Androgynos--The Male-Female in Art and ArchitectureHardcover, 3 September 1997

If we grant architecture the ability to form metaphors, to make statements about human existence, to go beyond fulfilling everyday needs, then here too the question of sexuality must become visible. We know the theory that something upright is phallic-male and that rooms, caves and domes represent the uterine-female. But this book goes a - doubtlessly speculative - step further. It makes a mental leap to recognize something specifically androgynous in architecture: the "tower on the dome" as a symbol of union, of penetration, of conjunction (which is love and aggression at the same time), the "house within the house" as a symbol of a being within a being etc.