Making Love to Architecture

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a 25-year-old Swedish woman named Eija-Riitta Erklöff got married to the Berlin Wall. The ceremony on Groß-Ziethener Straße was witnessed by a small group of friends and was performed with the help of an understanding man who channeled vows on behalf of the wall. As the pioneer of the term ‘Objectum-Sexuality’, Eija-Riitta put a name to her attraction to objects, buildings and structures that she sees as sexual, loving and reciprocal – insofar as all objects are, in her view, sentient beings with souls.

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a book was published that been defaced, censored and caused fascination ever since. The ‘Hypnerotomachia Poliphili’(The Strife of Love in a Dream) is part love story, part architectural treatise, describing a dream journey in which the main character, Poliphilo, searches for his lost love, Polia, in a woodland landscape populated by distended and mutated classical ruins, hieroglyphs, multilingual messages, futuristic machines, parties, feasts and nubile nymphs.

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we started to dig a circular ditch in a woodland west of Copenhagen.

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While we were casting a giant concrete ruin on a moonless night in a floodlit woodland clearing, the world described in Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and the descriptions of Eija-Riitta’s love for the Berlin Wall no longer seemed so bizarre and remote. Over the last days our rhythm became more and more closely tied to the behaviour of the concrete ruin we were casting. The concrete’s consistency would determine when we could rest – if we dared to err from its own rhythm and rules, there would be serious consequences: it would rupture its formwork if too liquid, it would crumble if too dry, it would change colour and refuse to harden if mixed for too long.

The cement dust dried and blushed our skin and whitened our hair.The cycles of stirring, pouring, and thrusting rods into the concrete began to gnaw on our aching joints. As the giant structure took form in the woods, it blocked our path and forced us into awkward positions, as if it were now dictating the terms of its own construction as we straddled its growing mass. But a bond of mutual dependence had formed, and now there was never for a moment any question in our minds of abandoning the labour of love.

 

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FORGOTTEN FOLLIES OF SØLYST