Abstract
Culture is the beam of light flowing through the built environment and it is the medium that bends the stream of architecture and design. Cough, Spit, Swallow (2018) depicts three conventional sites of ritualized physical contact (intimacy) that have created unique, specialized, and broadly recognizable furniture: the exam table, the dental chair, and the glory hole. The work both satirizes conventional propriety and shows us a method of reading the messages inscribed in the seemingly mundane.
Highlights
Culture is the beam of light flowing through the built environment and it is the medium that bends the stream of architecture and design
The wry title of the triptych evokes the specific activities that we may imagine in these spaces while the equanimity of the presentation asks us to consider these practices with impossible detachment
There is a pun contained in the “professional” status of the health worker contrasted with that of the sex worker
Summary
Culture is the beam of light flowing through the built environment and it is the medium that bends the stream of architecture and design. Refract: An Open Access Visual Studies Journal Journal Refract: An Open Access Visual Studies Journal, 1(1)
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