A Man-Made World? : Architecture...

“What’s this about?” a friend asks as he plucks from my desk a copy of Aaron Betsky’s “Building Sex: Men, Women, Architecture and the Construction of Sexuality.” My friend, you understand, has no interest in architecture and his idea of critical discourse is the Penthouse Forum, so I can only assume that he’s drawn to this book because the word sex is emblazoned on the cover in red letters three inches tall while the word building all but disappears.

“I think it says that the Empire State Building is a boy,” I joke, “and that the Hollywood Bowl is a girl.”

Later, I read the book and discover that my flippant remark comes absurdly close to the truth. Betsky, a writer who specializes in architecture and who was recently appointed design curator at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, has written a 200-page survey of Western civilization in which he hammers us with the notion that anatomy is destiny: Men build penises and women build wombs.

Here’s how the book begins:

“ ‘Why do I always feel out of place when I’m walking down the Champs-Elysees?’ a woman asked me when I was waxing enthusiastic about the grandeur of Paris. ‘Because you are a woman,’ I responded. The Champs-Elysees, I went on to explain, was designed by men. It represents their power. You might even say that it represents the body of a man.”

Betsky’s assertion begs a question: If women are compelled by their gender to feel all icky and out of sorts in places built by men, where on earth can they be at ease?

Women, Betsky suggests, can happily loll in the parks found on either side of the Champs-Elysees “These were places where nature was rebuilt in a domesticated version,” he writes, conveniently forgetting that the landscape architects were also men. “Here grand purpose gave way to sensual but contained delights. . . . Here culture reigned, people drifted in and out, wares were once sold, and men could find prostitutes. This was the place of women.”

Closer to home, the fair sex may take refuge from phallic skyscrapers and intimidating colonnades in--where else?--the shopping mall. “Space dissolves; textures emerge. This is a world that we think of as feminine. . . . The shopping mall has become the female temple.”

And then, of course, there is the home where women have long been, to borrow one of Betsky’s favorite verbs, “imprisoned” and where they’ve busied themselves re-creating the womb. In a typical passage, Betsky concludes: “The interior became even more the only place where the woman belonged and where she was lost in her own sensuous labyrinth.”

In case you’re not up on critical theory, I should point out that this business of viewing the world through the bifurcated lens of gender is not Betsky’s invention. “Building Sex” draws on the work of many feminist theorists including Beatriz Colomina, editor of an essay collection, “Sexuality & Space” (Princeton Architectural Press: 1992), in which the idea that buildings have gender is raised and thoroughly discussed. For most of the critics in that book, issues of masculinity and femininity are central, but rarely do they fall into place so neatly as they do for Betsky.

Perhaps Betsky is too dependent on psychoanalytical interpretation. “Following standard Freudian doctrine, Erik Erikson pointed out that each woman shelters an interior world in her body (the womb) and thus replicates this activity in the real world,” he writes in “Of Penises and Tents,” his first chapter. “A man, on the other hand, has no such space. . . . He does, however, have a penis. This appendage sticks out into space and extends its reach even farther through urination or ejaculation.”

One expects, and ardently hopes, that Betsky will quickly debunk this sort of reasoning. Instead, he plows manfully through history, selectively citing forms that reinforce it.

The pyramids: “The most salient point about them is their shape.” They exhibit an “inflexible, unusable thrust upward.” Early Mediterranean interiors: “sophisticated, gauzy, and ephemeral spaces that women defined.” The hearth: a place where “women’s space became the space created by the relationship between the all-purpose spoon and the face,” unless it happens to be a central hearth designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in which case it is a “phallic organized fact.”

Betsky should be commended for assembling a fascinating collection of sources for his book; the bibliography is an invaluable tool for anyone interested in this vein of research. And, periodically, Betsky forgets about his mission and writes a lovely, lucid paragraph describing, say, an ideal city painted by an early 16th-Century Italian. But he betrays the richness of his material by imposing on it exactly the sort of rigid theoretical models that he claims men, since Roman times, have been using to flatten and control unruly terrain.

Betsky’s worst habit is to view historical buildings with late 20th-Century eyes, not even attempting to understand the world as those who lived in it might have. For example, he either dismisses architectural ornament as a symbol of male addiction to artifice or applauds it as a healthy sign of femininity, but he never acknowledges that ornament was and remains a meaningful language. Whenever Betsky sees a column he cries “phallus.” He never considers the somewhat more interesting theory that the column symbolizes the whole human body--the base as feet and the capital as head--possibly bound in preparation for ceremonial sacrifice. He never ponders Caryatids, the stone women who not only bear the weight of some classical buildings, but also support a history rife with sexual intrigue. Such detail would needlessly complicate Betsky’s simple bipolar equation.

As it turns out, Betsky has crammed his pages with sexual stereotypes to demonstrate that we must now, at long last, change the world. We should, he advises in the final chapter, build structures that are not so easily circumscribed. We should fashion something he labels “queer space.”

Betsky confesses that he doesn’t really know how “queer space” looks. The point, though, is to liberate ourselves from the simplistic interpretations and lazy dichotomies to which Betsky has just devoted an entire book.

“It would not be the proud erection of complete and monumental objects. It would not be a tapestry of connection woven out of and through the world,” he explains. “It would be ourselves dissolving into the communal construction of an always changing world. . . . It would be a free space in which we can construct ourselves together.”

By contrast, in “The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History,” Betsky’s labored conclusion is embedded in professor Dolores Hayden’s text as a given. Of course the built world was largely financed, designed and constructed by men. However, argues Hayden, it can be reinterpreted and reshaped to tell the story of women and minorities.

To Hayden, the people who work or live in a place are the ones who define it. She assumes “that every inhabitant is an active participant in the making of the city, not just one hero-designer.” Hayden, who teaches architecture, urbanism and American studies at Yale, is concerned with preserving and telling the stories that have been bulldozed, paved over and ignored. Where Betsky commandeers all of history and boils it down to a simple equation, Hayden takes a few moments in the life of one city, Los Angeles, and builds on those moments until they have almost universal significance.

The strongest portion of “The Power of Place” is the saga of Biddy Mason, a slave who walked (with her three children) behind the wagon of her master from Mississippi to Utah, and then on to California. In 1856, Mason went to court to obtain her freedom, subsequently developed a lucrative practice as a midwife, and became the first African American woman property owner in Los Angeles.

By 1986, the site of Mason’s homestead between Spring Street and Broadway in Downtown L.A. was a parking lot. Hayden and her organization, also called the Power of Place, in cooperation with the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency began a project to commemorate Mason’s life and accomplishments. The result was a number of posters and installations, most notably an 81-foot-long wall running along the rear of a new shopping arcade on Spring Street between Fourth and Fifth Streets, that tells Mason’s story together with the early history of Los Angeles.

The main point of Hayden’s book is to promote the use of didactic installations and public artworks as a form of historic preservation and restoration. Hayden’s purpose is to create innovative monuments that allow a city’s buildings, sidewalks, and even its parking lots to teach passersby about what has been lost. Arguably, what Hayden advocates is not so different from Betsky’s “queer space.” She calls for a do-it-yourself answer to high-powered architecture. Hayden, however, is able to tell the reader how to go about, as Betsky would say, “constructing ourselves together.”

I offer Hayden only one suggestion. The cover typography on Betsky’s book will surely attract new readers to the subject of architecture. Perhaps if Hayden’s book featured the word power in huge red type, she would be able to do the same.