Unplanned Visitors: Queering the Ethics and Aesthetics of Domestic Space 9780228013778

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Unplanned Visitors

Unplanned Visitors

Olivier Vallerand

Queering the Ethics and Aesthetics of Domestic Space

McG i l l - Q u e e n ’s U n i v e r s i t y P re s s Montreal & Kingston

•

London

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Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2020 isbn 978-0-2280-0184-3 (cloth) isbn 978-0-2280-0185-0 (paper) Legal deposit second quarter 2020 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding has also been received from Arizona State University’s Institute for Humanities Research and Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Unplanned visitors : queering the ethics and aesthetics of domestic space / Olivier Vallerand. Names: Vallerand, Olivier, 1981- author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana 20200193570 | isbn 9780228001850 (softcover) | isbn 9780228001843 (hardcover) Subjects: lcsh: Homosexuality and architecture. | lcsh: Architecture—Philosophy. | lcsh: Domestic space. | lcsh: Queer theory. Classification: lcc na2543.h65 v35 2020 | ddc 720.86/6—dc23

Only love makes house a home Patrick Wolf, 2011

Contents

Acknowledgments | ix Introduction: Between the Domestic and the Public | 3 1 Public Privacy, Private Publicness: Feminist and Queer Critiques

of Space | 12 2 Making Queer Space Theory Visible: Emerging Voices

in the 1990s | 27 3 Living Pictures: Mark Robbins Drags the Home into the Gallery | 64 4 Perfect Homes/Queer Homes: Elmgreen & Dragset Destruct(ure)

the Domestic | 79 5 Expanded Territories: Applying Queer Space Thinking | 126

Conclusion: A Queer Use for a Queer Place | 162 Figures | 171 Notes | 175 Bibliography | 209 Index | 243

Acknowledgments

This book started life as PhD research and continued evolving throughout my post-doctoral fellowship and first years of teaching. As such, it emerged from exchanges with my advisor, the invaluably insightful Annmarie Adams, and PhD committee members, the dedicated Nik Luka and inspirational Amelia Jones. Further helpful feedback came from my defence committee and dissertation reviewers, Nik Luka, David Theodore, Martin Bressani, Natalie Oswin, and Christopher Reed; from discussions with colleagues at McGill, including Christina Contandriopoulos, Julia Tischer, Frederika Eilers, and Philam Nguyen; from colleagues at Berkeley, C. Greig Crysler, SG Yeros, and Eric Peterson; as well as from the manuscript’s three anonymous reviewers. I also had a very interesting intellectual exchange with Stéphanie Dadour, who shares my interest in subversive domestic experimentations. Thank you also to my editor, Jonathan Crago. Obviously, the research would not have been possible without the architects, artists, and organizations who have contributed tremendous help through their documentation, interviews, and interest in my work. I thank Ingar Dragset, Michael Elmgreen, Jan Sauerwald, and Anja Schiller at Studio Elmgreen & Dragset; Katarina Bonnevier and her colleagues from mycket; Nils Wenk; Jürgen Mayer; Mark Robbins; Joel Sanders Andrés Jaque; Lauren Johnson and Ryan Day; Heather Cassils and Clover Leary of the Toxic Titties; Erica Freyberger and Eva Franch I Gilabert at the Storefront for Art and Architecture; Anette Østerby at the Danish Agency for Culture; Elena Cazzaro at Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee/Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia; Louise Shannon at the Victoria & Albert Museum; Gordon Brent Ingram; Benjamin Gianni; and Matthew Hoffman and Matthias Hollwich at hwkn/boom.

Elements of this book have been published previously in preliminary form in “Home Is the Place We All Share: Building Queer Collective Utopias” in the Journal of Architectural Education 67, no. 1 (2013) and in “Living Pictures: Dragging the Home into the Gallery” in Interiors: Design, Architecture and Culture 4, no. 2 (2013). I have also had the privilege of presenting and discussing my ideas at numerous conferences; the feedback and questions received at all of them have greatly influenced this book. The research has been funded by a Bourse de doctorat en recherche from the Fonds québécois de recherche Société et culture (2010–13), a Schulich Graduate Fellowship from McGill University (2010–11), and a Doctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2012–14). Additional funding for research travel came from Graduate Research Enhancement and Travel Awards, a Graduate Travel Fund Award, and a Graduate Research Mobility Award from McGill University’s Faculty of Engineering. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, a subvention grant from the Arizona State University Institute for Humanities Research, and a subvention grant from the Arizona State University Herberger Research Council. This work would also not exist without my involvement in community groups fighting for better lives (and visibility) for gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, and queer youth. I am particularly thankful to the team at gris-Montréal for giving me the challenging responsibility to be their research coordinator since 2009, with invaluable help from Janik Bastien-Charlebois. This experience, as well as my collaboration with Maria Nengeh Mensah’s Testimonial Cultures and Line Chamberland’s savie-lgbtq research groups at uqam, has helped me learn much about doing interdisciplinary team research. Thanks also to my friend Antoine Coulombe for guiding me in my first years of activism and showing me that community engagement could lead to academic research. Thanks to so many great friends for being there, all the time, despite the physical distance. You make the solitary work of writing much more fun. Thanks to my parents and my sister for their presence and support. Thanks to Paul-André, you know why. Thanks to Louis for being there, always. Merci.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Unplanned Visitors

Introduction Between the Domestic and the Public

Apart from a few remarkable exceptions, architects have continued these past twenty years to ignore the epistemological transformations and the critical turn taking place in contemporary queer, transgender, and crip movements, and, indulged by the most dramatic amount of capital flowing between Dubai and Prada and the People’s Republic of China since World War II, have acted as if the ongoing transformation of sexual and somatic politics were just a minor detail within a new peak of architectural production at the global scale. As a result of this negation, feminist and queer architectural practices are today still posed in terms of female architects or discussed in shy or embarrassing debates around the more or less “out” character of the practices of Philip Johnson or Paul Rudolph. Paul B. Preciado, 20121 As Preciado’s comment underlines, when I started research for this book ten years ago the idea of queer architectural practices was somewhat dormant. Unlike other fields where strong feminist and queer research has evolved in sophisticated ways over the last three decades, until a very recent resurgence of interest in the topic queer thinking in architecture had been mostly limited to a small number of publications and exhibitions in the early 1990s. This book presents a short history of how architects, artists, theorists, and historians have investigated the relations between gender, sexuality, and the built environment, from historians focusing on trying to identify how the sexual orientation of specific architects or clients had impacted the design of discrete buildings to theorists and practitioners challenging the discipline of architecture. This history is about architecture and the built environment, but it does not focus on specific built

spaces. Instead, I observe the ideas that have circulated over the past three decades and survey the challenges they have faced, trying to find how a queer ethics of design has been defined. Few built examples of an architecture designed with a queer approach exist; I thus examine first how queer critiques of space are represented in artworks and installations, before discussing how they have had an impact on the design of some spaces. Furthermore, while queer critiques have targeted a range of spaces, because of the close relation between self-identifications and gender and sexuality many of them have focused on the relationships between public and private. As a point of entry, I observe how domestic and what are understood as private spaces have been targeted by queer space theorists. How do mainstream representations and discourses of domestic architecture – and its relation to other realms of the built environment – assume and often reinforce certain normative constructs? How do late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century practices highlight (and critique) (hetero)normative aspects of architecture? How is the domestic understood when restaged in a museum or in a public space? How do experiences of space, and the critiques that sometimes follow, vary according to sexual orientation, gender, race, and class? How can queer theory inform architectural discourse and understandings of architectural space, building up a renewed understanding of design ethics? And, finally, how do aesthetics and ethics relate in a queer approach to space? The word “queer” is complex and loaded with varying meanings that sometimes diverge heavily according to who uses the word, from political challenges to gender and sexual categories to a mainstream umbrella term grouping together sexual and gender minorities. In the context of this book, three main definitions of queer will be used (activism, theory, and identity-based umbrella term), depending on the projects or thinkers discussed. While the term queer has been used since the nineteenth century as a pejorative term describing homosexual men or men with a non-normative gender expression, starting in the mid-1980s the term was reclaimed by radical queer activists as “a way of reminding us how we are perceived by the rest of the world.”2 Activists, such as members of the short-lived Queer Nation organization founded in 1990 in New York,3 were then reacting to what they perceived as a weakening of the 1970s homosexual liberation and lesbian feminist movements in the context of the aids epidemic and its handling by governments, media, and community representatives. Their agenda revolved around the socio-political power of reclaiming the term “queer” to focus on a rejection of traditional gender identities. Their belief in challenging oppressive normativity also meant a broadening of their focus from gender and sexuality issues to an anti-capitalist and anti-oppression 4

