As the architect Reyner Banham pointed out in 1960, Playboy had done more for architecture and design in the United States than had Home and Garden magazine. From 1953, almost every issue of Playboy had included a full-color spread on architecture, featuring the magazine’s own interior design and decor projects.
While other US magazines like Ladies Home Journal or House Beautifullaunched a postwar crusade against the architecture of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier—believing it to be foreign to the American tradition—Playboy was publishing glowing articles on Mies, Walter Gropius, Philip Johnson, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Wallace K. Harrison, and its pages were a medium for the “simple, functional and modern” designs of Eames, Saarinen, Nelson, Bertoia, and Knoll. During the Cold War, Playboy had become a platform for spreading domestic architecture and design as masculine consumer goods for the new American popular culture.
Far from questioning the validity of the representation of Hugh Hefner as an architect and defending architecture as an exclusively professional or academic practice, what I propose here is to validate the photograph’s performative power to produce meaning and accept Hefner’s pose as a deliberate declaration of principles.
Here is the risky initial hypothesis that I will test in these pages: It is possible to see Hefner as a pop architect, and the Playboy empire as an architectural multimedia production company: a paradigmatic example of the transformation of architecture through the media in the twentieth century. If Beatriz Colomina is right in pointing out that “what makes modern architecture modern is not its functionalism or use of materials, but its engagement with the media,”4 we can affirm that not only did Playboy make an exemplary contribution to the “modernization” of architecture during the Cold War, but it also operated as an authentic multimedia architectural production company. One, in fact, that spread its model of urban, postdomestic, sexual utopia through an unprecedented dissemination spanning the press to the Chicago and Los Angeles mansions, as well as clubs, hotels, travel agencies, merchandising, television programs, film, video, the Internet, and videogames.
Playboy had managed to invent what Hefner called a “Disneyland for adults.” And Hefner himself was the pop architect of this multimedia erotic cabaret. He had somehow understood that in order to sculpt a new masculine subjectivity, one had to design a habitat: to create a space and invent a series of practices and uses of the domestic that could function as technohabits of the male body.