strat coffman*





 


 
Sliding pressure wall
Padded rocking door and peep wall
Fisting doors




Typical guidelines for railings in commercial buildings. These help encode appropriate kinds of touching.














Averaged body dimensions from Architects’ Data, 1936.



































Silvery, smooth, and chilled–an ambient armor surrounds us, condensing where and how we touch the built world. Bars, rails, handles, plates. These common commercial building fixtures solicit our caresses–they are how we gain a handle or find footing. While they are designed to be easily sanitized, scrubbed of touching traces, they unavoidably collect our fingerprints, oils, germs, and heat, tethering us to one another, in anonymity. Every door knob we share with a strangely intimate community of strangers. Erotica Generica allows these binding agents to multiply, inflate, slip down the wall, shifting beyond their mandate to secure and expedite. The work unearths the latent erotic exchanges these fixtures, and architectures of the generic, host. What can happen when we wake up to how intimate it is to handle a building?

Erotica Generica sits somewhere between an appliance petting zoo and a softened workplace lounge, where architecture relishes in, rather than repressing, its capacity to open pathways of anonymous contact, in sharing heat, swapping glances and bacteria, and trading pressure. Elasticated push plates wobble across a jamb, a flock of knobs slide through the wall, plush panic bars assemble into a clicking bed, and libidinal architectural energies are spawned.

2023
Exhibited at the Liberty Research Annex
Ann Arbor, MI

TEAM
Strat Coffman

Martin Rodriguez (Design & Fabrication)
Osama Sukkar (Design & Fabrication)
Jiabao Zhu (Design & Fabrication)

Sabrina Ramsay (Sewing Design & Fabrication)
Bryan Wilson (Sewing Design & Fabrication)

*additional help by Chris Humphrey, Philippe Kame, Sydney Sinclair, Sophie Mỹ Hạnh Nguyễntrần, and Rich Coffman