Beatriz Colomina, Professor of Architecture at Princeton, recently gave an interview to Architect Magazine on the current exhibition of her thesis—“Playboy Architecture 1953-1979”—at the Elmhurst Museum in Chicago. Her interest in the correlation between Playboy and architecture began nearly thirty years ago with her exploration on the role of gender and architecture in the work of Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier. From there, she began to observe numerous parallels between Playboy and the world of design.
Since the beginning of production of Playboy, the magazine has featured the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Buckminster Fuller, and Mies van der Rohe – to name a few. "Going through them [Playboy], we realized what no one seems to have realized before: that they were full of architecture and design from the very beginning," Colomina has said. Her research ultimately speculates how Playboy has been able to present architecture in such a way that it has, in turn, actually influenced modern design.
Check out the interview by Architect Magazine, here.
