When John Lennon and Yoko Ono married secretly in Gibraltar on March 20, 1969, the ceremony lasted only three minutes. But these minutes, so elaborately protected, were in fact the end of privacy. They promptly invited a global audience into their honeymoon bed, a weeklong Bed-In for Peace held from March 25 to 31 in room 902 of the Amsterdam Hilton International Hotel. In a later interview in Playboy magazine, they said: “We knew our honeymoon was going to be public, anyway, so we decided to use it to make a statement. We sat in bed and talked to reporters for seven days. It was hilarious. In effect, we were doing a commercial for peace on the front page of the papers instead of a commercial for war.” [1]

They even speak about all of this in the compact language of commercial slogans, the language of media: 

Yoko Ono: “In the age of advertisement, make advertisement.” [2]

John Lennon: “There is no line between private and public. No line.” [3]

Two of the most public people in the world, who had protested so loudly and worked so incredibly hard to protect their privacy in the face of a continuous media assault, suddenly inverted the equation and deployed the center of their private life, the bed, as a weapon, turning it into the most public platform for another kind of protest. After years of complaining about the “fish-bowl” of the press and the resulting “urge for privacy,” they put themselves in a literal fish bowl, the glass box of the Hilton, and created a site for work beyond paid labor:  

You’re in a fish bowl, so make use of it. It is no good trying to put a fence around it. So instead of all the cameras just being outside looking in, you’ve also got the cameras inside looking out. The things Yoko and I are doing are really that: projecting, bouncing back as fast as we can what happens to us from the outside. We put ourselves there in the fish bowls. And now, that we’re in that position—we use it for peace. And that’s the only thing to do, really. Because it’s no good working for money. And there is nothing else to do but work. So working for peace is an objective. [4]

Instead of having cameras outside snooping in, they brought the cameras inside the hotel, and further into the bedroom and onto their bed. The put the cameras to work for them. Not reporting on an event but performing the event. It was not simply a media event, it was media as event. They were filmed being filmed.

The name “Bed-In” came from “Sit-In” protests and was intended as a nonviolent protest against war and to promote world peace. “Make love, not war” was the slogan of the day; but to the disappointment of journalists, John and Yoko were fully dressed: John in white pajamas, and Yoko in a long white night gown, sitting in bed, as John put it, like “angels.” “I hope it's not a let-down,” Lennon apologized, “We wouldn’t make love in public. That’s an emotionally personal thing."[5]

Journalists were confused by the fact that nothing seemed to happen, speaking even of their boredom: “Love-In Bores Photogs” read a Chicago headline.[6] But it was a headline. Reporting a non-event event. Nothing happening was the happening. But John and Yoko were undermining the normal understanding of what is work, what is private, what is protest, and what is an event.  The bed had taken over from the street as the site of protest. They invited the world’s press into their room every day between 9am and 9pm, treating the bed as a work space with a precise schedule, while journalists streamed in and images streamed out. To the repeated question “Why in bed?” Yoko answered that they were working really long hours and that the bed is the most comfortable place to do this.

But the work day didn’t end at 9pm. John and Yoko repeatedly declared that they wanted to conceive a baby during that week. Yoko said that they “‘hope to conceive a baby’ during the seven days lie-in but not [in] public.”[7] Symptomatically, Yoko refers here to the “Bed-In” as a “Lie-In,” a slip that points to the fact that they were actually working day and night. The bed is the site of 24/7 labor with a relentless schedule:

9am–9pm: “Bed-In” for Peace

9pm–9am: “Lie-In” for Insemination

The bed is both protest site and factory for baby production: a fucktory. As John put it: “It is a make-love-and-not war protest. A happening, a sex-marathon, a bed production. It would be nice to conceive a baby in Amsterdam.”[8]

The bed as a site of conception, even an Immaculate Conception if we think about the all-white backdrop and its multiple religious references: white sheets, white night clothes, white robes, white walls, white flowers… John talks sometimes about the couple as two angels, other times as two saints. In photographs, the room is airbrushed out so the bed appears to be floating like a cloud, with John and Yoko angelically all in white, looking directly at us, and we at them, mesmerized, perhaps wondering why we have been invited to this royal bed. Waiting for a sign.