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position. From this activist stream emerged queer theory, a term coined by Teresa De Lauretis in her introductory essay to the “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities” issue (1991) of the feminist journal Differences to describe a radical reconsidering of sexuality outside the heterosexual matrix.4 Thinkers such as Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and David Halperin, emerging from a variety of disciplines including philosophy, literature, and history, both reacted to and built from feminism, gender studies, and gay and lesbian studies to open up new ways of thinking about gender and sexual identification, performance, and categories that have developed in many different directions since then.5 Importantly, both queer activism and queer theory are critical of identity categories and seek to problematize assumptions about essential identities. Somewhat contradictorily then, queer activism and queer theory have made the term popular and led to its adoption in mainstream discourse as an umbrella term uncritically grouping together a variety of identity categories understood to be other than heterosexual (someone who is exclusively attracted to another gender) or cisgender (someone who exclusively identifies as their sex assigned at birth). It includes, among others, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and gender non-binary people. The term is also sometimes taken by itself as an additional term to refer to people who refuse to identify with these categories, with the variation “genderqueer” also used to insist on a refusal to identify with a specific gender or sexual orientation, physically or mentally. The mainstream use of queer does not encompass the same breadth and complexity of meanings that queer theorists and activists attribute to it – for example, its use in contexts such as the reality television show Queer Eye (initially Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, 2003–07, rebooted since 2018) simply builds on stereotypes, such as the association of gay men with superior taste in fashion, design, style, and culture. Considering the challenges to identity categories brought by queer theory, I will refer in this book both to “self-identification” (defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “the attribution of certain characteristics or qualities to oneself,” which I will use most often in the plural form to underline how these attributions change through time and in relation to different people) and to “identity” (defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “the characteristics determining who or what a person or thing is”). “Self-identifications” marks the agency of acts and decisions made by a person, consciously or not, but also underlines the indeterminacy of the characteristics that emerge from performative acts and decisions, characteristics that can change and evolve depending on context, in opposition to the determinacy and essentialism implied by the term “identity.”6 Similarly, the terms “gay,” “lesbian,” “transgender,” “queer,” or “lgbt+” (standing for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and other related groups such as two-spirit, asexual, intersex, INTRODUCTION

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questioning, etc.) used at different places in the book underline the meanings implied by the thinkers, architects, or artists discussed. This does not mean that sexual and gender minorities share the same experiences and struggles; I will try to highlight differences as much as possible, particularly in relation to groups that have historically been marginalized within lgbt+ movements. The complicated meanings of queer (as both a word and a theory) make a definition of a queer architecture very difficult. Chapter 1 will show how, for example, some scholars and practitioners focus mostly on identity (buildings designed for gay or lesbian clients or by gay or lesbian architects), while others develop an approach to the built environment inspired by queer theory’s challenges to identity-based thinking. Queer critiques in architecture are a continuation and ally of feminist critiques that first highlighted how the division of private and public spaces in architectural design and history is intrinsically linked to gender divisions in society and therefore to gendered understandings of space. Most of these critiques blur the traditional gender divisions in domestic spaces, in line with queer theory’s critique of essentialist categories. They position queer space theory as central to discussions about how various aspects of identities impact our use and design of spaces. Furthermore, I develop my own thinking and discussion of these questions from a queer approach that analyses objects – here, domestic spaces, filmic and photographic representations of such spaces, and spatial installations and subversions – as events linked to their social, cultural, and political contexts, not just depending on them but shaping them. I thus bring forward an important series of works that have been seldom discussed in architectural history, even though they formed an original and important stream of theoretical thinking in the 1990s. They developed the social background of postmodernism that is too often hidden by a focus on formal language inherited from architectural historian Charles Jencks’s theorization of the movement.7 The focus of most commentators on the formality of postmodern architectural language shifts the discussion away from social aspects of the built environment, silencing how formal disruptions of architectural language are often prompted by a desire to highlight and challenge the social and political underpinnings of a language, and vice versa.8 Notions of private and public are omnipresent in discussions of architecture and cities. Far from being neutral, they are formulated through normative notions of gender – the very same notions that queer thinking seeks to question. Analysis of modern domestic spaces have shown that domestic experimentations disrupted and subverted gender and sexuality norms, long before feminist and queer critiques were explicitly spelled out.9 Starting from the Oxford Dictionary definition of “domestic” as “relating to the running of a home or to family rela6

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tions,” I focus in this book on “family relations” in a broad sense to avoid the common conflation of “domestic” and “private,” which I want to problematize. Building from feminist theorists, private and public are discussed as a historically constructed binary opposition and understood as two ideal types. Nancy Duncan, for example, defines these two types: “The private as an ideal type has traditionally been associated and conflated with: the domestic, the embodied, the natural, the family, property, the ‘shadowy interior of the household,’ personal life, intimacy, passion, sexuality, ‘the good life,’ care, a haven, unwaged labour, reproduction, and immanence. The public as an ideal type has traditionally been the domain of the disembodied, the abstract, the cultural, rationality, critical public discourse, citizenship, civil society, justice, the market place, waged labour, production, the polis, the state, action, militarism, heroism, and transcendence.”10 Feminist and queer critiques challenge these understandings, showing how they limit possibilities for many people, sustaining the design of oppressive and unsafe spaces. Chapter 1 focuses on the emergence in the English-speaking academic world in the early 1990s of queer space theory and the implications of different understandings of “queer” in architectural discourse. It discusses how queer critiques built on feminist critiques – as feminist theory itself continued to evolve – that challenged traditional definitions of domesticity in terms of normative binaries omnipresent in Euro-American architectural discourses, most importantly in the opposition of private (conflated with domestic, assumed to be feminine and often vernacular) and public (assumed to be masculine or associated with institutions and high-style architecture). It also addresses how the design professions have limited the potential of women and queer people and how feminist and queer architects and designers have sought to counteract this. Chapter 2 then explores how queer space theory’s potential for architectural design, history, and discourse has been most explicitly developed in a series of exhibitions, focusing on the Queer Space exhibition at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York (1994) and disappeared at the Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago (1996). The chapter also covers how a wave of 1990s architects interested in social issues, including feminist and queer issues, addressed the importance of domestic spaces in peoples’ lives, as well as changing notions of privacy. The House Rules exhibition, curated by Mark Robbins at the Wexner Center for the Arts in 1994, brought forward practitioners and thinkers to challenge normative regulations and ideas about the house. This exhibition developed similar ideas to the queer space exhibitions being held at the same time, while also complicating some of the issues by trying to project them onto real-life regulations. The chapter ends with a discussion of the Un-Private House exhibition at the INTRODUCTION

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Museum of Modern Art (1999) that also explores the theme of privacy, but through a more formalist discourse erasing the social and political aspects of most projects. The exhibitions discussed in chapter 2 that first made queer space theory visible were collective endeavors. Chapters 3 and 4 focus instead on two practices, of an architect and of a duo of artists, exploring the representation of domestic spaces from a queer perspective. Developed as a critique of popular interior design and architecture magazines, American architect Mark Robbins’s Households project (2003–06), in chapter 3, investigates the impact of the transposition of spaces understood as “private” in the public space of the gallery through photographic representations of domesticity. Discussed in chapter 4, Scandinavian artists Elmgreen & Dragset’s large-scale installations move away from representations of existing domestic space to focus on the creation of imaginary domestic spaces put on display in the public realm. The chapter also explores how Elmgreen & Dragset have brought their critique of space to the design of their own living and working space in Berlin, the Pumpwerk Neukölln. It provides a closer examination of the ways that queer challenges to domesticity and its representations can inform the design of actual lived spaces. After this initial peak of interest in queer space theory in the 1990s, interest declined as digital and projective practices gained prominence in the 2000s. However, interest in social issues, including feminist, queer, critical race, and critical disability theory, resurfaced in architecture in the 2010s following social and political changes and events. The last chapter presents current approaches to the relation between gender, sexuality, and the built environment, including intersectional political practices such as Scandinavian designers and artists mycket and Spain-based architects the Office for Political Innovation (founded by Andrés Jaque), as well as two projects designed primarily for non-heterosexual seniors, the boom communities in Palm Springs and the Costa del Sol, and the Center on Halsted’s Town Hall apartments in Chicago. These projects address how queer people – and particularly the more marginalized ones such as trans, migrant, and/or older people – still experience oppression and violence every day. The discussion of these projects also shines a light on how some architects such as Joel Sanders who were involved in early queer space exhibitions have since developed their thinking about gender and sexuality. The cases studied represent key moments in the development of queer space theory in architecture and design. In addition to being layered works offering a diversity of readings, they also highlight some of the tensions that arise from trying to define “queer space,” and from reconciling aesthetic and ethical concerns. The focus on domesticity underlines the importance of intimacy in understand8

