The City Never Sleeps

Architects and designers were treated as major cultural figures and published alongside other major literary figures, philosophers, activists and politicians. Playboy did not simply feature architects. They advised the reader on architecture and design. And they used architecture as prop for their sexual fantasies. Beds are designed for sleeping, not for the other events that occur there. Work, sex, watching movies, reading, the squashy surface seems comfortable and inviting but pains quickly arise when using the bed for more than just sleeping.

Hugh Hefner was the star of the most famous bed in America. Iconic for its unorthodox circular shape, Hefner used his bed as a canvas for far more than sleeping. Hefner’s dream was of the kitchen-less kitchen, a space of the ‘young connoisseur of meat and wines’ fused with technologies to make the bachelor seem more ‘normal’. For Hefner his ideal remained: mechanical gadgets rotated and transformed. In a review of Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture & Biopolitics by Beatriz Preciado, Marshall says “Borsani couches could become horizontal. The round bed could turn 360 degrees. Kitchens became theatres, swimming pools had retractable roofs, sliding walls, two-way mirrors, glass walls, and naked interior spaces as pornographic as any playboy bunny.

Hefner invented a new way of sitting. He introduced a new kind of horizontal worker in contrast to the vertical. Hefner worked on the floor. ‘I used the carpet as a gigantic desk. When I met artists, designers, and writers we used to crawl while we looked at our work.’ Playboy had invented a semi-professional space and a new style of cool worker in designer pyjamas. He blurred the boundaries between pleasure and work. His Playboy bed had a TV, radio, remote control system for drapes and lights, ambient lighting, was the technification of a non-monogamous horizontal pornotopia. The anti-female domesticity training given by Playboy, first to get rid of women after sex, second to eliminate their traces, and third to prevent women from taking back the kitchen…’ From these perspectives Hefner’s famous rotating bed is more like a military observatory or control room than a bed.”

“One touch of the rotating bed’s buttons allows Hef to create four different rooms. When a bed is orientated toward the wall, he faces the Hi-Fi channel and video, in front of a television console made of Philippine mahogany with a double screen that was manoeuvred from the bed and a stereo Hi-Fi Clairtone channel, with spherical speakers coated in aluminium … To the North , the bed faces the conversation zone created by Knoll sofa and a coffee table… To the West, the bed faces a fixed headrest, with a private bar and a table to eat at any time. And to the South, the bed is orientated toward the romantic glow that the Italian marble chimney produces.’ Tom Woolf described it as ‘No daylight. Within his sealed capsule, Hefner loses all sense of time and season.”

Playboy

Hefner re-imagined conventional bed use at the time, however no radical changes were truly made. Additions were made to an existing piece of furniture, perhaps to make things more convenient and accessible, but does this necessarily make it more comfortable? In plan the orientation shifts, however datums and surfaces remain static, forcing the user to adapt and introduce discomfort to events.

Tracey Emin’s “My Bed” exhibition in 1998 showcased the many events which occur in the bed, and the way in which it becomes a sanctuary for a recluse. Emin accumulated a repulsive mess in her bed after languishing in it for several days while suffering a severe depression brought upon by relationship difficulties. Our beds are not given the credit they deserve for their emotional healing properties, largely due to the physical discomfort that arises when using the bed for events other than sleeping.

We have designated areas to carry out such activities, however spending prolonged periods of time in the same location with the same lighting, seating, and materials quickly induces discomfort. The city never sleeps all at once, therefore the home should provide for scenarios that reflect the needs of the modern city dweller. What if our homes become a more ambiguous space of surfaces and volumes, to use as a canvas however we desire? Does this achieve comfort?

The previous model represented the possibilities of the bed – a hard, interlocking rigid structure is combined with a soft, flexible padding. In this case, we explore whether the servicing could be contained within the flexible structure rather than the rigid forms.