for shopping sprees and speeding sports cars. Playboy would steadily roam cities around the world through a series of illustrated features. Its portrayal of the city as the glamorous electric background for foreplay was paralleled by realistic urban critiques attending to crime, pollution, and racial tensions. Literature There is some truth to the cliché that one reads Playboy for the articles. The magazine featured many of the decades most popular authors, such as Ray Bradbury, Ian Fleming and John Cheever. The genre, style, and subject of the stories varied, offering readers a collection of imaginary lives, fantastical characters, and futuristic cities. These contributions were both a means of escape and an opportunity to explore real issues urban, ecological, political, and social. Playboy addressed similar themes in its interviews, as well. The Playboy Interview acquainted readers with the views of popular and provocative intellectuals, politicians, writers, artists and architects such as Buckminster Fuller and, more controversially, Albert Speer. Through interviews and literature, Playboy both educated the bachelor and reinforced the magazine s cultural agenda, all while establishing an aura of respectability. Architecture Playboy featured the work of numerous architects, broadcasting their opinions on themes ranging from furniture, housing and city planning to the Great Society, and even holding up the designers as exemplars of the Playboy lifestyle. The profiles on Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe, contributions from Buckminster Fuller and Richard Neutra, and a feature on Ant Farm s House of the Future affirm Playboy s deep familiarity with architecture culture. This awareness was echoed within architecture itself, where Playboy illustrates the debates around postwar modernism. The most influential historian of modern architecture, Sigfried Giedion, referred disparagingly to late 1950s architecture as playboy architecture, architecture treated as playboys treat life, jumping from one sensation to another and quickly bored with everything. While Reyner Banham, the guru historian of the sixties generation, lauded Playboy s combination of architecture, popular culture and gadgetry; and their pin-ups as one of America s greatest gifts to Western culture. PRESSINFORMATION Page 4

5 Sat/Sun, 4 p.m. Open guided tours by Yorck Förster; admission to the museum EUR 9 Euro/ EUR 4,50 reduced 6 March 2014, 19.00, Auditorium DAM MOVIE SCREENING AND TALK Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel, 2009 (engl. Original) with the director Brigitte Berman PUBLICATION Accompanying the Exhibition appears a reprint of the special supplement Playboy Architecture, in Volume Magazine Nr. 33, english, Softcover, 31 pages, size 20 x 26,6 cm Museum shop prize: 5,- EUR, not in bookstores available IMPRINT Playboy Architecture, February 20 April 2014, Deutsches Architekturmuseum, first Floor Director Peter Cachola Schmal Curatorial Team Beatriz Colomina, Britt Eversole, Federica Vannucchi, Margo Handwerker, Pep Aviles, Marc Britz, Daria Ricci, Princeton University School of Architecture Curatorial Assistance DAM Evelyn Steiner Registrar Wolfgang Welker Public relations Stefanie Lampe, Susanne Lehmann Administration Inka Plechaty, Jacqueline Brauer Museum education Christina Budde, Yorck Förster Design Exhibition design: EventArchitectuur, Amsterdam Graphic design: Experimental Jetset, Amsterdam Soundtrack: My Little Underground, Amsterdam Production of the exhibition design Deserve Raum und Medien Design, Mario Lorenz, Wiesbaden Buro Floor, Maastricht Inditec Display & Messegestaltung, Bad Camberg Translations Jeremy Gaines Invitation, Poster, Banner Gardeners, Frankfurt Exhibition realisation Eike Laeuen, Marina Barry, Angela Tonner, Gerhard Winkler, Michael Reiter, Jörn Schön, Jannik Hoffmann, Karsten Kraft, Felix Imiola under the direction of Christian Walter. Paper Restoration Valerian Wolenik PRESSINFORMATION Page 5

6 Realisation and first venue Bureau Europa, Maastricht The first version of the exhibition in Maastricht was iniated and developed by Beatriz Colomina and Guus Beumer Consignor Museum Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt am Main Knoll International Manufactum Warenhaus, Frankfurt am Main, Manufactum GmbH & Co. KG, Waltrop Acknowledgments Additional thanks are due to: Joseph Bedford, Ron and Suzanne Dirsmith, Daniela Fabricius, Lee Froehlich, Vanessa Grossman, Yetunde Oliaya, Enrique Ramirez und/and Molly Steenson In Cooperation with: PROGRAM IN MEDIA + MODERNITY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY Press images for announcements and reports during the exhibition period at 24 May 24 August 2014 Bridging Ostend Points of time at closest range 10 May 19 October 2014 Mission: Postmodern Heinrich Klotz and the Wunderkammer DAM DEUTSCHES ARCHITEKTURMUSEUM Press & Public Relations Schaumainkai 43, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, Stefanie Lampe, M.A. T +49 (0) \ F +49 (0) stefanie.lampe@stadt-frankfurt.de Susanne Lehmann, M.A. T +49 (0) \ F +49 (0) Susanne.lehmann@stadt-frankfurt.de PRESSINFORMATION Page 6