Freudian Fridays: Top 12 Phallic Monuments
As we all disperse towards our favored holiday partying and wintering places, our weekly psychoanalysticle Freudian Fridays asks that you keep your eyes open for gratuitous instances of the most familiar form in modern architecture: the phallus.
As Freud tells us constantly, every human activity that isn’t sex is the direct result of displaced sexual impulses, and you can bet that includes architecture. Of course, many of the buildings presented here are precursors to the “guy with a fancy car” syndrome.
When worried about their ability to project potency, men (be they statesmen or businessmen) throughout history have resorted to aggrandizing themselves with self-congratulatory structures that always look an awful lot like wee-wees. With that in mind, here are Listicles’ Top 12 Phallic Monuments.
London’s Gherkin
Office-appropriate phallic-chic.
Gettysburg Monument
Wounded national pride? Nothing a phallus can’t fix.
New York’s Forthcoming Freedom Tower
See previous description.
Oslo Monument
Phallic forms can be artsy and European too.
Napoleon Monument
The greatest French patriot ever melted his defeated enemies’ canons to create this metal monument in Paris. Now that’s phallic power!
Hong Kong’s 2 IFC
Mindless Afternoon / Flickr
Toronto’s CN Tower
Canadians: low on national pride but sky high on phallic monuments.
The Burj Dubai
A little gaudy and extra-low on subtlety, the Burj Dubai is the nouveau-riche of phallic monumentality.
The Leaning Tower of Pisa
Thank you, Rob Schneider, for bringing this one to our attention.
Phallic Monument + Fireworks = Phallic Orgasmic
The Washington Monument
It feels so good to be American right now!
Paris’s Eiffel Tower
Just when you think it can’t get any less subtle…
Seattle’s Space Needle
I hope the pyrotechnics team used protection.
[...] psychoanalysticle Freudian Fridays, we looked at some of the most overt, excessive and unsubtle phallic monuments built by man. While the need to put power, potency and might into concrete (and steel and glass) [...]
You missed the most phallic structure in the world. Go to Seattle, take a ferry ride and look back at the city. Hiding behind the Columbia Tower, you will see the former AT&T Gateway building (not sure what it’s called today). It is literally in the shape of a penis. It’s unavoidable - too clear to be a coincidence. To the best of my knowledge, no one ever asked the architect (who has since passed on, I believe) why he designed a penis building. But seriously - it’s not merely “phallic,” it’s not simply suggestive, it is, quite literally, a penis that someone snuck into a major city’s skyline in what has to be described as the most ambitious juvenile prank ever pulled. Your list isn’t complete without it.
^^ It’s now called the Seattle Municipal Tower. And you’re exactly right, it definitely looks like a 60-story high penis.
[...] we’ve reported in previous editions of our weekly psychoanalysticle Freudian Fridays, phallic forms are among the most potent and clearly legible symbols of power in our patriarchal capitalist [...]
[...] we alerted you, dear readers, to knowledge that already lay waiting deep in your subconscious: the buildings we inhabit, vehicles we travel in and weapons we fight with are loaded with repressed sexual [...]