Playboy Architecture: 1953–1979 at the Elmhurst Art Museum
By FRANCK MERCURIO
“Playboy played an enormous role in introducing modern architecture and design to a mass audience,” asserts the provocative introduction to Playboy Architecture: 1953–1979 at the Elmhurst Art Museum. Aptly presented within the museum's midcentury wing, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the exhibition examines the influence of Hugh Hefner’s iconic magazine—best known for its pictorial centerfolds of sensuous playmates—on the design tastes of average Americans.
“In many ways [Playboy] made modern architecture and design accessible, desirable, and palatable to an American public that, in general, had been quite resistant to the idea,” said Beatriz Colomina, professor of architecture at Princeton University and curator of the exhibition.
According to Colomina, many Americans were suspicious of modern design during the postwar era, seeing it as foreign and even “communistic.” In the 1940s and 50s an influential group of European emigrées—including Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, and Marcel Breuer—had already begun to promote the principles of International Style modernism within American design schools, architecture firms, and art museum exhibitions. But it took longer for the general public to catch up and accept modern design in their everyday lives.
Attitudes eventually changed as modernism became popularized through various venues, including Playboy. “In my view, the magazine did more for modern architecture than any other institution, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Walker Art Center,” contends Colomina. “Seven million people read Playboy [each month during its heyday]. How many people were going to MoMA at that time? Maybe a few hundred thousand each year?”
Hefner took modernist design off the museum pedestal and presented it as a key element in the lifestyle of the sophisticated, urban bachelor. Indeed, the magazine was one of the first comprehensive lifestyle magazines. Its articles and advertisements—as well as its photographs of beautiful women—appealed to the aspirations of its largely straight male audience. Playboy gave its readers advice on what clothes to wear (Mod), what music to listen to (jazz), and what furniture to buy (modernist)—all in the quest for seduction.
The Elmhurst exhibition focuses largely on the physical spaces that reflect this aspirational lifestyle. It showcases the designs of bachelor pads, townhouses, and weekend hideaways published in the pages of Playboy during the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Each of these spaces embraced a modernist design aesthetic meant to aid the reader in the seduction of women. One particular article from May 1954 highlights the role of the well-designed bachelor pad in the process of persuasion. “Playboy’s Progress” outlines a series of numbered steps—spread across an apartment’s floor plan—that lead the bachelor and his date from the front door and into the bedroom.
“Playboy wasn’t simply providing an array of seductive images, but rather analyzed the architecture of seduction [for the reader],” explained Colomina. “It seems that the sophisticated playboy needed to know much more about modern design than about women. So, there are no articles about the psychology of women, but you definitely needed to know about modern design if you were going to be a successful seducer!”
In addition to renderings, photographs, and scale models of bachelor pads—including the interiors of Hefner’s private plane—the exhibition features a series of modernist chairs designed by Eames, Bertoia, and Saarinen. Each chair sits empty on a pedestal (as proper museum convention dictates), but is accompanied by a photo or advertisement reproduced from vintage issues of Playboy showing the chairs occupied, either by voluptuous females or amorous couples. Within this context, the chairs become objects of desire—almost equally coveted as the women who occupy them. Sex sells (literally).
This leads to one of the blindspots in the exhibition. Nowhere does Playboy Architecture directly address the objectification of women in the pages of Playboy and their exploitation in selling modernism to the American masses. Of course, the debate over whether Playboy exploited women (see Gloria Steinen’s influential exposé “A Bunny’s Tale” from 1963) or provided them with opportunities (see former Playboy bunny Candace Collins Jordan’s blog “Candid Candace”) has been ongoing from the time the magazine was first published. In recent years, the argument has become more nuanced as women scholars, such as Carrie Pitzulo (Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy, 2011) and Elizabeth Fraterrigo (Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in America, 2011), have written about the influence of Playboy on American culture. Even so, the Elmhurst exhibition could have benefited from a more robust feminist critique.
Sexual politics aside, the exhibition wraps up, fittingly, with a scale model of Hefner’s famous circular bed enclosed behind a kind of peek-a-boo curtain.
“Playboy Architecture, I think, ultimately turns to the bed,” said Colomina. “It becomes a kind of control room where you have everything you need, so you don’t ever have to leave it.”
Indeed, in his own house, Hefner converted this most intimate of spaces into his command center. Photographs from the 50s and 60s show Hefner editing the magazine from his bed strewn with articles, notes, photos, telephones, and ashtrays—a boudoir transformed into a Mad Men office. From his bed, Hefner built an empire and promoted the Playboy lifestyle, and in the process, popularized modern architecture and design with average Americans.
Playboy Architecture: 1953–1979 runs through August 28 at the Elmhurst Art Museum.