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ings of the relation between gender, sexuality, and the built environment; but it also ties in with gendered understandings of the separation between interior and exterior, private and public. Even when researching cruising spaces carved out of public environments, what is in fact discussed is the relation between those spaces and domestic spaces, the privacy unavailable in domestic environments but that can be found hidden in plain sight. The projects studied take various forms, from photographs to installations to buildings, but they are all concerned with problematizing the relation between spaces understood as private and public and their representation. Furthermore, they are projects that reach across disciplines and blur traditional boundaries between art and architecture to make more visible the rarely discussed relation between architectural domesticity and codes of normative gender and sexuality, even if the domestic’s close relationship with self-identifications makes these codes systematically embedded in any design for dwellings. The context of art museums and galleries appears to create a more welcoming space for such discussions, while the tension between the traditionally understood significance and meanings of varying disciplines and media is used to underline how domestic space must be understood beyond public/private oppositions. The critiques are highlighted in these projects by the shift in context that transforms everyday domestic environments, often assumed to be neutral containers and havens for private lives, into objectified art pieces presented in (public) gallery spaces. If, as some of the examples discussed here will show, such questions are hard to translate into actual designs, the political commentary present in the projects studied suggests potential transformations for architectural practice, teaching, and histories, building towards a renewed design ethics. The artists and architects studied come from diverse geographic and theoretical backgrounds and have thus addressed queer theory in different ways. Early discussions of queer space theory in architecture occurred among a relatively small group of architects and architectural historians in academic circles of the United States’ East Coast, with for example Robbins developing his practice from the early 1980s under the influence of the emergence of gay studies and later queer studies, and in conversation with other figures studying sexuality and space, including Aaron Betsky, Beatriz Colomina, or Joel Sanders.11 An important number of them were white men, unfortunately mirroring the limits faced by women and persons of colour in the discipline and limiting the diversity of case studies that could be included in the genealogy presented in this book. In addition to some of the earlier thinkers continuing their work, later projects thankfully come from a more diverse range of people, in terms of gender and geography, such as the important number of queer women in Scandinavian countries exploring INTRODUCTION

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sexuality and gender in the built environment with a critical lens building on an understanding of queer theory in its later stages. Others, like Elmgreen & Dragset, have learned about queer theory after a few years of practice, having already included elements of their experience as a gay couple in their work from the beginning of their careers in mid-1990s Northern Europe. The decision to mostly avoid analyzing specific built domestic spaces in this project is an attempt to circumvent the limitations of basing observations on only a few spaces, accessible for analysis and thus already detached from ordinary domestic spaces. It also stems from a desire to contribute new viewpoints to the discussion of queer space in architecture, which has up until now often concentrated on identifying characteristics of queer space from the study of exemplary houses or sexualized spaces. I instead look at the potential of queer critiques for the field of architecture broadly understood, to build from queer space theory to understand how the assumed public/private dichotomy is performed and challenged, and how it affects a variety of subjects. Building on feminist design methods that use gender as an entry point to take into account the needs of everyone, queer design methods similarly are not only for gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, or queer people but are instead necessary to create safe spaces for everyone. The projects are analyzed through two lenses: by understanding how they deconstruct space through representations of common assumptions about domesticity, and by analyzing how the projects and their blurring of private and public are presented and perceived in art or architectural discourses – be this by the authors or in mediated scholarly and mainstream reports of the works, including institutions’ handling of the projects. Most of the projects studied are temporary installations and exhibitions that no longer exist except in archival material – and I unfortunately have only been able to visit some of those archives. In most cases the main primary sources used are interviews with the artists and curators involved and the archives of the creators and of the institutions where they were exhibited. The artists and architects studied have all expressed the importance of the political in their work; the interviews are a rich source to investigate their intentions and understand how they position themselves in their social context. Finally, the context and reception of the works is explored through discussions in contemporaneous reviews and news reports. The book follows two parallel but interwoven paths. The first thread presents a history of queer space theory through its materialisation in installations and exhibitions, generally moving forward in time through the different chapters and presenting the exhibitions, installations, performances, and buildings as a coherent group of related works. The works studied have never been discussed together and their common social and political implications have thus been 10

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somewhat ignored. The second thread focuses on specific aspects of the representation of domesticity in art and architecture through the different cases studied, gradually moving from more theoretical and representational critiques towards attempts to integrate these critiques in the design of lived spaces. Rather than attempting to present as many examples of queer space projects as possible – an impossible attempt given the multiplication of examples in recent years – these threads allow us to explore the relation between aesthetics and ethics in queer thinking, to understand how bringing a diversity of methods, discourses, and aesthetics can sustain a more open-ended ethics of design that better responds to the needs of the diversity of people that live in the built environment created by designers and architects.

INTRODUCTION

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1 Public Privacy, Private Publicness Feminist and Queer Critiques of Space

If orientation is a matter of how we reside in space, then sexual orientation might also be a matter of residence, of how we inhabit spaces, and who or what we inhabit spaces with. Sara Ahmed, 20061

Discussions of how gender and race relate to the profession and to studies of architecture, including discriminations based on them (the proverbial “glass ceiling”), have slowly entered scholarly and professional debates since the 1970s, even if they are still not enough discussed.2 Feminist practice – its goals and processes – has changed as feminist theories changed. Early examples, such as the 1869 book The American Woman’s Home by Catherine Esther Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, have been identified as proto-modern attempts to rethink how the home can better serve the needs of women, while still keeping women in the house.3 Later examples, identifying that changing the built landscape to facilitate women’s life reinforces accepted gender roles, often focus instead on the goals and processes required to better reflect the diversity of human needs: these are often non-hierarchical, collaborative, with a focus on participatory design methods (valuing non-architects as much as trained professionals), the use of non-traditional representation methods, the design of spaces traditionally ignored by the male-led architecture profession, and often a clearer political position than almost any other architectural practices.4 Sexual orientation and sexual identity have, by comparison, been much less discussed. As Annmarie Adams argues, the discussion of architecture in relation

to queerness holds great potential that relatively few scholars in architecture have explored.5 Queer issues have been even more ignored by architectural discourses than have feminist challenges to traditional architectural history, theory, and design that have been present for a longer time, as shown by reviews such as Sherry Ahrentzen’s “The Space between the Studs” (2003).6 While feminist and queer issues gained exposure in architectural discourse in the late postmodern period, the rapid rise of the digital in the 1980s and 1990s7 and the post-critical/projective turn in the 2000s8 silenced many more progressive voices. This chapter discusses how feminist critiques of domesticity have opened up the path to the work of queer theorists. The chapter begins by questioning binary oppositions between feminine-masculine and private-public inherited from the “separate spheres” theory that emerged after the Second World War to describe nineteenth-century women’s history. The critiques question what constitutes privacy, how we understand the family, how gender and sexuality are constructed through space, and what impact these understandings have on the built environment and discussions of it. The chapter continues with a discussion of the emergence of queer theory and its relatively limited influence on architectural discourse and theory. It focuses particularly on the implications of different understandings of “queer” in art and architectural discourses that are exemplified through two exhibitions, the Queer Space exhibition at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York (1994) and disappeared at the Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago (1996). The Separate Spheres Tradition in Feminist Domesticity Studies Understanding the role of gender and sexuality in relation to architecture and space necessitates a deconstruction of binaries that are omnipresent in architectural discourses. As architect Joel Sanders suggests, the opposition of public and private is grounded on a prior spatial dualism, that of inside and outside: “architecture’s bounding surfaces reconsolidate cultural gender differences by monitoring the flow of people and the distribution of objects in space.”9 Much discussion of domesticity, at least in an American sphere of academic discourse, is similarly marked by the spectre of separate spheres theory, either working within its influence or trying to argue against it. The term is a metaphor that has been used starting in the postwar period by feminist scholars – building on their reading of Alexis de Tocqueville’s description of early nineteenth-century women in North American society – to describe “a historically constituted ideology of gender relations that holds that men and women occupy distinct social, affective, F E M I N I S T A N D Q U E E R C R I T I Q U E S O F S PA C E