Yet we were not alone. The Bed-In received unprecedented media coverage all over the world. One room in an Amsterdam hotel became the most famous bedroom in the world. In the biggest possible expansion of the big glass windows that typically expose the domestic interior of Dutch houses, or even Amsterdam’s red-light district and its famous inversion of public and private with sex workers displaying their wares to the passersby, the confusion of street and bedroom is taken to its most extreme limit. In as much as they insisted that they are spending half their time trying to make a baby, they are presenting themselves as sex workers, and as spectators to the event, it was possible to sense the journalist’s frustration not being able to witness that. Reports stated that “they would engage in uninhibited love making,” and journalist seemed to hang around in the hope that something will happen in vain.[9] A kind of privacy was constructed in the middle of massive exposure. The bed oscillated between exposure and concealment.

John and Yoko didn’t simply occupy the room. They redesigned it as a media stage set with a particularly image in mind. They were in every sense the architects of that image. It is not by chance that the published images look so similar; practically only one angle was possible. They had emptied the usual Hilton room, removing all the furniture, artwork, and decoration, leaving only the king size bed, which they deliberately placed against the floor-to-ceiling glass wall, with a panoramic view onto the city of Amsterdam. With their back to the window, they faced inside the room in a kind of Loosian move.[10] Their bodies against the light—in an all-white background, of white walls, white sheets, white pajamas, and white flowers—seemed to fly above Amsterdam.

Outside is, of course, Amsterdam, but the bed is far more public than the streets. Rather than contemplate the view of the city, its occupants faced the reporters’ cameras registering the images and sounds that will soon be in the streets, in newspapers and magazine covers, on TV, film, and radio, internationally. For 12 hours each day, John Lennon and Yoko Ono did endless interviews on camera or by telephone, often doing more than one interview at once. Celebrities come and go. The telephone rings constantly. No second is empty: “We don’t have time to be bored.”[11]

On the glass panes behind them, they pinned-up two hand written posters: “BED PEACE” and “HAIR PEACE”; and on the side wall: “STAY IN BED,” “GROW YOUR HAIR,” “I LOVE YOKO,” “I LOVE JOHN,” and “BAGISM.” From the street, the back of the two posters was visible, marking the now-famous room, and even the bed, with the white pillows pushed up against the glass, and at times the back of John and Yoko’s heads visible as they held court.

All the usual furniture went out and in came media equipment, filling the room and even the bed itself, which was covered with tape recorders, telephones, microphones, and flowers from the wedding. Indian music played from a phonograph. The room was permanently crowded with journalists who leaned forward, so close they were practically on the bed, where they would deposit their equipment and ask questions. They seem to be puzzled, waiting for something to happen, while John and Yoko talk endlessly about peace and exude a strange calm. What is happening is a happening. Yoko is a key Fluxus artist, a legend of downtown Manhattan performance art, and the Bed-In is, first of all, and maybe never more than, a performance work. The Bed-In was an artwork, a 24/7 piece by two hyper-dedicated art workers.  

As Yoko put it: “Instead of writing a play about it, we just started to do it in real life—so the whole world is a theater actually. I mean, the Hilton was the stage.” Life as art for two performers for whom there is no longer a backstage.

In fact, the performance and their personal relationship itself began with an artwork. The Bed-In in Amsterdam was not the first bed as production site, nor the first 24/7. In their first collaborative work in May 1968, John and Yoko composed and recorded experimental music in an all-night session that ended in the morning with their, reportedly, first time making love. Lennon took some pictures of themselves with his automatic camera, naked with the unmade bed in the background. The images were used in the front and back cover of the album Unfinished Music n.1-Two Virgins, produced by Apple Records. The album covers were ruled obscene in the United States, confiscated in the docks of New Jersey, and ordered destroyed.[12] They were finally distributed with the covers wrapped in brown paper with hole on both the front and back covers showing only their faces—which, like all forms of prohibition, only intensified the erotic charge. A kind of peephole.

