ARCHITECTURE IN HENTAI

[architectureinhentai]

Many Japanese citizens would likely recognize that this drawing is based on the western/Marunouchi side of Tokyo Station, designed by Tatsuno Kingo and completed in 1914. The Wikipedia page describes the building as “broadly Neo-Baroque”, but I would say it is, more accurately, in the range of the British 19th-century Queen Anne style.

Artist: Mifune Seijirou / Doujin: Elf Harem Academia

[architectureinhentai]

As an aside: people who follow this account may be interested to know that I have an ongoing series on another account, Brick by Brick, dedicated to defining what you’re seeing in the Dark Souls series, Bloodborne, and Sekiro. I say ongoing, although it has been a while since I’ve added any updates.

Putting Names to Built Things: Naming the Architecture and Ornament of Dark Souls and Bloodborne

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5 / Part 6 / Part 7 / Part 8 / Part 9 / Part 10 / Part 11

An Architectural and Ornamental Glossary for Sekiro

Part 1 / Part 2

[architectureinhentai]

Kind of a fun little detail in a smaller panel, where it looks like the artist may have used the columns at the Erechtheion as a reference and exaggerated the scotias. Although a lot of studied neoclassical columns came to have, for multiple reasons (such as which sites (or countries!) were accessible by those interested), a narrowed range of forms, the columns of antiquity express a great sculptural variety around their bases and capitals. The base of a column is essentially made up of tori (singular torus), which are convex semicircular moldings; scotias, which are concave moldings; and fillets, which are rectangular bands separating the concavities and convexities. With these three elements, countless mutations can be realized. Anyway, in the third image -- an illustration from Claude Perrault’s Ordonnance for the Five Kinds of Columns after the Method of the Ancients which aims to demonstrate an ideal proportionality and shapeliness for each columnar order --, you can see how the bases’ moldings have been pretty well regularized by the 17th century.

Artist: Ere 2 Aero / Doujin: Zecchou Haramase Oppai

[architectureinhentai]

You're an honest delight, and I hope your blog gets more traffic.

I doubt it’ll ever be located in more than the nichest of niches, but thank you!

[architectureinhentai]

This is a facade of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.

Artist: Yosyo- / Doujin: Bijutsukan de wa Oshizuka ni

[architectureinhentai]

Weird-ass postmodern building -- a love hotel, I guess? -- that has diamond-point rustication near the cornice, two bull’s eyes windows (yeah, they’re actually called that), and a sort of arcaded row of windows below. Just weird-ass enough that I suspect it exists.

Artist: Jun / Doujin: Mentor's Booty of Winter

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The Palais de Justice, Paris, France. The facade seen here is along the Rue de Harlay, and constitutes a 19th-century reconstruction by Louis-Joseph Duc, awarded the Prix de Cent Mille Francs in 1869, a year after the reconstruction’s completion, for the greatest work of art produced in France during the century.

Artist: Kanno Takanori / Doujin: Aliza to Alicia ni Stan-kun ga Shiboritorareru Hon

[architectureinhentai]

Someone, or something, uploaded to Pornhub what seems to be the entire footage from a “cinematic” 2000 Windows game called Doll: Ouroboros. Until a person linked its page on Mobygames I really thought, and kind of hoped, that it was an inexplicable recent solo project using outdated modeling software. Of course, with the knowledge that it was a turn-of-the-century Japanese effort, its resemblance to the cutscenes and music you’d see and hear on Sega Saturn make more sense. Since this is being written about on Architecture in Hentai, I should clarify: yes, there is fucking, and all of it is fiercely unappealing. Just, like, five-minute long fuck sessions where an emotionless man slams it into a squeaking, bouncing, mannequin-like woman. Maybe it was arousing seventeen years ago, but I have a hard time believing even that was true.

Finding the footage was interesting to me in light of a recent forum discussion on Demon’s Souls -- whose servers are being shut down early next year -- and someone’s response in particular, which I think brings Demon’s into a broader context of certain 3D Japanese-developed games from the mid-/late-90s:

the anonymous architecture is great but there’s a special place in my heart for the strangely doll-like, deprecated-version-of-Poser-ass character models, which similarly feel sort of chunky and smooth and unweathered and generic. there’s something very endearing about seeing those little dudes run through cavernous grunge labyrinth. in general i feel i appreciated demon’s souls [...] because it had this kind of half-assimilated b-game quality […] the vistas are buried in a level just called “3-1” that you warp into from a big list like crash bandicoot. and the character models and environments frequently had that kind of mostly-functional vibe i associate with arcade games like time crisis 2.

