About the Artist
a Professor in and Past Chair of the Department of Architectural Science at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. He is also director emeritus of RVTR, which operates simultaneously as a professional architectural practice and as an academic research platform with studios in Toronto and in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Ripley’s work has been extensively published and along with his colleagues in RVTR he has been the winner of a number of major awards, including the 2009 Professional Prix de Rome in Architecture. Colin Ripley holds a Bachelor of Engineering from McMaster University, a Master of Science in theoretical physics from the University of Toronto, and a Master of Architecture from Princeton University, and is currently finishing a PhD in Philosophy, Art and Critical Thought at the European Graduate School. He is author or editor of several books about architecture as well as journal papers on a wide range of topics, including megaregional urbanism, responsive envelope systems, sonic architecture, Canadian modern architecture, and the modern concept of the house as understood through the writings of Jean Genet.
About the Works
The Brothel, the whorehouse, the house of illusion: this is the perfect architectural representation of the world we live in, Alain Badiou’s Pornographic Age, Paul B. Preciado’s Pharmacopornographic Era. The Brothel manifests the ideal conjunction of the body, the image, and capital, for good and bad; it is an absolutely contemporary mechanism, the perfect late-capital machine for producing money from desire.
In these images, inflected by historical record but not tied to that record, we seek to understand the architectural form of the Brothel historically, in the contemporary world, and in the coming future. How do the changes in the way we understand our bodies and the relationships between bodies change the form of the Brothel?