These original photographs already capture the angelic scene of the cloud-like bed. The unmade bed and the two naked artists standing at its foot with the rumpled sheets on the floor float at the center of the white album cover. In the typewritten text below, Paul McCartney symptomatically refers to the meeting of “two saints.” Everything that will appear in Amsterdam has already been put in motion in London a year before. The scandalizing image lured the world into the Hilton.

But why the Amsterdam Hilton? “Because it’s very functional. The bed is okay,”[13] Lennon laconically replied. The choice was no accident. The Hilton International was already a “fishbowl.” The guests are not simply seen by other guests, as in a traditional grand hotel. The entire scene is designed to expose them, with transparent walls not just in the lobby but in the rooms themselves, which were equipped with balconies to make appearances. The hotels are not just a voyeur’s paradise, but an exhibitionist one. The architectural equivalent of the reversal of the fishbowl of the media that Lennon and Ono wanted to perform with their bed-in was ready-made in the all-glass Hilton International hotels. Hilton turned what people fear—exposure—into a positive experience. As Anabelle Wharton puts it, the Hilton chain “transformed the anxiety of being observed into a pleasure.”[14] In 1965, Vogue magazine described the “subliminal pleasures” of the “tall glass oasis” operating as “a balm, a salve, a glass of Alka-Seltzer,” in the face of the stress of the unfamiliar.[15]

The hotel is in the city, but detached; a transparent oasis. But what is outside? The background is Amsterdam, at the time the center of Europe’s 1960s cultural and sexual revolution, of experimentation with sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, political activism, and protest—against the Vietnam war, the local government, and housing shortages; for equal rights, abortion, and even alternative forms of transportation. The Dutch anarchist movement Provo provoked the police and the government with non-violent happenings that ended up in violence. Provo had been dismantled in 1967, but Provo activist Hans Hoffmann gave the couple a white bike during the Bed-In, demonstrating sympathy with their tactics. In the summer of 1965, Provo had given away white bicycles for communal use in Amsterdam with the aim to create a more sustainable environment. John and Yoko laid the bike across the bed and were photographed with it in yet another confusion of public street and private room. The very presence of Provo inside the Hilton was radical confusion in itself, as if Provo, whose actions were always in public space, understood that no space was more public in that moment.  

Like the Hilton hotel, the Bed-In was not a one off. It was part of a chain of events. A second Bed-In was supposed to happen in New York, but Lennon was denied a visa into the US because of a marijuana possession charge in London. They decided to do it in the Bahamas to address the American public, apparently not realizing how far away from the US and how hot and humid it was: “It’s not a good place. It’s not that the hotels are bad, they’re just not hotels, John and I both didn’t like it, but we said, ‘Let’s go to bed and see what it looks like in the morning.’”[16] The following day, they decided to try Canada instead. Upon their late arrival from the Bahamas, John was detained for two hours while authorities deliberated on his visa. After being released, they promptly turned the bed in the King Edwards hotel in Toronto into a 24-hour office, being interviewed and receiving visitors. A full 24/7 bed in took place in Montreal in May, 1969, in the Queen Elisabeth hotel, also a Hilton International. The whole room was set up as a TV studio with spot-lights on top of the bed. It was a collaboration with a Canadian TV corporation who recorded all the interviews and celebrity visitors such as the Smothers Brothers, Derek Taylor, Murray the K, the Canadian Radha Krishna, and Timothy Leary, who even laid in bed with them and others. It was a kind of proto-reality TV for which Amsterdam and Toronto now appear as rehearsals that were themselves broadcast.