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and occupational realms. According to this metaphor, there is a public sphere inhabited by men and a private sphere inhabited by women.”10 The development of the metaphor focuses almost exclusively on the woman/man dynamic, generally ignoring implications of race, class, or sexual orientation on these spheres.11 Although the idea of separate spheres first developed as a social and political idea, because it is a spatially constructed metaphor it deeply shapes many discussions and understandings of space and architecture and of the roles and places of architects, interior designers, and clients.12 For example, architect Pauline Fowler discusses how architectural historian Kenneth Frampton builds on Hannah Arendt’s dialectical concepts of work (seen as static, public, permanent) and labour (seen as process-based, private, impermanent), which are not seen as equal but instead as the former relegating the latter to an inferior status, in order to argue that domestic buildings are not architecture at all.13 She expands here on challenges to the value traditionally assigned by architects to public buildings over private homes already made by Susana Torre’s Women in American Architecture (1977) or Hayden’s The Grand Domestic Revolution (1981).14 Fowler further argues that “the disdain for domestic architecture expressed by Frampton and others who share his views generally carries with it a disdain for programme, or ‘user requirements’: floor space, use of space, functional relationships – all social concerns in general.”15 She suggests that feminist approaches to architecture must overturn this hierarchy.16 Whereas the first stage of the development of the metaphor focuses on identifying separate spheres as a theme central to women’s historical experience, the second stage, in the later 1970s, explores the liberating opportunities offered by women’s cultures rendered possible by the existence of a separate women’s sphere. Linda K. Kerber identifies historian Estelle Freedman’s “Separatism as Strategy” (1979) as one of the first essays to see the women’s sphere as a physical space, suggesting that the simplifications of the traditional male-public/female-private hierarchy could be overcome by a new category, the “public female sphere,”17 consisting of women’s colleges, settlement houses, world’s fairs, women’s buildings, etc. Freedman understands the separate spheres as empowering women: a separate female sphere can be a space where women are free to create their own forms of personal, social, and political relationships, without seeing themselves as inferior to men. While Freedman discusses the activities taking place in these spaces, she does not address specifically the architectural characteristics of the spaces.18 This period also saw a pioneering generation of feminist architectural historians develop a rethinking of how domesticity was discussed to acknowledge how social issues were an integral part of houses’ designs. Gwendolyn Wright, for example, underlines the complex symbolism associated with the Victorian houses 14

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designed to be at once unique and easily recognizable to express a social status, creating a point where public and private are deeply intertwined.19 Similarly, Dolores Hayden discusses how “material feminists” at the turn of the twentieth century appropriated the physical space of the house and sought to redesign it to socialize domestic work and create more empowering women’s spaces, once again challenging the constraining view of women as prisoners of a separate sphere.20 The material feminists’ influence was famously built in settlement houses such as Jane Addams’s Hull House in Chicago.21 In parallel to scholarly revisions to the history of architecture, endeavours devoted to the practice and teaching of architecture were also appearing, for example through the work of Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative (1980–96) and the Women’s Design Service (1984 onwards) or the pedagogical experiment of the Women’s School of Planning and Architecture (1975–81).22 Recent feminist architects have expanded these initiatives by trying to open up the boundaries of architectural practices. For example, muf architecture/art, a London-based practice in which architects and artists have collaborated since 1994, addresses the social, spatial, and economic infrastructures of the public realm through innovative client/ user/professional relationships with a particular focus on creating equal access for everyone using a space.23 The impact of philosophy and psychoanalysis on architectural theory in the 1980s and 1990s also influenced feminist thinking. For example, the much-cited Sexuality & Space collection (edited by Beatriz Colomina, 1992), often seen as one of the pioneering works in discussing sexuality and the built environment, relies heavily on psychoanalytical approaches that most often focus on the gaze and visual interpretations.24 The approach is arguably justified for projects interested in an architecture explicitly informed by psychoanalytical models, such as Sylvia Lavin’s study of Richard Neutra’s work in Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in Psychoanalytic Culture (2004),25 but in other situations, it does not fully or satisfyingly address the material and embodied dimensions of the relation of gender, sexuality, and space, as well as often leaving aside the political dimensions of sexuality and gender. As architect Sharon Haar and art historian Christopher Reed noted (and criticized) in 1996, such “highprofile architectural theorists reinvigorated discussions of domesticity through their use of feminist psychoanalytic and critical theory, though without engaging the more politically oriented work of 1970s feminists.”26 The understanding of domesticity and interior design in terms of binaries has, however, lately been increasingly challenged. For example, Jason Edwards and Imogen Hart note in their introduction to Rethinking the Interior (2010) that their “various case studies, however, suggest that Aesthetic and Arts and Crafts F E M I N I S T A N D Q U E E R C R I T I Q U E S O F S PA C E

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interiors are not either masculine or feminine, public or private, but rather both masculine and feminine, public and private; neither masculine nor feminine, public nor private; or at some moments/to some extents/from some viewpoints masculine, feminine, public and private.”27 Aaron Betsky further suggests that the erosion of strict divisions between public and private opens up the possibility of a queer space, allowing him to place historically the earliest proto-queer space in men’s and women’s houses that he describes as central institutions for many prehistoric societies. He asserts that these houses were like an individual hut, but larger, “as if it were a dwelling seen in a distorted mirror,”28 a “private” space given a “public” meaning. For Betsky, this “queer space” is a space of doubt, a space that escapes the plays of power, that situates itself outside both “the proud erection of complete and monumental objects” (i.e., the masculine) and the “tapestry of connection woven out of and through the world” (i.e., the feminine).29 Betsky’s vision of a layering of space and lived experiences beyond binary models is but one of the numerous understandings of queer space that will be further discussed in the next section. What Is Queer Space? From Identity-Based Understandings of the Built Environment to Their Deconstruction “Queer” is a much-contested word. Definitions and discussions of its different uses in academia and activism – presented in the introduction – help us to position the sometimes-divergent understandings of queer space across and within disciplines. The emergence of the term “queer” follows some of the feminist critiques identified in the previous section, but also comes as a reaction to some of them; it represents a direct attempt to offer an alternative to visions of sexuality and gender as binaries. Initially used pejoratively, the term has been reclaimed positively since the 1980s by those who were previously targeted by it to define an identity category, an activist/political movement, and an academic theory. In architecture, queer space discourses emerged relatively late compared to other fields such as geography, in a similar way to other identity issues, as architect Sharon Haar and art historian Christopher Reed note: “It is symptomatic of the conservatism of the architectural profession that not until the mid-1990s did architects begin to engage the issues of identity that were central to postmodernism in the broader culture.”30 As such, notions of queer space initially emerged in relation to identity-based understandings of the built environment, but eventually explored more critical understandings of space closer to queer theory and queer activism.31 16

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If Tim Davis argues that queer activists try to move beyond a politics of spatial concentration or of physical gay spaces to challenge the heterosexist assumption in a diversity of locations and promote an idea of community based on the idea that “we are everywhere,”32 the earliest explorations of the notion of queer space in architecture – while emerging a few years after the appearance of queer activism – are closer to later mainstream understandings of queer as a non-problematized umbrella term for non-heterosexual people. Building on gay and lesbian studies more than queer theory or queer activism, these early approaches understand queer space as gay or lesbian territory demarcated from heteronormative territory, as the physical manifestation of a gay community, with Manuel Castells’s much-cited study of the Castro district in San Francisco as an early inspiration, followed by Alan Collins’s and Brad Ruting’s models of the evolution of gay-oriented urban spaces.33 Early descriptions of gay or lesbian bars by scholars such as Barbara Weightman or Maxine Wolfe similarly offer a rare entry into hidden (and mostly forgotten) worlds,34 without challenging the separation of these spaces from “heterosexual” space or the understanding of these spaces as different from other “non-queer” spaces. Following this approach, in architectural history, most discussions of queer space focus on single buildings or architects.35 For example, Aaron Betsky’s well-known Queer Space (1997) is fundamentally based in this understanding with its investigation of spaces used and designed by (mostly) gay men, be they domestic spaces or public cruising environments.36 Similarly, mainstream architectural publications often positions “queer space” as an architecture for others, as being designed by or for people outside of what is presented as the heterosexual and cisgender mainstream.37 This can lead to problematic statements, such as when Philip Johnson is claimed as an iconic figure of queer space.38 While it can be argued that Johnson navigated high design and corporate architecture with a camp sensibility that resonates with some understandings of queerness, he was also in the closet for most of his life and never addressed the concerns and issues raised by queer theory and queer activism that during the later years of his life. Another example is the description by Jonathan Boorstein of historical and contemporary designers and architects he believes to be gay as sharing a “queer design aesthetics,” thus assigning essential characters to a diverse landscape of buildings and urban spaces simply because of their designers’ sexual orientation.39 These approaches have been rightly criticized for not considering that queer space existed before gay or lesbian neighbourhoods appeared, as described for example by historians George Chauncey and Matt Houlbrook in their investigations of early twentieth-century “gay life” in New York and London.40 They also

