Phallic architecture
The ancient Greeks and Romans celebrated phallic festivals and built a shrine with an erect phallus to honor Hermes, messenger of the gods.
The ancient cultures of many parts of the Far East, including Indonesia, India, Korea and Japan, used the phallus as a symbol of fertility in motifs on their temples and in other areas of everyday life.
[3] It is believed that they sought their inspiration from the ancient Egyptians and their phallic image of Min, the valley god, who was similarly "depicted as a standing bearded king with simplified body, one arm raised, the other hand holding his erect phallus.
[10] Fetishism with the phallus architecturally and in smaller implements was also exhibited by certain gnostic sects in medieval times, such as the Manichaeans, and was connected with masochism and sadism, a form of religious flagellantism.
[6] Smaller phallic shaped monuments in the form of idols, even vases, rings, drinking vessels and jewellery have been well-documented and could be found within medieval churches of Ireland.
The Brihadeeswarar Temple of Tanjore in Tamil Nadu, built during the Chola Dynasty, is dedicated to Shiva, and features lingam between the cells; it is especially renowned for its "Hall of One Thousand Lingas".
According to the Indonesian chronicles of the Babad Tanah Jawi, Prince Puger gained the kingly power from God, by ingesting sperm from the phallus of the already-dead Sultan Amangkurat II of Mataram.
[10] However, in comparison to the likes of Jean-Jacques Lequeu, who gained notoriety for his pornographic architectural concoctions, Ledoux's architectural inspiration was relatively mild, and he is said to have omitted towers from his designs on occasion as he was aware that they would be frowned upon shamefully by general society as a too obvious representation of the phallus; Ledoux's "missing erection" is explained to this effect in Jacques Lecan's Significance of the Missing Phalus.
[10] He located two designs for the Bustum Caesaris Augusti, concluding that they were based upon sexual ritual, with "two phallic plans penetrating the semicircular cubicula".
[10] A work of note to this effect is Neoclassical Temple of Virility and the Buildings with a Phallic Shaped Plan (1977) of the Institute for Art History of the University of Lund, Sweden.
[10] In America, especially in Chicago and New York, and numerous other global cities, high rise skyscrapers of phallic shape grew up in the 20th century.
[23] In the last few decades the high-rise phallic skyscraper has been a symbol of government quest for economic power in China, Hong Kong and South Korea and the other ASEAN/Pacific Rim nations.
China fuels billions of dollars annually into high-rise office and residential buildings with the aim of increasing GDP, at a rate far greater than they can be occupied.
[30] Feminists in particular, such as Margrit Kennedy, perceive high-rise phallic-like buildings on the urban landscape as "phallic symbols of male domination, power and rational instrumentality.
"[31] Esther M. K. Cheung believes the form of monumental high-rise building which grew up in 20th century America can "be read as a phallic symbol of power".
"[33] Elizabeth Grosz, however, offers a counter argument to phallocentrism in urban design theories, saying "not so much the dominance of the phallus as the pervasive unacknowledged use of the male or masculine to represent the human.
[35] According to a popular belief, the cemetery house the tomb of a pre-Islamic prophet, Khalid Nabi, who was born 40 years prior to the birth of Muhammad, in c.
[36] In Dragon Pool Temple in Jeju City, there is a phallic shrine which is visited by female pilgrims who come to worship it for its perceived fertility blessings.
Chao Mae Tuptim shrine in Bangkok has over a hundred colored erect wooden penis statues of all shapes and sizes which are said to possess special cosmic powers and endow good fortune and fertility on anybody coming into contact with them.
[37][38] Kharkhorin Rock, located in Övörkhangai Province of Mongolia, is a massive statue of a penis raised on a platform on the steppe near Erdene Zuu Monastery.
He discovered that her restless spirit could be appeased in such a manner, so the townsfolk compensated for the woman's inability to consummate beyond the grave by placing sexually potent phallic statues in view of the shore.
[41] On a road drive from Paro airport to Thimphu explicit paintings of phalluses are a common sight on the white-washed walls of homes, shops and eateries.
The glaringly displayed phallus in the monastery is a brown wooden piece with a silver handle, a religious relic considered to possess divine powers and hence used for blessing the spiritually oriented people.
[44] In his poem A Ballad of the Good Lord Nelson, Lawrence Durrell included the multiply allusive lines "Now stiff on a pillar with a phallic air/Nelson stylites in Trafalgar Square/Reminds the British what once they were.
The New York Times described it as a "great phallic monster of truly monumental ugliness, a bit like an enormous asparagus with a silver ball on top.
[64] The Torre Agbar is a 38-story skyscraper located in the Plaça de les Glòries Catalanes of the Poblenou neighborhood of Barcelona, Spain.
[66] Although many draw comparisons with the phallus, locals refer to the structure as el supositorio (the suppository), a drug delivery system that is inserted into the rectum or vagina.
"[71] James Webb used a metaphor to praise the "uplift[ing]" power of the Washington Monument as a white phallus, "piercing the air like a bayonet".
[72] In the futuristic film Hardwired, set in the United States where everything noteworthy is commercialized, the Washington Monument is used as a giant Trojan condoms billboard.
[84] Its phallic appearance was emphasised on 7 November 2014, when the AIDS Council of NSW (ACON) temporarily installed a giant condom over the Obelisk as part of a HIV awareness campaign.
