Transurban Sex: The Architecturalization of Romance

Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation, Essay, expanding design practices, Miguel Mesa, No Density, Politics and economics

Architecture&Gender, Cultural agitator, Digital era, Digital identity, Digital technologies, Essay, Gender, Housing market, Interior design, LGBTQ, Network society, New citizen, New paradigms, New urbanism, New uses, Real Estate, Society, Transforming society, urban, Urban planning, Urban policies, Urbanism, USA

In the last decades, four simultaneous phenomena have revolutionized the way architecture participates in the making of sexuality: 1. The development of location-based dating media (such as Grindr); 2. Monopolized control of the distribution of adult films (MindGeek); 3. The financial crisis; and 4. The money-storing condominium towers with “helicopter views”. These four emerged in 2008 as a coordinated process that produced an unforeseen outcome: a shift from the desire for true sex to the collective assessment of verified sexuality. Post-2008, sex has progressively stopped being an interpersonal human transaction (in the US, interhuman intercourse has decreased at a consistent rate of 5% per decade; in Japan, half of the adult population claimed not to have engaged in interhuman intercourse in the past month) and has instead become an architectural business. This started as a process of urban atomization.