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do not challenge the assumptions that most other places are fully straight and that queer space can only exist within gay enclaves. In reaction, some scholars sometimes broaden their understanding by considering queer space as the contested “other” between lesbian or gay space and straight space,41 using queer as a broader vision of non-heteronormative identities. This extended understanding focuses on the boundary, the interface, and the adversarial ownership of place without questioning how these boundaries are themselves defined by an understanding of queer spaces as other that is itself defined by a normative majority. Later queer space thinking gradually integrated various streams of queer theory and attempted to apply concepts that were often abstract to the concrete realm of physical spaces, sometimes returning to the early influences of queer theory. One of these major influences was French philosopher, historian of ideas, and social theorist Michel Foucault42 and his attempt to think beyond identity categories and acts, in this case sexual practices, towards unspecified and unspecifiable forms of relationality.43 Judith Butler added to this a foundational reframing of performativity in terms of gender and sexuality, just as Jacques Derrida had already elaborated on J.L. Austin’s thinking on performative utterances. Butler discusses gender and sexuality not as essential expressions of one’s identity, but as something that one does over and over, in a “stylized repetition of acts.”44 Queer theory is thus less a discourse around an identity than a critique of conventional identity politics. This understanding has allowed David Halperin to define queer as “whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence,”45 a definition that has since been much cited and has opened the door to work that goes beyond the realm of sexuality and gender. Sara Ahmed further insists that “it is important to retain both meanings of the word queer, which after all are historically related even if irreducible to each other. This means recalling what makes specific sexualities describable as queer in the first place: that is, that they are seen as odd, bent, twisted.”46 This political and ethical tension creates queer theory as more than just a school of thought; instead it is “an unavowable community of thought, but as one that is always coming never arriving, just as much as it is a matter of being both out in and out of the academy at once.”47 Queer theorists David L. Eng, Jack Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz point out in their introduction to a 2005 special issue of Social Text the utility of queerness as an engaged mode of critical enquiry that encompasses some of the most innovative and risky work on globalization, neoliberalism, cultural politics, subjectivity, identity, family, and kinship.48 This claim – that considerations of empire, race, migration, geography, subaltern communities, activism, and class 18

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are central to the continuing critique of queerness, sexuality, sexual subcultures, desire, and recognition – is nevertheless challenged by geographer Jon Binnie. Pointing out that all sixteen essays in the Social Text issue are by US-based scholars in the humanities, Binnie argues that this commonality undermines any claim to a wide variety of critiques.49 Although Binnie’s argument must be situated in his own attempt to reassert the importance of uk geography to the study of sexuality, his call for a more intersectional queer academic approach is important. Similar calls have challenged the foregrounding in queer politics and activism of specific identifications at the expense of others and discussions of gender and sexuality as unifying identity categories instead of considering how they cannot be experienced and understood outside of class, race, ethnicity, age, etc.50 At its best, queer theory challenges both hetero- and homonormativity and reaches beyond gender and sexuality. The potential of queer theory is thus immense as it refuses, at least theoretically, binary concepts and clean divisions between homosexuality and heterosexuality, between femininity and masculinity, and, by extension, between understandings of space as feminine or masculine. Queer space theory does not dismiss completely the idea that space is gendered but instead suggests that we need to look at the gendering and sexualization of spaces as processes beyond the materialization of essential characteristics. As such, it can offer renewed discussions that approach architectural spaces as created by more than formal and programmatic decisions, as formed by a network of relations between designers, clients, permanent and temporary users, and their social, political, and historical contexts. Both the activist and academic understandings of queer thus sustain approaches to queer space that position it as overtly sexualized space, sometimes envisioning political impacts to this visibility of queer sexuality. Such approaches focus on sexual acts and tension, not sexual identity or ownership, where the sex act defines the construction and dissolution of queer space. In such cases queer space is understood as inherently ephemeral, building on Butler’s performativity theory. Early writings by geographers David Bell, Jon Binnie, and Gill Valentine, for example, present the visibility of queer sex acts as creating queer space.51 In architecture, this approach is visible in analyses of bars, sex clubs, and cruising spaces that understand them as an architecture that gains its political power from being outside of normative understandings of what constitutes architecture.52 This approach is useful and rightly notes the importance of sexuality in most understandings of queer space. However, by focusing only on the sexual aspects of sexual orientation, it underestimates the impact on the experience of space of social communities that have developed around a shared sexual orientation. F E M I N I S T A N D Q U E E R C R I T I Q U E S O F S PA C E

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Another understanding of queer space builds on the previous ones to define queer space as challenging and imminent. Here, queer theory’s challenges to normative views is reflected in thinking about queer space as continually in the process of being constructed in opposition not only to heteronormativity but also to broader prescriptive norms. Importantly, this understanding of queer space positions it as performative; it is built out through time, existing not only in the physical space, but in the intersubjectivity of the relations, through verbal, nonverbal, and physical interactions. “Queer politics is about relations rather than identity. In queer space there are multiple identities that are constructed from these relations. It is a politics of relating rather than claiming rights.”53 Christopher Reed further argues that “no space is totally queer or completely unqueerable ... Queer space is imminent: queer space is space in the process of, literally, taking place, of claiming territory.”54 This understanding of queer space also points out the importance of context in how people experience space. Context in performativity is not only understood as the physical context, but more importantly as when and how, through which earlier experiences, and by whom space is encountered, taking into account issues of gender, race, class, sexuality. Walking by the closed door of a gay bar in the middle of the day is completely unlike entering it in the middle of the night or seeing it on television, even if these experiences take place in the same physical space, as is visiting an apartment knowing or not knowing who lives in it. Identity in relation to architecture cannot be reduced to its users’ or designer’s identities; it is constantly performed through use. From an architectural point of view, this understanding of queer space in terms of performance and relation is challenging: what are the physical characteristics of queer space? In what “architectural” conditions does queer space exist? Can any space become queer? Are spaces commonly associated with gay males, such as bars or cruising grounds, queer? Are the homes of gay male couples, lesbian couples, or trans couples all equally queer spaces? How and why are domestic spaces inhabited by two men or two women automatically assumed to be gay or lesbian households? And why would those be queer spaces? Where do non-traditional households fit in these categories? Can a heterosexual couple’s home be queer space? Are all these spaces still queer when not occupied? Do attempts to define queer space violate queer theory’s stance against categories? Some answers might reside in Katarina Bonnevier’s search for a critically queer architecture. She attempts to find strategies for resistance to, and transgression of normative orders. It does not mean that queerness is an essentialist core of some buildings, 20

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and not others – the queer perspective is, just like seemingly neutral observations, an interpretation – but the cultural production that surrounds us is not as straight as heteronormativity makes it appear. Queer implies inter-changeability and excess; the possibility to move, make several interpretations, slide over, or reposition limits. To understand buildings as queer performative acts, and not static preconditions, opens architecture to interpretation and makes it less confined within normative constraints. It is a key both to accomplish a shift in how architecture can be understood or analysed and to [her] ambition to contribute to a transformation in future building; thereby presenting in a broader sense, enactments of architecture.55 Queer space theory extends far beyond gay- and lesbian-oriented architecture, which suggests that lessons learned from critically queer occupation of space by lgbt+ people could be of use to rethink how our environments are designed, used, and analyzed. I explore this idea from a different angle from that Bonnevier takes, who focuses on theatrical and performance tropes to support her critical rethinking of space. I instead investigate how these questions have been explored through interventions in space. Queer space research and discourses face the same challenges that queer theory and queer studies in attempting to engage with the broad range of subjects suggested by the term “queer.” If geographers’ long engagement with the idea has led to sophisticated discussions of the potential of queer space, for example in Natalie Oswin’s work on Singapore families, in Kath Browne’s challenge to existing queer geographies, or in the multidisciplinary and wide-ranging Queers in Space (1997) collection (which includes some discussions of architecture),56 architecture’s more limited thinking on queer space leaves many groups underrepresented. A major example is Betsky’s Queer Space (1997) in which he essentially conflates “queer” and “(male) homosexual.”57 The book’s complete title, Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire, clearly shows Betsky’s understanding of queerness as linked to homosexuality, as his case studies also confirm. He defends himself against accusations of exclusion by arguing that he “will call queer space any space that establishes such a free and radical space, no matter the sexual preferences of the persons making it or using it.”58 Betsky thus seems to argue that “non-homosexuals” can create spaces sharing characteristics he sees as essential to queer spaces; earlier in his book, however, he contradictorily states that such spaces should not be defined as queer because of the “non-queer” sexual orientation of their designers or users.59 This bias also raises multiple questions surrounding people’s sexual orientation and self-identification. Following F E M I N I S T A N D Q U E E R C R I T I Q U E S O F S PA C E

