Sexy Skyscrapers

It was a few days ago that I stumbled upon the designs for an in-progress condo complex in Mississauga, Ontario (pictured to the left). Dubbed the "Marilyn Monroe" buildings (actual name: Absolute), these voluptuous towers will be the tallest on the skyline for that region.

It's strange to think of a building as sexy, curvaceous, something with junk in its trunk, but it's hard to deny that these towers radiate a certain come-hither coyness. The design is almost bashful, as if the building is at once beckoning you and pulling away.

It leads me to wonder how something that seems as human-centric as "sexy" can be applied to inanimate and synthetic products--everything from vehicles to buildings to Apple computers to LCD TV screens--and what the criteria is for a sexiness in our objects.

The obvious candidate when speaking about man-made products with sex appeal is the car. Cars, with their gleaming, buffed, and curvy exteriors and their slinky, padded and form-fitting interiors seem ripe for the infusion of sex appeal. It could be a cultural thing sure, but I think might be something more to it than that.

I don't own a car, haven't driven since I was 18, and feel myself far removed from anything remotely resembling car culture, and yet when someone points to a Porsche parked on the street and describes it as "sexy" I can understand what they're talking about. Strangely, it is kind of sexy.

That the Absolute condos have been likened to Marilyn Monroe is telling. There's something about the design of them that makes you kind of want to run your hands down the length of the building. We enjoy shiny to dull, curvaceous to angular, fluid to broken, slick to marbled. But not every object with curves and busts elicits this same sexiness. A Coca-Cola bottle, for example, with its hourglass figure doesn't really seem all that sexy.

I suppose the natural endpoint to all of this would be the day when these objects cease to simply have sex appeal and become sex objects themselves--like Real Dolls, those life-size synthetic humans that exist to satisfy sexual needs. This is the ultimate culmination of the object as sex, but does it have to be limited to only dolls?

Maybe we'll see a blurring, when the distinction between objects described as "sexy" and sex objects themselves disappears. The day that drivers have relationships with their cars, take their laptops out on dates, buy their new wine glasses a drink. Perhaps one day, far in the future, some hormone-laced adolescent will look up at the Absolute condos and fall in love for the first time.