*Nothing comes between us
but a piece of latex.

It takes courage to enjoy it
The hardcore and the gentle
Big time sensuality*

This issue of Paprika! explores encounters with space as mediated through embodied experience. Through disability specifically, as one capacious category of embodiment, we approach intimacy. Through disability, we approach an enhanced sensuousness of and with the built environment.

The haptic, the erotic, and the supportive are approached from critical disability studies and architectural theory lenses. We ask if access always means proximity—touch—and seek out an enriched understanding of how bodies encounter architecture. Architecture isn’t inanimate, but rather one side of a relation that can be erotic, assistive, and negotiated. Touch, the most basic encounter pressing persistently through this edition, is the habitual pressing of an automatic door opener, sunburned shoulder against cool tile, and / or a lover’s embrace. It is always relational and mediated; in each encounter between fingertip and surface, an imperceptible buffer of ​​electromagnetic repulsion keeps matter’s atoms apart.

Several themes guide the collection of texts in this issue. We consider intimacy with architecture: our emotional relationships with material space, drawing examples from art, architectural history, and design. A key reference here is Little Frank and His Carp (2001), a six-minute video work by the artist Andrea Fraser. A woman in a green dress, Fraser, stands in the foyer of the then-new Guggenheim Bilbao, listening with evident delight to the seductive voice of an audio guide. He, authoritative and arch, tells her:

As you look around, you’ll see that every surface in this space curves. Only the floor is straight. These curves are gentle, but in their huge scale, powerfully sensual. You’ll see people going up to the walls and stroking them. You may feel a desire to do so yourself.

Fraser moves closer to the limestone wall, only to press and grind her body against it as her dress lifts, and strangers stare. Her touch, the architecture, is desire, negotiation, relation.

We also turn to theory, referencing ‘impairment phenomenology’ as developed by the media scholar Jonathan Sterne in his 2021 book Diminished Faculties: experience as fragmented and incomplete, not assuming a subject in command of their own faculties. Impairment is understood here from the perspective of a subject who is not fully able to account for their own experience. This expands our understanding of intimacy as an instrument through which experience is reliably produced and communicated, a framework to place impairment as dependence, uncertainty, and partial perception as conditions of embodied life. Intimacy, in this sense, can be the way bodies rely on other bodies, technologies, and forms of environmental mediation to experience and make sense of the world.

A third point of reference, mediators of access and proximity, further explores this reliance—contact—via the devices, negotiated movement, and shared infrastructures that mediate where a building and body meet. Assistance, leverage, and negotiated balance are intimate conditions contingent on access needs, where the subject is supposedly at the mercy of the built space.

With these prompts we invite you to trace how our bodies meet the built world, form attachment through use, how desire can be architectural, and how familiarity propagates, over time, between person and place. Here, closeness and intimacy is not voyeurism, it is repetition; a daily rehearsal through which space becomes known and knowing; how space is embraced.