This uncanny, ill-defined, yet discernible vagueness is probably why I like the cutscenes in the PlayStation 2 Castlevania games -- Lament of Innocence and Curse of Darkness -- so much; Lament’s especially, many of which take place in a dimly lit cabin, usually involve only two people, have a hushed quality that feels utterly removed from a larger, unmapped wilderness, and are almost atmospherically subterranean. It’s hard to describe using exact terms and points of reference, and seems to be a cumulative consequence of character models, lighting (both the sources of illumination and the engine), the spatial arrangement, and environmental textures: a mixture of the bizarre, the mundane, the comfortable, and the uncomfortable.

Anyway, here are some shitty screencaps I took of Doll; the black rectangle in the screens’ lower right corner is a very subtle measure on my part to hide Sinful Porn Ads. The few first-person sections are obviously modeled on the dungeon-crawling genre, with CD-based games like the King’s Field series and Wizardry: Dimguil coming to mind, and some of the regal interiors you see later on could be compared to Castlevania 64. Also, the third-to-last image of this set reminds me of a room from Dark Souls 2′s Lost Bastille.

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lmao, this owns

[architectureinhentai]

If I made the rules, I can break them. This update focuses on the architecture from Fist of the North Star, or Hokuto no Ken (HnK (even the acronym sounds like the sound a goon might make when punched)). Although it’s not a hentai manga, its character dynamics are about as stupid as any H-doujin. What distinguishes HnK’s architecture is that it’s rendered in such a scrupulous level of detail but never stops being a weird, naive medley of styles, ranging from ancient Sumerian to German-Baroque to speculative techno-futurism culled from movies. I stop short of classifying it as mannerism because mannerism expresses a learned, particular, connoisseur-appealing subversion of classical tropes (it is perhaps partly for this specialized wittiness that the Palace of Charles V may never be more than a cultural outlier). Tetsuo Hara’s illustrations look rather like source material was amassed then slung together to fit a given scene. The effect here is purely cumulative and blunt.

Architectural weirdness is relative to HnK’s own fiction, too, though. This isn’t a story that takes place on an alternate Earth; not blatantly, anyway. Really, if it weren’t for the dungeon-palaces housing each Bad Guy, poking up higher than any other settlement structure in a manner similar to the cathedrals of old Europe, most of HnK’s distant urban views would look like a default post-apocalyptic scene: frayed skyscrapers creaking over barren lands. But it’s these fortresses and the closer looks we get of city streets that are centrally, almost singularly, responsible for throwing off a sense of continuity from regional reality. You might assume that, well -- maybe the Bad Guys appropriated corporate buildings and had laborers and slaves graft "classical" pieces onto the existing frames. The problem with this assumption is that the civic design is comparably bizarre, just with less glitz. It doesn’t matter that HnK never specifies where it takes place; the more you read, the more you suspect, or realize, that its setting has no real-life parallel.

I honestly don’t think much thought was put into any of this by either Hara or author Buronson. You might as well also ask why there are so many impossibly enormous men wandering around (and no, the answer isn’t “nuclear radiation”). The architecture’s qualities exist as such for dramatic effect. There are evil huge men with evil huge ambitions, and they are complemented with evil huge buildings. Everything beneath that which follows suit does so for the sake of atmosphere and consistency. It’s theater. With the emphasis on muscular men, why not have them inhabit muscular environments? It’s just interesting to me that Hara settled on something so Byzantinely patchwork.

When Hara references another fictional location, he doesn’t do a whole lot to mask the imitative process. Which, you know -- fine. This isn’t a subtle work. An interior shot of Bladerunner’s Tyrell Corporation building becomes the throne room of Shin, HnK’s first antagonist. Later on, the palace of Jabba the Hutt from Return of the Jedi serves as the model for a mountain dwelling, albeit on a smaller scale, right down to the adjacent bulbous-domed tower.

These sorts of examples are barefaced. If you want, however, you can go much further back and compare some of HnK’s sites to the imaginary architecture of Erlach, Ledoux, Piranesi, Boullée, etc. It’s true that sometimes you’ll see what you want to see. But when it comes to an object like the Holy Emperor Cross Mausoleum, a pyramid-tomb built for an antagonist’s dead master, the spirit of Boullée’s funerary gigantism couldn’t be closer at hand (if this topic interests you, take an hour out of a day to watch this excellent talk by historian Erika Naginski on French visionary architecture). It’s similarly feasible -- again, just visually -- to compare the least inhibited palatial designs to the cake-like assemblages in plates by Piranesi which reimagine roads of the ancient Roman republic as being lined with eccentric monumental antiquities.

Click the link below if you want to see other images from the manga.