In an unsympathetic review of the TV program “John and Yoko Lennon’s Bed-In for Peace,” filmed in Montreal, Variety magazine wrote: “It was lensed like disaster coverage, and steadier camera handling has come out of combat zones.”[17] The Vietnam war was indeed never far away from the coverage of the Bed-In, and on many occasions occupied the same page of the newspaper. When the Boston Globe reported on a Newton couple that had emulated John and Yoko, staying 144 hours in bed in protest against the war, for instance, underneath ran a story about the tenth anniversary of the first soldier killed in Vietnam, and four Massachusetts’ towns commemorating the deaths of 35,000 American soldiers since then in Vietnam by holding a “mock funeral procession.”[18]

The Montreal Bed-In week culminated with the recording of “Give Peace a Chance,” somehow echoing the origins of the Bed-In in a recording session in London. They were thoroughly mediatic in their sensitivity to the relationship between the singular event and the permanent recording, the single bed and the mass audience. The bed was literally suspended in fronts of millions of eyes, floating in media space with one idea in mind, even a product. As Yoko Ono put it: “We’re selling peace like we’re selling soap.”[19]

The 24/7 bed of John Lennon and Yoko Ono anticipates the working bed of today. In what is probably now a conservative estimate, the Wall Street Journal reported in 2012 that 80 percent of young New York City professionals work regularly from bed. The fantasy of the home office has given way to the reality of the bed office. The very meaning of the word “office” has been transformed. Millions of dispersed beds are taking over from concentrated office buildings. The boudoir is defeating the tower. Networked electronic technologies have removed any limit to what can be done in bed. But how did we get here?

In his famous short text “Louis-Philippe, or the Interior,” Walter Benjamin wrote of the splitting of work and home in the nineteenth century:

Under Louis-Philippe, the private citizen enters the stage of history… For the private person, living space becomes, for the first time, antithetical to the place of work. The former is constituted by the interior; the office is its complement. The private person who squares his accounts with reality in his office demands that his interior be maintained in his illusions… From this spring the phantasmagorias of the interior. For the private individual the private environment represents the universe. In it he gathers remote places and the past. His living room is a box in the world theater.[20]

Industrialization brought with it the eight-hour shift and the radical separation between the home and the office or factory, between rest and work, night and day. Post-industrialization collapses work back into the home and takes it further into the bedroom and into the bed itself. Phantasmagoria no longer line the room in wallpaper, fabric, images, and objects. It is now within electronic devices. The whole universe is concentrated on a small screen with the bed floating in an infinite sea of information.

To lie down is not to rest but to move. The bed is now a site of action. But the voluntary invalid has no need of their legs. The bed has become the ultimate prosthetic and a whole new industry is devoted to providing contraptions to facilitate work while lying down—reading, writing, texting, recording, broadcasting, listening, talking, and of course, eating, drinking, sleeping, or making love—activities that seem to have themselves been turned, of late, into work. Waiters in restaurants in the United States ask if you are “still working on that” before removing your plate or your glass. Endless advice is dispensed about how to “work” on your personal relationships, “schedule” sex with your partner. Sleeping is definitely hard work too, for millions, with the psycho-pharmaceutical industry providing new drugs every year and an army of sleep experts providing advice on how to achieve this apparently ever-more-elusive goal—all in the name of higher productivity, of course.

This philosophy was already embodied in the figure of Hugh Hefner, who famously almost never left his bed, let alone his house. He literally moved his office to his bed in 1960 when he moved into the Playboy Mansion at 1340 North State Parkway, Chicago, turning it into the epicenter of a global empire, and his silk pajamas and dressing gown into his business attire. “I don’t go out of the house at all!!! … I am a contemporary recluse,” he told Tom Wolfe, guessing that the last time he was out had been three and a half months before, and that in the last two years he had been out of the house only nine times.[21] Fascinated, Wolfe described him as “the tender-tympany green heart of an artichoke.”[22]

