Bedrooms are, or should be, used for a fairly narrow range of activities, such as sleeping or recuperating from illness. An activity, seemingly unacknowledged in design discussions, is sex. While this may be embarrassing for clients, an architect, like a doctor, must make discussing these things comfortable when planning a home.
So, what should we not have in bedrooms? Televisions, computers, and other things that may detract our attention from the tasks at hand, so to speak, should not be in the bedroom. An alarming trend in American b
edroom design is to make it ever larger and more inclusive: The "master suite" is now so large and complex that it can be used to run a medium-sized business.
What should we have? I think it is fun to have some sort of visual "encouragement" in the bedroom. I like the sign (see upper photo) that must have been some sort of filling station (or ice cream parlor?) direction, "squeeze trigger for pressure". I also like a set of hand-painted wood signs I found at the curb in New York, "amateur", "all male", and "bondage" (lower photo). Given their color, they must have been painted in the mid 1980s. These must have described the films found at an adult bookstore, which were under attack during the Giuliani administration. You can rearrange them as you wish!
As I have mentioned previously, I volunteer at the Art Institute of Chicago. This past weekend, a patron spoke with me. She brings her kids to the museum and discusses subjects to which they may not normally be exposed or, if exposed, only negatively. She recently brought to the museum a neighbor's nine-year-old boy, in addition to her own children.
The woman said they were looking at a painting she described as portraying two nude women on a bed, one pregnant. They were warm towards each other. The woman asked, referring to the full-bellied one, "what's going on here?" One of her children said, "she's pregnant", to which the boy replied, "gross!" The woman said to him, "that's not gross, it's beautiful!" Then she asked the children, "what kind of relationship do (the two women) have?" One of her kids said, "they're lesbians", to which the boy said, "gross!". And so on....
The Marsden Hartley painting "Madawaska -- Acadian Light-Heavy" (1940) (see photo above), was originally a nude. A male nude at that time was virtually unacceptable and is still rare. Mr. Hartley added a "posing strap" to make the painting more palatable. (By doing so, he anticipated similar treatment of male models in men's "fitness" magazines by a decade.) Even with the strap, Mr. Hartley challenges the viewer to look at a man in an admiring way, similar to that reserved for female subjects.
A purpose of art museums is to give us different perspectives on common experiences. Sexuality, for example, is often portrayed in ambivalent ways in our daily lives. Nursing women are tolerated, sexy ladies are lusted after and condemned in the same breath, and homosexuality is debated. Not all artists are progressive (i.e. Thomas Hart Benton, who did not like what he perceived as pervasive left wing/gayness in the New York art scene), but even "reactionary" works are thoughtful and thought provoking.
Bedrooms are, or should be, used for a fairly narrow range of activities, such as sleeping or recuperating from illness. An activity, seemingly unacknowledged in design discussions, is sex. While this may be embarrassing for clients, an architect, like a doctor, must make discussing these things comfortable when planning a home.
edroom design is to make it ever larger and more inclusive: The "master suite" is now so large and complex that it can be used to run a medium-sized business.