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Betsky’s thoughts, should we only discuss as “queer space” spaces designed or used by self-identified homosexuals? Where does that leave people who do not identify with a binary between essentially “queer” men and women (queer being used here in a very limited understanding) and “straight” men and women? And furthermore, what do we do with historical spaces whose users we cannot clearly identify with our modern definitions of identity? Building upon feminism and gay and lesbian studies, queer theory defies identity categorization. Without necessarily disposing of categories, it calls for an understanding and critique of their constructedness. More recently, it has also opened up to an intersectionality recognizing the diverse elements that form identity – although scholars working within a queer theory framework often do not satisfyingly account for race and class even if they are fundamental constituents of one’s self-identification. Queer theory can thus help us move away from earlier understandings of queer space as strictly gay-oriented spaces towards a more inclusive approach that understands queer space as performative, as depending importantly on context and relationality in its challenge to both hetero- and homonormativity. In this sense, space is queer not in itself, but in relation to something else, in relation to the changing people using or visiting a place; the queerness of space is a layer of spatial experience amongst others. Queer theory thus reminds us of the importance of looking beyond the formal to understand space and architecture as one aspect among others in the construction of identity. Extending queer theory’s lessons to a study of space can furthermore underline the political importance of the built environment in identity building. We must always remember that “tolerance of sexual oppression requires room … Many physical aspects of our communities reflect only incomplete adaptations of spatial archaeologies of repression.”60 Architecture can be linked not only to a physical representation of self-identifications – as in memorials, community centres, or bars – but also to the potential oppression of specific identity minorities through a repressive control of the spaces they visit, claim, and eventually transform.61 The most powerful potential of queer space theory is thus its ability to use various elements of identities – starting from sexuality and gender, but importantly also opening up to race, class, age, etc. – to understand the constraints and potentials created by spatial structures, rather than any attempts to formalize “queer design” characteristics. The past decades have seen socially oriented critiques attempt to shatter architecture’s still largely Euro-American, white, male-dominated culture. Nevertheless, the slow pace at which the discipline is evolving – in part because of the cost and time required to build most projects – means that most of these queer critiques have been presented as exhibitions, installations, and speculative pro22

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jects and have only slowly begun to impact both the state of the profession and the ways buildings are designed and built. Glass Ceilings and Closets: Gender, Sexuality, and the Architecture and Design Professions Gender and sexuality influence not only the experience and study of the built environment, but also architecture and design professions. For example, in her portrait of the Women’s School of Planning and Architecture co-founder Noel Phyllis Birkby, Stephanie Schroeder notes that Birkby’s career was almost cut short when her high school career counsellor told her: “it appears that if you were a man, you should be studying architecture,” and guided her “into the more ‘feminine’ study of art despite her aptitude for and interest in architectural and environmental design.”62 In similar ways to other disciplines, preconceptions about gender – and its relation to sexuality – have steered many women and gay men toward specific roles. The association of domesticity with the feminine through separate spheres theory has led to the relegation of a large number of early women designers and architects to the design of interior, domestic spaces.63 But as architectural historian Jasmine Rault argues, “being denied access to institutional architectural training and capitalising on associations between women, femininity and domestic space, interior design allowed many women the only opportunity to take part in early twentieth-century debates on modern architecture … they may have wanted that opportunity – as the sheer volume of modernist architectural theory, with its utopic and revolutionary tenor, points to there being more at stake in debates about buildings, furnishings and their design than style alone.”64 Rault’s argument that modern domestic spaces represented an important opportunity for women to engage in modern architecture’s investment “in producing not only new occupants, but physically, psychologically, and heterosexually healthy bodies, and as such needs to be understood as engaged in the constitution of new subjects”65 references Foucault’s demonstration of the importance of sex in definitions of health since the nineteenth century.66 The modern project of producing healthy bodies was also the project of regulating and producing sexuality and as such, Rault argues, women needed to take part in the design of interiors if they wanted to be part of that power negotiation. Further research has been done in recent years on the contemporary and historical conditions that support or restrain women’s (and racialized minorities’) access to the profession, among others Kathryn Anthony’s Designing for Diversity (2001), Annmarie F E M I N I S T A N D Q U E E R C R I T I Q U E S O F S PA C E

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Adams and Peta Tancred’s Designing Women (2000), or Despina Stratigakos’s Where Are the Women Architects? (2016).67 Rault’s understanding of the role of women in the design of space ties in with other feminist historians’ reading of early women designers and clients. For example, Dolores Hayden argued that material feminists of the second half of the nineteenth century had attempted a socialization of the domestic to gain control of space,68 while Alice Friedman showed in her analysis of the creation of the modern canon how challenges to normative domestic traditions were closely associated with challenges by women clients to beliefs about gender and sexuality.69 In Women and the Making of the Modern House (1998), she argues that “gender values – assumptions about how men and women should behave in their daily lives – often play a role in architectural design, particularly in domestic architecture, since these values shape both the explicit and the implicit requirements of a building’s program.”70 She extends the argument to sexuality to underline the possibilities for men or women outside the (hetero)norm to sustain the creation of innovative domestic spaces. Not unlike Hayden’s material feminist belief in the power of rethinking domesticity to change women’s lives, Friedman argues that modern architects and their women clients shared the conviction “that the essence of modernity was the complete alteration of the home – its construction, materials, and interior spaces.” Arguing that “a powerful fusion of feminism with the forces of change thus propelled these projects into uncharted realms of originality,” she notes that “as guardians of the domestic realm, middle-class women were thus asked to play a difficult and contradictory role: ‘naturally’ suited both to housework and to the refinements of polite society – the former relying upon manual labor and a knowledge of the physical needs of the body, and the latter on delicacy of mind and spirit – they were ultimately confronted with a dilemma that, for many of them, could be resolved only by seeking new roles for women and by redefining the terms of domesticity itself.”71 Modernity thus found a particularly appropriate space to do so when reacting to unconventional living arrangements. This situation led to the design of architectural avant-garde icons such as the Mies van der Rohe–designed house for Edith Farnsworth in Plano, Illinois, or the house built by Gerrit Rietveld in Utrecht for Truus Schröder-Schräder and her three children. Both houses, while dissimilar, present influential challenges to traditional understandings of the physical limits within interior spaces and between interior and exterior. Rault further argues, in a similar way to Friedman’s analysis of gender and sexuality in relation to redefinitions of space, that many prominent early twentieth century women designers mobilized the queer pleasures of the visible invisibility in their interior designs as an aesthetic of obscurity and discretion informed by 24

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the ambiguous “communicative logic of sapphic fashions. “Why were so many women working on new domestic design and decoration while also working out new possibilities for being outside the bounds of conventional heterosexuality?” Rault asks.72 While neither Friedman nor Rault argue that women designers or clients inevitably create queer spaces, they do suggest that many women pioneers making their mark in these fields were also challenging other societal values – and that their designs were thus informed by these challenges. The success of early women designers in an overwhelming masculine field was thus often linked to the part they played in networks of women challenging male power and presence in public life. Others have expanded thinking about women’s place in architecture to nonheterosexual designers. For example, Joel Sanders has discussed how the gendering of the profession, created by profound social anxieties about gender and sexuality, led to an increased division between interior “decoration” and architecture that also influenced how male designers were perceived.73 He suggests that the current gradual acceptance of the fluidity of gender identities will eventually lead architects and decorators to embrace the best features of both worlds. Carl Matthews and Caroline Hill have further explored the historical perspective presented by Sanders to understand how homosexual and heterosexual orientations influence the experiences and perceptions of male interior design students and professionals.74 In addition to showing tensions between public perceptions of the interior design profession and designers’ internal peace between identity and chosen profession, responses to their 2008 survey highlighted that the topic “struck a nerve.” “Some of the most provocative comments were received by men who chose not to participate in the study,” note Matthews and Hill. They received emails stating “What’s this all about?,” “How did you get my name?,” “You can’t ask these kinds of questions,” and “Men in my office are complaining about this survey – take me off your list.”75 These strong reactions underline the uneasiness with which people discuss sexual orientation in relation to architecture or design. As historian John Potvin suggests, “While historians note that homosexuality and interior design have been linked since the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it is fascinating how homosexuality is either taken for granted, closeted, or simply remains the open secret within both the field of Design History and the profession of Interior Design.”76 These discussions of the perceived links between homosexuality and interior design further underline the gendering of interior design as feminine and architecture as masculine. A few male architects have in the past decades been reclaimed as gay, such as Philip Johnson and Charles Moore; and current architects including Andrés Jaque and Joel Sanders explicitly discuss sexual orientation and gender identity F E M I N I S T A N D Q U E E R C R I T I Q U E S O F S PA C E

