The Railings
by Strat Coffman
The Railings is a collection of nomadic play assemblies that commandeers familiar safety fixtures as media for pleasure, contact, and unanticipated scenarios. With the original iteration installed in Body Zone, one of the few remaining gay saunas in Detroit, its appearance at Alcova Miami marks the latest iteration—and recontextualization—of this collection.
Using the language of institutional care—grab bars, handrails, padded supports—the work asks how bodies might touch differently when loosened from the orthodoxies of safety that govern the designed environment. While safety railings are typically installed to enforce boundaries of liability and control, The Railings travels beyond sites of industrialized labor, where the logic of caution slips into a game of shared risk.
As its cushions get strapped around these rails, and unstrapped, piled, hung, folded, rolled, and kneeled on, The Railings flirts with multiple uses. Its function remains conveniently open to interpretation, to users and hosting institutions alike, inviting play with different intimate acts under the cover of its strategic ambiguity. It finds here a zone to the side of named positions, legal labels, and safety perimeters, a zone for, in the words of writer and literary critic Samuel Delany, “a certain social excess.”
The Railings is outfitted with a family of accessories, at once ornamental and functional, that suggestively proliferate pipe dreams (aka scenarios that the railings can host). Each accessory activates a different bodily sense—the burn from the slap of a paddle or the delicate scent of a cut flower.
Strat Coffman is a spatial designer whose work reimagines the role of standards, sensation, and the body in contemporary architecture. Their work spans event architecture, exhibition design, and speculative furniture, often repurposing generic materials and infrastructural components to create new, sensory forms. They have worked with a diverse range of clients and venues, from art institutions and galleries to private bathhouses and music festivals. They are based in Los Angeles, where they teach at the University of Southern California. They are a recipient of the 2024 Architectural League Prize and their work has appeared at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, the MIT List Visual Arts Center, and the Goethe Institut.