2023 - ongoing
ANN ARBOR / LOS ANGELES
Erotica Generica
A field of architectural touch-points exploring the intimacies embedded in standard fixtures
SCALE
custom fixtures; multi-station configurations
TYPE
site-specific installation / performance interface
SITES
Liberty Research Annex (Ann Arbor), MAK Center for Art and Architecture (Los Angeles)
SCOPE
design, fabrication
Sliding pressure wallPadded rocking door and peep wallFisting doors
Typical guidelines for railings in commercial buildings. These help encode appropriate kinds of touching.
Erotica Generica queers the standardized fixtures of commercial architecture—door knobs, push plates, panic bars, stair rails—exposing them as intimate sites of transfer between bodies. It’s a study of these objects as conduits for heat, oils, germs, pressure, and movement, asking what happens when we treat everyday hardware not as sterile, utilitarian tools, but as soft thresholds where strangers meet through touch.
Averaged body dimensions from Architects’ Data, 1936
The work manifests as a surreal landscape of elasticated push plates that wobble across door jambs, plush panic bars arranged into clicking beds, and flocks of knobs that slide through walls. These hybrid fixtures occupy a space between appliance, sculpture, and furniture. Here, architecture relishes its capacity to facilitate anonymous contact: to share heat, trade pressure, and carry traces from one body to another. Erotica Generica invites viewers to wake up to the intimate choreography embedded in the act of simply handling a building.
Exhibition view, Entourage, MAK Center for Architecture & Art, Los Angeles, 2024.
TEAM
Strat Coffman
Design and fabrication assistants: Martin Rodriguez, Osama Sukkar,
Jiabao Zhu, Sabrina Ramsay,
Bryan Wilson
*additional help by Chris Humphrey, Philippe Kame, Sydney Sinclair, Sophie Mỹ Hạnh Nguyễntrần, and Rich Coffman