Playboy was much more than print and girls without bikinis. In fact, during the 1950s and ’60s, the magazine had managed to create a series of architectural spaces in its pages. It then publicized them so relentlessly through the media that they created not only a new popular erotic utopia, but also radically transformed the uses and techniques of the domestic space of the Cold War years.
For example: Playboy had popularized the designs for the “Playboy Penthouse Apartment,” “Kitchenless Kitchen” and “Rotating Bed” that later materialized in the 1959 reconstruction of the Playboy Mansion. This “32 room Love Palace,” as it was billed, would inspire the set for the first reality show in television history, broadcast in 1959, and became the setting for innumerable photographs destined for the magazine’s pages.
Hefner himself defined the nature of the project as follows:
Far from being simply an erotic magazine, Playboy forms part of the architectural imaginary of the second half of the twentieth century. Playboy is the mansion and its parties, the tropical grotto and the underground glass-walled games room that lets guests watch the Bunnies swimming naked in the pool; it is the round bed where Hefner frolics with the Playmates; it is the bachelor pad, the private jet, the club with its secret rooms, the gardenzoo, the secret castle, and the urban oasis. Playboy would become the first “pornotopia” of the mass media age.