Androgynos: The Male-Female in Art and Architecture.

By Gunther Feuerstein. Stuttgart/London: Edition Axel Menges 1997. [pounds]49

This is a most peculiar book. For one thing, it is (and thankfully) a dryish academic antidote to the coffee-table glossy editions on architecture as phallic structure/womblike space: though this is exactly its subject area, it's not exactly a romping read. It also sounds as if it's going to belong to the late twentieth-century vaguely cultural theory genre, but it doesn't do that either.

Actually, it's a fairly unreconstructed academic work, with a series of alarmingly manualish headings (2.1 The division of the One. Parthenogenesis. Creation out of unity. 9.1. First Synthesis: One on top of the other. 9.2. Second Synthesis; Penetration. Third Synthesis: One inside of the Other etc). And so on. The target audience is mindboggling. At whom is this book with its mixture of psychology, art history, cultural theory, anthropology and formal scatological concerns aimed?

In fact, the book's basic thesis suggests a more complex and intelligent reading of spaces in terms of body language than the simple phallic/hysterical divisions, and proposes an inherent androgyny in the spatial/structural forms and expressions of architecture throughout history. But as an abstract argument, this remains comparatively underdeveloped, leaving the bulk of the book to develop as an astonishing collection of different forms of both gender-based and mixed gender models for describing ideas and paradigms in art history, religions, psychology and architecture. An invaluable resource for anyone who really feels they must study this subject in more detail.

KESTER RATTENBURY