Playboy turned the bed into a workplace. From the mid-1950s on, the bed becomes increasingly sophisticated, outfitted with all sorts of entertainment and communication devices as a kind of control room. The magazine devoted many articles to the design of the perfect bed. Hefner acted as the model with his famous circular bed in the Playboy Mansion. The bed was first introduced as a feature in the “Playboy Townhouse” article of 1962, which presents a detailed unrealized project in plans, sections, and renderings that had been originally commissioned to be Hefner’s own house. Not by chance, the only piece of the design to be realized was the bed, which was installed in the mansion. The bed itself is a house. Its rotating and vibrating structure is packed with a small fridge, hi-fi, telephone, filing cabinets, bar, microphone, dictaphone, video cameras, headphones, TV, breakfast table, work surfaces, and control for all the lighting fixtures—all for the man who never wants to leave. The bed was Hefner’s office, his place of business, where he conducted interviews, made his phone calls, selected images, adjusted layouts, edited texts, ate, drank, and consulted with playmates. Sex was part of his work, part of his business. He was a sex-worker in the end.

Hefner was not alone. The bed may have been the ultimate midcentury American office. In an interview in the Paris Review in 1957, Truman Capote is asked, “What are some of your writing habits? Do you use a desk? Do you write on a machine?” To which he answers:

I am a completely horizontal author. I can’t think unless I’m lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and a coffee handy. I’ve got to be puffing and sipping. As the afternoon wears on, I shift from coffee to mint tea to sherry to martinis. No, I don’t use a typewriter. Not in the beginning. I write my first version in longhand. Then I do a complete revision, also in longhand… Then I type a third draft on yellow paper… No, I don’t get out of bed to do this. I balance the machine on my knees. Sure, it works fine; I can manage a hundred words a minute.[23]

From morning to afternoon to evening, the drinks, the paper, and the equipment changes, but his position on the bed does not.

Even architects set up offices in bed at midcentury. Richard Neutra started working the moment he woke up with elaborate equipment enabling him to design, write, or even interview in bed. As his son Dion Neutra revealed:

Dad’s best time for creative thinking was early in the morning, long before any activity had started in the office below. He often stayed in bed working with ideas and designs, even extending into appointments which had been made earlier. His one concession to convention was to put on a tie over his night shirt when receiving visitors while still propped up in bed![24]

Neutra’s bed in the VDL house in Silverlake, Los Angeles, included two public phones; three communication stations for talking with other rooms in the house, the office below, and another half a kilometer away; three different call bells; drafting boards and easels that folded down over the bed; electric lights; and a radio-gramophone controlled from a dashboard overhead. A bedside table rolling on casters held the tape recorder, electric clock, and storage compartments for drawing and writing equipment so that he could, as Neutra put it in a letter to his sister, “use every minute from morning to late night.”[25]

Postwar America inaugurated the high-performance bed as an epicenter of productivity, a new form of industrialization that was exported globally and has now become available to an international army of dispersed but interconnected producers. A new kind of factory without walls is constructed by compact electronics and extra pillows for the 24/7 generation.

The kind of equipment that Hefner envisioned (some of which, like the answering machine, didn’t yet exist) has now become expanded for the internet and social media generation, who not only work in bed but socialize in bed, exercise in bed, read the news in bed, and entertain sexual relationships with people miles away in bed. The Playboy fantasy of the nice girl next door is more likely realized today with someone on another continent than in the same building or neighborhood—a person you may have never seen before and may never see again. And it is anybody’s guess if she is actually real, or rather an electronic construction. As in the Spike Jonze film Her, a moving depiction of life in the soft, uterine state that is a corollary to our new mobile technologies, the “her” in question is an operating system that turns out to be a more satisfying partner than a person. The protagonist lies in bed with Her, chatting, arguing, and making love.