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in their projects. But there are still very few visible out lesbian architects.77 Architects like Jane Greenwood in the United States or Naomi Stead in Australia have sought to fight this invisibility, a consequence of the intersection of gender and sexual orientation prejudices. For example, Stead has combined her queer activism with her involvement in the creation of Parlour, a multiplatform organization offering research and resources to create spaces for women in architecture in Australia and around the world.78 This book focuses on queer critiques of the experience and use of the built environment. However, to achieve meaningful changes to how spaces are designed, the professions involved need to be transformed to bring a broader range of experiences that better reflect the diversity of users of the built environment.79 Equitable design is not only about empathy, but also about having lived and living through diverse experiences. Yet the current state of the professions does not allow for such transformations and the relatively low number of women, queer, or racialized role models for younger architects and interior designers further limits changes. The situation impacts confidence, as suggested by a 2015 survey from the Architect’s Journal.80 In this uk-based survey, “just a third [of lgb architects] said they saw openly gay employees at senior levels in the profession, and a similar number said they felt discouraged in their careers by the lack of senior gay employees,” highlighting that role models in senior and leadership positions are essential “to demonstrate that sexual orientation is not a barrier to success in the construction industry.” More worryingly, “just one in five gay architects said they saw support from senior colleagues in industry, and 86 per cent said they wanted to see more support from senior employees.”81 Follow-up surveys showed other worrying trends, with the 2018 survey showing a drop to 73 per cent of the number of lgbt+ respondents saying they were out in their practice, compared to 80 per cent in 2016, and 30 per cent of respondents indicating that being lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or trans had created barriers to their career progression – a significant rise from 24 per cent in 2016. Obviously such factors impact both mental health and productivity.82

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2 Making Queer Space Theory Visible Emerging Voices in the 1990s

Queer space theory emerged in the mid-1990s through installations, exhibitions, and theoretical texts. The installations and exhibitions, at the intersection of art and architecture, build on the disciplinary challenges brought by the ambiguity of their position in between disciplines. Artists and architects approach installations and temporary works in different ways, but they share the premise that any work not designed to be lived in is driven by a rhetorical impulse of discovery that reveals existing conditions of spaces we inhabit. Conceptual art and installations have been extensively presented as liberating art from restrictive rituals, and importantly as challenging the public museum’s role, with extensive discussion that focus on the institutional critique embedded in these works. For example, Julie Reiss’s From Margin to Center (1999) presents how conceptual artists worked outside of conventional art venues, while Jane Rendell’s A Place Between (2006) focuses more specifically on how projects designed by architects borrow “art tactics” to build institutional critiques, often through an engagement with the spatial structures framing institutions.1 By extension, architects engaged with art practices or non-traditional installations can similarly challenge institutions and normative understandings of space and architecture. Sarah Bonnemaison, Ronit Eisenbach, and Robert Gonzalez suggest that the importance of architectural installations “has to do with rhetoric or what the architecture says. Installations are built as a mode of communication – they are designed to persuade an audience about an idea.” They further suggest that “by using architectural devices and strategies, an installation brings attention to issues embedded in the built environment that are often overlooked. Installations can engage in critical, often controversial, social, and political aspects of architecture – we might say, the implicit effects of buildings … Unlike most architecture, installations are rhetorical

objects – they convince the public and engage that public to respond.”2 In addition to the architectural installation’s smaller scale and shorter existence, architect Carole Lévesque argues that it is its intrusion into daily life without a clear programmatic need that mostly sets it apart from other architectures: because architecture is usually “useful,” the “uselessness” of installations creates unexpected discoveries that force the individual to stop, question, and reformulate their usual relation to architecture.3 The unexpectedness of such expressions in architecture breaks the invisibility and neutrality often associated with architectural backgrounds encountered in everyday life, and opens up a space for critical discourses. The uselessness of these installations ultimately makes them useful. This section discusses how two queer-oriented exhibitions have attempted to use installations to reflect on the social norms shaping architectural space: the Queer Space exhibition (1994) at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York and the John Paul Ricco–curated disappeared (1996), in which he developed some of his ideas on queer spaces understood as a minor architecture. The Collective Experiment of the Storefront for Art and Architecture’s Queer Space The first major exhibition specifically devoted to queer issues in architecture is Queer Space, held at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York (18 June– 30 July 1994). Organized by Beatriz Colomina, Dennis Dollens, Cindi Patton, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Henry Urbach, and Mark Wigley, the exhibition’s goals were to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall riots – often discussed as the launching event for gay liberation in the Euro-American world, which took place in Greenwich Village, close to the Storefront – but also to challenge architecture’s handling of sexuality.4 Spatial critiques in Queer Space are developed through installations with no or limited relation to traditional architecture projects, unlike a large number of architectural exhibitions that rely on models or drawings of built or speculative projects.5 This use of non-traditional forms of architectural discourse and practice is a rhetorical device that allows their unusual critiques to surprise an unprepared audience and to explain more clearly the ideas developed than if these ideas were already integrated into a finished project and somehow diluted throughout the other elements shaping the design. Furthermore, as will be discussed later with the boom and Pumpwerk projects, architects face difficulties when trying to shape new forms of architecture that address queer critiques; the use of installation

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works might thus also be a way to first present clearly observations and challenges to the normativity of domestic spaces as well as being a way to get around the hardships of getting an innovative project off the ground. These works are thus positioned outside of traditional schemes, but still within architectural discourse, through their use of recognizable architectural tropes and their display in major exhibition spaces, such as the Storefront for Art and Architecture. Queer space theorists are not the first to present architectural theories or critiques through exhibitions or installations.6 Where they differ is in their insistence on the relation between (architectural) space and self-identifications. They exhibit critical or projective works that cannot be understood without thinking about the ways we build our identifications in relation to others. For example, the organizers of the exhibition Queer Space at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, “propelled by the urgent necessity to rethink the politics of space … sought to uncover various definitions of the terms ‘queer’ and ‘space’ and the conceptual bonds that unite them. The exhibition was centered around a set of crucial interrogatives that defined the spatial politics of the early 90s: how can minorities define their rights to occupy spaces within the city? How can such space be legitimized, given a history and a future? Is it even physical space that is in question, or is it the space of discursive practices, texts, codes of behavior and the regulatory norms that organize social life? The installations, interventions and proposals at Storefront and at other locations around the city were an attempt to generate new ways of thinking about the social politics of space in the city.”7 The group of designers and theorists behind Queer Space envisioned the exhibition itself as a queer space, an exhibition that extends the gallery’s limits to become a space of discussion on the role of gender and sexuality in shaping our environment. The project was initially intended to include, in complete integration with the gallery exhibition, a symposium, a book, and the use of “nontraditional venues like storefront window displays, broadcast media, posters and postcards.”8 The poster/catalogue (Figure 2.1) for the exhibition both underlines and undermines this approach: its cover presents the queer shape of the exhibition space’s floor plan and its opening to the street,9 but by focusing on the gallery’s space it simultaneously ignores the diverse places involved in the different projects. In the catalogue, descriptions of the works are complemented by essays and faxes written by the exhibition’s organizers that reiterate their goals and questions, underlining the difficulties experienced both in the conceptualization of what is queer space and in the desire to explode the exhibition’s setting.

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Figure 2.1 Queer Space exhibition poster, 1994, Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York.

