Eros is not necessarily wild sex or pornography. Eros is passion and the desire for happiness. It fills the world of objects with a substance that seduces and conquers. Also in the world of architecture, design and art, there is no enthusiasm, passion, humanity or gratification without Eros.

According to the director Michele De Lucchi, “Eros is a state of mind and it is the best possible condition, the best means to establish contact with and between the eight billion brains that comprise humanity today”. Beatriz Colomina examines what do we do in bed today, and what has become of this horizontal architecture in our liquid-work society. Mixing part-organic and part-neoparametric curvilinear forms, three recent projects by MAD invoke terms such as “sensual” and “sinuous”. In 1968 Dante Bini met Monica Vitti and Michelangelo Antonioni, leading to the story of an architectural rarity. Among the many colums: “Anthropology” features an essay by Saskia Sassen on the intermediation in complex systems; in “Cinema”, Chris Kraus’s masterpiece, suggests that passion is not all: it allows us to sway between the extremes but is only one aspect of life; in “On the couch” you can find a conversation with Lino Tagliapietra, the last of the great Italian master glassmakers. This month’s Rassegna is about Outdoor furniture.