If, according to Jonathan Crary, capitalism is the end of sleep, colonizing every minute of our lives for production and consumption, the actions of the voluntary recluse are not so voluntary in the end.[26] But it may be worth noting that communism had its own ideas of bringing the bed to the workplace. In 1929, at the height of Stalin’s first five-year plan—with the working day extended and mass exhaustion among factory workers in the face of staggering production quotas—the Soviet government organized a competition for a new city of rest for 100,000 workers. Konstantin Melnikov presented the “Sonata of Sleep,” a new building type for collective sleep, with mechanized beds rocking the workers to unconsciousness and slanted floors to eliminate the need for pillows. Centralized control booths with sleep attendants would regulate temperature, humidity, smell, and even sounds to maximize sleep, including the “rustles of leaves, the cooing of nightingales and the soft murmur of waves.”[27] Melnikov described it as a “laboratory of sleep” and made a poster that reads; “Cure through sleep and thereby alter the character.” The inspiration was symptomatically American—Melnikov had read about a military academy in Pensacola, Florida that taught language to sleeping cadets. Sleep itself had become part of the industrial process.

The nineteenth-century division of the city between rest and work may soon become obsolete. Not only have our habits and habitats changed with the internet and social media, but predictions about the end of human labor in the wake of new technologies and robotization that were already being made at the end of the nineteenth century are no longer treated as futuristic. Thirty-five years ago, the late economist Wassily Leontief reminded us that “They replaced horses, didn’t they?” and the business section of The New York Times recently reconsidered his idea of the end of the “human workhorse”:

Horses hung around in the labor force for quite some time after they were first challenged by “modern” communications technologies like the telegraph and the railroad, hauling stuff and people around farms and cities. But when the internal combustion engine came along, horses—as a critical component of the world economy—were history… Humans as workhorses might also be on the way out.[28]

Economists wonder what kind of economic model this reality will lead to: from growing inequalities with vast amount of people unemployed to large-scale redistribution in the form of Universal Basic Income, which was recently considered in a referendum in Switzerland and rejected. Yet multiple trials are now underway from California to Finland.

The end of paid labor and its replacement with creative leisure was already envisioned in utopian projects of the 1960s and 1970s by Constant, Superstudio, and Archizoom, including hyperequipped beds. Meanwhile the city has started to redesign itself.

In today’s attention-deficit-disorder society, we have discovered that we work better in short bursts punctuated by rest. Many companies provide sleeping pods in the office to maximize productivity. Bed and office are never far apart in the 24/7 world. Special self-enclosed beds have been designed for office spaces—turning themselves into compact sealed capsules, mini space ships, that can be used in isolation, gathered together in clusters, or lined up in rows for synchronized sleep—understood as a part of work rather than its opposite.

Between the bed in the office and the office in the bed, a whole new horizontal architecture has taken over. It is magnified by the “flat” networks of social media that have themselves become fully integrated into professional, business, and industrial environments in a collapse of traditional distinctions between private and public, work and play, rest and action. The bed itself—with its ever more sophisticated mattress, linings, and technical attachments—is the basis of an intra-uterine environment that combines the sense of deep interiority with the sense of hyper-connectivity to the outside. Not by chance, Hefner’s round bed was a kind of flying saucer hovering in space in a room without windows, as if in orbit, with the TV hanging above as a reference to planet earth. It was a circle, the classical image of the universe, after all. The bed today has become a portable universe, equipped with every possible technology of communication. A midcentury fantasy has turned into mass reality.

What is the architecture of this new space and time? What is the nature of this new interior in which we have collectively decided to check ourselves in? What is the architecture of this prison in which night and day, work and play are no longer differentiated and we are permanently under surveillance, even as we sleep in the control booth? New media turns us all into inmates, constantly under surveillance, even as we celebrate endless connectivity. We have all become “a contemporary recluse,” as Hefner put it half a century ago.

In Laura Poitras’ film Citizenfour, we see Edward Snowden up close for days on end sitting on his bed in a Hong Kong hotel, surrounded by laptops, communicating with journalists in the room and around the world about the secret world of massive global surveillance. The biggest invasion of privacy in the history of the planet is revealed from bed and dominates all media. The most public figure in the world at that moment is a recluse. Architecture has been inverted.