The author

Richard Williams, professor of contemporary visual cultures at the University of Edinburgh, lives in Morningside in the Scottish capital. “There’s a picture of my street in the book,” he observes. “I live with my wife Stacy, who’s an art historian and curator, and my daughter Abby (11) and son Alex (8). There are two rather grumpy cats too. You honestly couldn’t get any more conventional.”

Edinburgh “is an extremely handsome place, and if you’re in work, you can live well. It has many of the facilities of a much larger city. The geography (and geology) is pretty extraordinary. The university is great - it’s got its eccentricities, for sure, but it’s always treated me very well. And I’ve got marvellous friends here.’

“The city can be maddening, though: I’m on public record saying as much. Aside from the universities, its institutions are too often inward looking, parochial and snobby. Yet they’re convinced they’re the centre of the universe. The reality is that nothing of any consequence has happened since 1890.”

Where would he live if he had the choice? “Ah, don’t we all like to play this game? I’m less susceptible to it these days, as everywhere has its pitfalls. And much as I complain about Edinburgh’s eccentricities, I’ve been here so long I’m part of its landscape. But I really like Los Angeles. The beach, the climate, the outdoor life, the relentless optimism - and the freeways, believe it or not. They’re still a real pleasure to drive on, for the most part.”

Williams was born in the US - “by chance, really. My parents lived there in the mid-1960s and I was born at the end of their stay. I moved to the UK almost immediately. I have US citizenship as a result, but I’ve never really lived there. But it was always an important place. My parents grew up in a very austere 1950s Northern Ireland, and the US made a huge impact on them, and consequently me. There is also a minor creation myth involving sailing back to Britain as a baby on the liner SS United States. I became slightly obsessed with it as a child - did lots of drawings of it, made models and so on. The amazing thing is that the ship still exits, but as a rusting hulk in Philadelphia. I went to see it a couple of years back. It is one of the most profound experiences I have ever had, seeing something that I knew intimately as an image, but had never seen with adult eyes. There are photographs of me on it as a baby, mid-Atlantic, but I had no memory of it of course. I did a photographic exhibition about it in 2012. Anyway, I digress. My wife’s American. I seem to go there a lot. I should add that I lived in Madrid during 1990-93, and that was as powerful an experience as any I’ve had. But I’m culturally a Manc, really, albeit a rather cosmopolitan one. I’m not sure what other people think I am. ‘Hard to place’, I imagine.”

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Of his early interest in scholarship, Williams says: “I was around academics from the start. My father is a retired professor of astrophysics; his PhDs were often hanging around at home drinking homebrew. It seemed like a decent life. My mother was important too - she was a GP with interests in psychogeriatrics. She put me on to Oliver Sacks, and psychology in general, which has remained a lifelong interest.

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At school, he was “a very conscientious, studious child. I got into art a bit later. I had a very educational time studying fine art at Goldsmiths in the mid-1980s. Rather dissolute, but fascinating - lots of rummaging through skips and derelict buildings. I learned a huge amount, although the academic results weren’t great. I put that right a bit later on, when the University of Manchester took a chance and helped me do a PhD despite a slightly nutty academic record. I owe them a great deal for taking that chance.”

Although Williams cannot remember one building in particular that spurred his interest in architecture, he was “always fascinated by buildings other people seemed to find repellent. I remember Manchester’s Arndale Centre under construction in the 1970s. It was quite a sight. What else? The afternoon sun on the Great Northern Warehouse, Deansgate, about the same time. Great Ancoats Street on a busy Friday afternoon, looking at the gleaming CIS tower rising out of a mess of derelict Victorian storefronts. The Hulme Crescents. Manchester in the 1970s was a wreck, but it certainly made an impression. Later, I’d say Bankside Power Station. I used to look at it most weekends in the mid-1980s when I was a student. I’d cycle up there from Camberwell, have a drink in the Founder’s Arms, and just look at it.”

“The first house I remember living in was extremely modern for the time: a mass-market take on Eric Lyons/Span design. Ribbon windows with aluminium frames, sliding patio doors as part of the original spec, all services built around a central core. You could run unimpeded all the way around the ground floor. It still represents an ideal home for me. We left because of the thin walls. My mother said they were running a brothel next door, and they were servicing clients all day. Apparently you could hear everything.”

