Need a last-minute gift for the architecture enthusiast in your life? Does that person also enjoy butt plugs?
If so, look no further. The New York-based interior architecture and exhibition design firm Wolfgang + Hite has turned New York City’s skyscraper-studded $25 billion mega-development Hudson Yards into a seven-piece sex toy set. Its phallic-shaped buildings of mostly high-end office space and some residential have been transformed into silicone dildos. The trophy development’s centerpiece, the stairs-to-nowhere architectural sculpture the Vessel, has been rendered into a hot pink butt plug, available for $75.
[Photos: Wolfgang + Hite]The full set of sex toys replicate the entire built space of Hudson Yards, with individual dildos modeled on each of the project’s six towers, which were designed by architects including Skidmore Owings and Merrill, Foster and Partners, and Diller Scofidio and Renfro. Made to order, the full sets take a few weeks to manufacture, so wouldn’t be available in time for this year’s holiday season. The butt plugs and the dildo version of the tower at 15 Hudson Yards, though, are available now.
Originally produced last fall, the architectural sex toys were designed to be used. “Of course they work,” says Shan Raoufi, cofounder of Wolfgang + Hite. “Manhattan’s finest new jewel is really good at finding the sweet spot.”
“We have gotten good reviews, actually,” adds Greta Hansen, the firm’s other cofounder. She notes that the toys are geared toward certain sexual proclivities, “because some of those structures are huge.”
The sex toys are what Hansen calls “a soft critique” of Hudson Yards as a transformative force in this part of Manhattan, and a reaction to the$6 billion of public fundingthat was used to develop the project—financing partly secured bygerrymandering the city’s mapto connect the project’s site to Harlem and qualifying as providing jobs to the economically distressed neighborhood.But Hansen and Raoufi have gotten some feedback from one of the architects involved in Hudson Yards. “She wrote us and asked us for instructions on how specifically she could use her building,” Hansen says. “We need to send her a Christmas gift.”
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