Culture is the beam of light flowing through the built environment and it is the medium that bends the stream of architecture and design. Cough, Spit, Swallow (2018) depicts three conventional sites of ritualized physical contact (intimacy) that have created unique, specialized, and broadly recognizable furniture: the exam table, the dental chair, and the glory hole. The work both satirizes conventional propriety and shows us a method of reading the messages inscribed in the seemingly mundane.