Prince Charles’ famous comment about “monstrous carbuncles” has fed into the received wisdom that Britain is particularly hostile to innovative architecture. Williams, author of the 2009 book Brazil: Modern Architectures in History, says, “I actually think Modernism is an elite taste wherever it shows up, but in some places, the elite has more power to get things done. In Brazil, it was a tiny handful of people, with Oscar Niemeyer at its centre. You could say something similar about France. In the US, it was people with money who wanted to make a splash. Britain is as modern as anywhere else, but it has long traditions of political compromise that don’t apply elsewhere. That said, the UK’s record on state housing is pretty thorough. It’s difficult to drive along the Westway, or the M8 in Glasgow, and not see a country in love with modernity. It just gets forgotten, because this is the landscape of the poor rather than the rich.”

Sex and Buildings contains confessional elements that are rare in scholarly monographs. Observes Williams: “My writing and teaching had been moving in that ‘confessional’ direction for a long time, and it was my editor at Reaktion, Vivian Constantinopoulos, who encouraged me. For all kinds of reasons, she was right (she almost always is). There’s been a solipsistic trend in certain kinds of humanities writing lately, but it’s generally stopped short of what I’ve done.”

He adds: “I tried to make my background clear, and also my thought processes, so that the reader could see where I was coming from. I couldn’t have written the queer and feminist material, honestly, in any other way. I also wanted to make the authorial voice one that allowed doubt and reflection. I don’t know the answers to the questions that I pose, but I think the journey I went on was worthwhile. Was it hard to write like this? No, actually. I’ve been teaching for years in a way that encourages students to make full use of their own experience. I’d also say that the writers I most admire did the same thing. Oliver Sacks always inscribes himself into his clinical accounts; it’s not without its problems, but I think he’s aware of what they are. The same goes for Richard Sennett, the sociologist. His best, most provocative writing happens when he cuts loose.”

Asked whether any family members have read Sex and Buildings, and what they have thought of it, Williams says, “My children said they were embarrassed by it - but their minds are so completely in the gutter, I think they were just putting it on. When I was on BBC Radio 3, my parents dutifully listened. My dad said, ‘I understood every word you said. But I still don’t understand the way the words fit together.’ My wife had to clear everything of course, so she has read it. What I hope comes across is that it’s a book about a particular stage of life, a set of compromises that are widely shared, and which we both experienced. I couldn’t imagine write the sort of memoir that criticised someone I was close to. Not ever.”

Williams is a witty and prolific blogger at . He recently damned Venice’s best-known art event as “a biennial festival of Garbage. The mysterious Biennale attracts pilgrims from all over the world to worship displays of rubbish, and speak in mystical terms, guided by the enigmatic catalogo, a religious text. The origins of this rubbish-worship are obscure.”

“I’ve just spent a week in Venice, funnily enough,” he comments when asked if he finds the city itself repellent. “The whole place is ludicrous. It’s hard to know where to start. Maybe I should just say that if you’ve been in the Piazza San Marco at 5pm in August with an 8-year-old who needs to pee, there is probably nowhere on earth so inhumane. I think anyone who thinks Venice is any kind of urban ideal is deranged. And the food is unspeakable.”

Of pastimes other than damning the Serenissima, Williams confesses to doing “a lot of stuff outdoors. If there’s water, I tend to swim in it, and if there’s a hill, I go up. It’s the rules. But I’m a failed rock and roller, really. I have a red SG guitar, just like Jack Black’s in School of Rock. Alex (my son) and I play a lot together. We play bluesy jams with a solid R&B groove. We like to imagine we’re in the Grateful Dead circa 1968. I’m far too undisciplined to be any good. Alex has the makings of a guitar hero, though…”

Listen to our podcast interview with Richard Williams

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Karen Shook

Sex and Buildings: Modern Architecture and the Sexual Revolution

By Richard J. Williams
Reaktion, 224pp, £25.00
ISBN 9781780231044
Published 15 August 2013