{ dildo-architecture }
The notion of prosthesis is crucial for developping an understanding of the role of architecture as a multiplier of (gendered) ideology. As Paul B. Preciado argues, hegemonic masculinity is prosthetic: it is a symbolic yet material, and ideologized add-on, a dildo, operating on a multiscalar yet monolingual language that only speaks ‘to reproduce itself’ from body to territory. ‘The dildo-building as structure is the only model upon which the development of the erect urban skeleton has been developed’, he argues. Indeed, he signals ‘dildoarchitecture’ as foundational practice of patriarchal societies:
“The city has a man’s body. In the city, buildings are also masculine bodies, dildo-structures reclaiming the power of the phallus in specific enclaves. The dildo-building is the empirical reinscription of phallic trascendental power in social urban space. Whether it is an industry, a home, or a ministry, every building is a sacrament of the heterosexual institution of the reproduction of love-power”.
The prosthetic logic of architectures of power and its relationship to the body politic of hegemonic masculinity is intensified to the extreme in Spatrisano’s building. The building operates in the manner of a giant dildo in public space, much in the spirit graphically embodied in contemporary buildings like London’s 30 St Mary Axe, commonly known as ‘The Gherkin’ or Barcelona’s Torre Glòries: they all produce an urban, prosthetic masculinity, a social apparatus reassuring and re-establishing the material exploitation of one sex over the other in such a way that the sheer genitality and nature of this imagery is completely naturalised and thus, paradoxically invisible.
