ARTISTS
Playboy Architecture, 1953-1979
Founded in Chicago in 1953, the magazine Playboy combined the art of seduction with the arts of architecture and design to create a revolutionary new cocktail for readers. Playboy featured interviews and articles about architects including Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe and Buckminster Fuller alongside photos of the “girl next door,” creating archetypal and indelible images of postwar life in America. The exhibition Playboy Architecture, 1953-1979 shows how architecture and design played a crucial role in creating the Playboy fantasy and in turn how Playboy came to influence the world of architecture.
The exhibition features original photographs and films, published and unpublished architectural renderings, design objects and interviews with architects and editors from the magazine’s inception in 1953 through the 1970s. A central feature of the Elmhurst exhibition of Playboy Architecture is a new staging of Mies van der Rohe’s McCormick House as the ultimate Playboy bachelor pad, with examples of iconic mid-century design and furnishings.
The exhibition is curated by Professor Beatriz Colomina in collaboration with the Ph.D. program of the School of Architecture and the Media and Modernity program at Princeton University and was exhibited previously in the Netherlands at Bureau Europa (Maastricht).
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Founded in Chicago in 1953, the magazine Playboy combined the art of seduction with the arts of architecture and design to create a revolutionary new cocktail for readers. Playboy featured interviews and articles about architects including Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe and Buckminster Fuller alongside photos of the “girl next door,” creating archetypal and indelible images of postwar life in America. The exhibition Playboy Architecture, 1953-1979 shows how architecture and design played a crucial role in creating the Playboy fantasy and in turn how Playboy came to influence the world of architecture.
The exhibition features original photographs and films, published and unpublished architectural renderings, design objects and interviews with architects and editors from the magazine’s inception in 1953 through the 1970s. A central feature of the Elmhurst exhibition of Playboy Architecture is a new staging of Mies van der Rohe’s McCormick House as the ultimate Playboy bachelor pad, with examples of iconic mid-century design and furnishings.
The exhibition is curated by Professor Beatriz Colomina in collaboration with the Ph.D. program of the School of Architecture and the Media and Modernity program at Princeton University and was exhibited previously in the Netherlands at Bureau Europa (Maastricht).
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