Architects Do It with Models

The thinking woman’s sex symbol is a rumpled middle-aged man who can draft a building on a napkin.

By Shinan Govani
Illustration by Catto Houghton

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At the 18th birthday bash I attended for Siberian tennis babe Maria Sharapova one mad night last year in Manhattan, the women looked hungry, the men were plucked and people everywhere seemed to be wearing smiles that screamed, “Come in. I’m US Open.”

As the room spun around the racquet star who’s got legs that go on longer than Mariah Carey’s octaves, I found myself in a crunch between spaghetti-strapped socialites, some H&M tribesfolk and plenty of freckled-faced kids who know Sofia but haven’t a clue that she’s got this filmmaker dad named Francis. There were, but of course, some friendly ball busters too. And at least one admirable architect.

“Find any tennis players that tickle your fancy?” I asked a friend who I’d lost earlier in the evening there at Hiro, the rec-room-style Japanese club tucked, sliplike, inside Chelsea’s trendy Maritime Hotel.

“No, but I met a really hot architect!” she said. And when she said “architect‚” she sounded just like a kid who’d found one of Willy Wonka’s precious gold tickets in a chocolate bar. And then, off she went to play hanky-panky. Long and luscious tennis stars be damned.

My female friend, I’ve noticed in the last little bit during my social travels, is not entirely alone in her architectural ardour. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, one of the greatest of the great builders, once famously said that “God is in the details.” True. Too true. But it’s an equally compelling thesis that God is good to the men who make the details.

Professional athletes are nice. Leading men actors do the job. Masters of the universe business types have their following. But for a woman of a certain refinement and a certain 21st-century savoir faire, architects really, truly do take the cake. The age of the celebrity architect – something we’ve been hearing about ad nauseam ever since the ribbon was cut at Frank Gehry’s celebrated Guggenheim in Bilbao – has led us, inevitably maybe, to the age of the architect crush. These days, names like Rem Koolhaas, Renzo Piano and Daniel Libeskind are as likely to stir the loins as your run-of-the-mill Pitt, Farrell or Kutcher.

Natalie Kovacs, an artist friend of mine, refers to these blueprint-bearing Casanovas as “starchitects‚” as others have been known to do, and I’ve more than once seen her actually getting starchitect-struck by them. Rebecca Rosenblat, a certified relationship and sex therapist in Toronto, chalks it up to the fact that these men – and they are mostly men – are both right- and left-brain thinkers: the sort of blokes who must swing both micro and macro. “They have to use their imagination to be really successful,” she notes, “but they also have to use their hands.”

In other words, they are both plodders and ponderers. And Cupid approves. More interestingly, as an editorial in the Robb Report mused in one of its issues not long ago, “The fact that architects are usually middle-aged men who appear craggy, aloof, rumpled, cerebral and introverted only adds to their attraction. Like their buildings, architects have real staying power and nothing is more appealing than a man who commits.” Hey, does Lavalife know?

Architects, who routinely reach for the stars but keep their workboots on the ground, have long been associated with the lone visionary artist in the popular imagination. Howard Roark – famously inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead – is a poster architect: both egoist and sage. In the movies, for better or for worse, the occupation is used as shorthand for a sophisticated chap: Think Tom Selleck in Three Men and a Baby, Sam Waterston in Hannah and her Sisters or Tom Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle. Think, even, of Seinfeld’s George Costanza and his numerous (failed) attempts to masquerade as an architect to get chicks.

Canada-born Gehry, that most famous of famous architects, showed off his own Romeo talents during a stop at Toronto’s swank Bymark restaurant during the city’s big film festival in September. At a dinner, my sources say, the septuagenarian genius charmed the skirts off all the ladies at the table by drawing up customized doodles for each and every one of them. “They all fell in love with him,” says one who was there. “They were all swooning.”

You might even say it was love at first draft. 

Write to us: letters@enroutemag.net

Shinan Govani is the Scene columnist for the National Post and frequently appears on television commenting on celebrities and the social whirl. Write him at sgovani@enroutemag.net.

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