[architectureinhentai]

A number of real-life skyscrapers/highrises have been compared to penises or dildos (e.g., the Gherkin or Torre Agbar), but this fictional building, seemingly set among a flat dystopian landscape, leaves no room for any other sort of interpretation. A large, literally modeled sculpture of a penis, calling to mind the Kanamara Matsuri, extends from a wall at the building’s base and ejaculates liquid, probably an aphrodisiac, onto crowds. Going by the visual narrative alone, this seems like one of those doujins whose setting and narrative is set at a level of grimness where I wonder what the erotic appeal even is supposed to be; but I guess it takes all kinds, etc.

Anyway, the situating, setting, and vantage point recalls (for me, anyway) the Temen-ni-gru -- a tower that rises up from beneath a city in the videogame Devil May Cry 3. One character quips like a buffoon: “You saw it too, didn't you? The huge tower jutting out of the ground? That thick shaft that causes women to shudder is actually a tunnel linking the demonic domain to the human world.” But if you want to get closer to real life, you can’t get more blatant than Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s plan for an unbuilt brothel. Art historian Christian Freigang writes, of the building’s symbolic form, that “...visitors to the building were not meant to satisfy their carnal desires, but rather attain moral maturity by recognizing the repulsiveness of the activities taking place there.”

Artist: Kito Sakeru / Doujin: CRAZY HARDY

[architectureinhentai]

This stood out to me for its somewhat interesting usage of space around the port (why does the first main staircase have another on its side leading to a wall?) and the detailed town buildings. It’s hard to tell, given the smallish size of the original file, but I think that the buildings’ facades are basically copy-pasted and reversed, while the gabled ends are perspectively modified by row. The middle image is a reminiscent pair of panels from Berserk’s fifth volume.

You could probably categorize the town buildings as Tudor style, perhaps more specifically as Tudor Revival. The distinctive strips of wood lining the exteriors’ sides are half-timbering: originally functional load-bearing structures (not without ornamentation of their own), later on applied as pure ornament. As far as the entire vista goes, it does seem firmly rooted in the tradition of hub-based dungeon crawler videogames, the action-RPG series Ys, or a semi-recent standalone title like Resonance of Fate, where a settlement is adjacent to a mysterious tower/towering structure.

Artist: 44 / Doujin: RIESZ&FASHION7

[architectureinhentai]

This example really is closer to a sort of postmodernism -- coincident with reductions, you have a preservation of select fundamentals (e.g., the arched second-story windows, the gabled center) --, neoclassicism, or even Palladianism (emphasis on the horizontally inclined country houses), but what came to mind for me was Christopher Wren’s design (image #2) of the facades for the Royal Hospital’s courtyard. If anything, irrespective of how (in)accurate that exact comparison is, the drawing does feel more English than it does French, German, Italian, Spanish, or any other European style. The dissimilar and clumsily integrated portico feels like an addition the artist might’ve made on their own while referencing an actual building for the rest.

Image #3: Egerton Crescent, designed by George Basevi

Image #4: Koshland Hall, designed by Vernon DeMars

Artist: Mikemono Yuu / Doujin: Takao Onee-san to Nyuukyo! Kai

[architectureinhentai]

Some sort of imaginary Venice equivalent. In spite of that obvious parallel, I’m reminded more of Tony Garnier’s design for an industrial city, in particular his illustration of a general view of its factories, steel mills, industrial port, and wharves, I suppose because the doujin’s maritime buildings have that same plain, fairly rigid, and seemingly colorless (well, who knows) look.

Artist: Nenemaru / Doujin: Ajin Shoujo-tan Vol. 5 Another

[architectureinhentai]

I didn’t know what building this was beforehand, but it did look very familiar. A couple of image searches later the answer turned up: the Conference Tower at TOKYO BIG SIGHT. It was completed in 1995, designed by the firm AXS Satow, and is the location for events including Comiket. I’m curious to know what the inverted pyramidal design was inspired or motivated by.

Artist: Itose Ikuto / Doujin: RanCos♂♀

[architectureinhentai]

OLYMPUS ROYAL MAGIC ACADEMY

This is the image I used for the blog’s header and I thought it was worth making a post about for one detail: the temple’s Ionic columns. Unless you’re somewhat versed in classical European architecture, you probably wouldn’t focus in on the fact that there is an odd amount of columns. This is another one of those naive details. The porticos of actual Grecian/Roman temple-inspired buildings are nigh-invariably supported by even-numbered -- generally four, six, or eight -- columns. This has been done to avoid the awkwardness of having a supportive structure in the center that visually blocks the entrance.

Also worth pointing out is the forecourt that appears to have been inspired by Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s colonnaded design for the piazza of St. Peter’s.

Also also: can’t help but be reminded of this.

Source: Pandra the Animation

[architectureinhentai]

This is great, but wouldn't it be more complete with the names of the comics

I was considering that and wasn’t sure if it wouldn’t conflict with trying to keep the page safe for work, although maybe that’s a moot concern with the page having ‘HENTAI’ in its title. I’ll start doing it if other people want me to, though.