50 Shades of Queer Space

Although the organizing team was unable to explode the exhibition’s range as much as they wanted, in part due to the unavailability of external funders (the project was rejected by every institution approached), a number of installations extend the show in the city or attempt to relate the exhibition experience to the outside.10 One of them, repohistory’s Queer Spaces Sign Project (Figure 2.2), used the opportunity offered by New York City’s particular context, loaded with little-known queer history, to propose a reclaiming of public space through the revelation of a previously latent queer community.11 The project is a network of pink triangle signs scattered throughout the city to reveal little-known queer political histories and reclaim public spaces; it showcases the politically queer use of space in both expected and unexpected places and underlines the temporality of queer space. Signs were placed, for example, close to a bar that won a court case over “decency” issues, close to a lesbian bar, on the site of New York’s first gay rights demonstration, on the scene of the first act up demonstration, and near the dwelling of Marsha P. Johnson, described as a “Stonewall 30

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Veteran, performer, panhandler, prostitute, Warhol Model,” and “legendary drag queen” whose drowning death, initially ruled a suicide, was reclassified as “of an unknown nature” following a campaign by The New York Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project.12 repohistory’s project echoes, in an ephemeral example, a series of memorials throughout the world that try to bring queer lives to the public view, often informed by queer space theory. For example, a permanent memorial, the Homomonument in Amsterdam designed by Karin Daan (1987), is described by Christopher Reed as a prominent example of queer space. The monument comprises three large pink granite triangles, each measuring 10 metres on each side, set apart into the ground and linked by a thin row of pink granite bricks to form a larger 36-metre triangle. Reed understands the impossibility of perceiving the monument and the space it occupies as a whole as making it queer. Both invisible and overwhelming, for Reed the unrecognizability of the sculpture links it to other vernacular queer spaces that keep traces of queer use even when not actively used by people. It echoes examples such as the queer gardens of Chicago’s Lincoln Park that acknowledge the gay uses of beaches (as cruising space) even when they are unoccupied. The presence is felt and visible if the viewer knows the “right” context and the significance of these gardens.13 Similarly, artists Elmgreen & Dragset acknowledge in their Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under Nazism (2008) the (continuing) use of Tiergarten, where the memorial sits, as gay cruising grounds.14 The project is an echo of their earlier Cruising Pavilion/Powerless Structures, Fig. 55 (1998), in the Marselisborg Forest in Århus, Denmark, where a pavilion presented a built trace in broad daylight of the cruising activities going on at night in the park, as will be discussed in more detail in chapter 5. While this project focuses on homosexual acts, it shares with repohistory’s signs project – and other queer space works – a desire to make visible histories and actions rendered invisible by the majority. Martha Judge and Gordon Brent Ingram’s “Open” “Space” similarly opens the exhibition to the city by taking advantage of the configuration of the Storefront façade – large panels that can be flipped to open the space of the gallery to the street – to present on opposite sides divergent experiences by a man and a woman of (queer) urban open spaces (Figure 2.3). Ingram’s side juxtaposes Vancouver spaces associated with a lover and with his father, both dead. Judge’s side shows a series of posters of a naked lesbian couple overlapped with Toronto sites and photographs of the same posters destroyed by vandalism on a previous showing.15 Judge and Ingram also bring together a man’s and a woman’s experience to underline the similarities and differences between both, eschewing attempts to essentialize experiences. EMERGING VOICES IN THE 1990S

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Figure 2.3 Gordon Brent Ingram. “Open” “Space,” from Queer Space exhibition, 1994, Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York.

Another work by path Architecture (Brian McGrath, Mark Watkins, MaoJung Lee), There Is No Queer Space, Only Different Points of View, is set up inside the Storefront, but “describes the appropriation of public space [and refrains from defining] a minority realm which exists separated from ‘normative’ space.” The work displays a giant transparent screen where “the voyeurism and cruising in urban space” can be experienced by visitors through a 3D digital model that allows for layered and multiple points of view.16 Importantly, for McGrath and his team, by presenting representations and recordings from public spaces (New York City’s subway, Central Park, and waterfront) that map familiar spaces in unfamiliar ways, “the installation aims to invite others to occupy New York City from many different points of view.”17 Similarly, in the manifesto written by geographer David Bell on behalf of the United Kingdom’s Sexuality and Space Network, the network hoped “to be able to build up a better understanding of

Figure 2.2 (opposite) REPOhistory. Queer Spaces, from Queer Space exhibition, 1994, Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York.

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the difference that ‘space’ makes to ‘sex,’ and the difference that ‘sex’ makes to ‘space,’” by creating “a forum for the discussion of sexualities from a geographic perspective” that would concentrate on the use of public spaces by queer action groups doing “kiss-ins,” “wink-ins,” or “queer nights out” to disrupt the “dominant sexual codings of space.”18 Another proposal not selected for the exhibition, Ernest Pascucci’s Queeries in the St Patrick’s Day Parade, similarly sought queer opportunities, but focused on patterns of queer resistance within the heteronormative St Patrick’s Day Parade.19 These projects call for action from the viewers to disrupt understandings of space as dedicated to particular groups, instead proposing to discover layered meanings to each space. They suggest that users – not just designers – have a say in how spaces are understood, but at the same time imply that queer uses can merely be added on to existing spaces without really changing them in a more permanent way. path’s project, like other projects in the exhibition such as Paul Haslhofer’s Colorado An Outing Space, Robert Ransick and Blake Goble’s The Walls Speak: Passage from Queer Places, or Mitchell Owen and Charles Renfro’s Finding Queer Space or Reconstructing a Queer New York …, are attempts by their authors to create works that echo existing spaces they consider to be queer spaces, often spaces rendered queer by their occupation by queer people rather than because they were explicitly designed to be exclusively used by them.20 The focus of many projects is on queer understood as gay/lesbian, although an example like Haslhofer’s more open-ended project – in which a James Turrell-inspired light sculpture and souvenirs are created to bring together back room spaces and the vastness of Colorado, at the time having recently passed and then seen overturned anti-gay legislation – demonstrates that this is not always the case.21 Other projects like Ransick and Goble’s The Walls Speak – in which visitors walk through a closet/passageway lined with photographs of contemporary queer people with historical queer figures such as David Wojnarowicz, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Sylvia Rivera, Jean Genet, Sappho, Philip Johnson, and James Baldwin overprinted in negative – focus on gay and lesbian figures in history, but also announce that they are concerned with the other elements of identity that inform the queer experience: “Queer space is the psychological place of queer experience, a place infused with parallel experiences: cultural, religious, social, physical and intellectual.”22 Another approach also used by some of the projects, including some already discussed as part of the first group, attempts to capture queer space through their design, projecting new ways of offering opportunities for queer space to appear, a theme that will also appear in Benjamin Gianni and Scott Weir’s project for House Rules (see following section). For example, path Architecture’s There Is 34

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No Queer Space, Only Different Points of View provides recordings of public spaces in New York City to present queer minor routes through major public spaces of the city, while Jürgen Mayer’s Housewarming – also presented in a revised form in Ricco’s disappeared (see next section and Figure 2.5) – highlights potentials for occupation and contact in the domestic realm.23 A number of nonselected proposals also took this approach, including Michels Bailey Architecture’s (Leigh Bailey and Doug Michels, previously of Ant Farm) Dollennium 2000 and Ann Krsul and Sarah Drake’s Dyke Pleasure Palace, two of the rare projects looking more specifically at lesbian-oriented spaces. A last approach is taken by Benjamin Gianni and Mark Robbins’s Who we are and how we live, published in 1997 as Family Values (Honey, I’m Home) (Figure 2.4) in Architecture of the Everyday,24 both precursors to Robbins’s Households, discussed in chapter 4. In their project, Gianni and Robbins “explore (and explode) stereotypes about the gay community, who we are and how we live” and examine certain assumptions about spatial decisions from gay men and lesbian women.25 They present snapshots collected through ads published in gay papers in Columbus, Ohio and Ottawa, Ontario. Each pair of snapshots – composed of one interior view and one exterior view of dwellings – is accompanied by the dweller’s age, gender, household status (living alone, with roommates, with lover), and urban or suburban status. Unlike other projects that attempt to identify queer space characteristics, Gianni and Robbins aim to demonstrate that such characteristics do not exist – or more precisely are impossible to generalize – by showing the diversity and variety of most domestic environments used by queer people (with a focus on gay and lesbian people), by making visible households usually hidden. They ask: Columbus, Ohio has a population of 1.2 million If one out of ten people are gay, there are 120,000 homosexuals living in Columbus On a given night 5,000 are in bars, clubs or cruising areas Where are the other 115,000?26 Gianni and Robbins question the assumption that all “gays/homosexuals” engage in public sex or go out regularly in clubs. However, the focus on bars and cruising in their question, spaces most associated with gay men, ignores other spaces visited by lesbian women, even if their “one out of ten” statistics and the presence of spaces inhabited by women in their project would seem to include women. This once again underlines the difficulties associated with definitions of identity and attempts to link spaces with sexual orientation. EMERGING VOICES IN THE 1990S

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Figure 2.4 Mark Robbins and Benjamin Gianni. Detail from Family Values (Honey, I’m Home), 1997.

Gianni and Robbins’s question paradoxically restates common associations between homosexuality and sexualized spaces, but it also attempts to show that most spaces used by queer people are hidden throughout ordinary landscapes, that they are a layer among normative symbols of domesticity associated with urban, suburban, and non-urban environments.27 Gianni and Robbins’s project is also, along with Mayer’s, among the few to deal directly with domesticity.28 The project, however, shares with other projects in the exhibition despite its different focus what appears to be a flaw in its critical objective. The project’s neutral and descriptive approach creates a risk that viewers miss the critical message implied. Visitors already aware of the critiques that sustain Gianni and Robbins’s project might understand the goals behind their project, but others might only see images that reiterate their own prejudices. 36

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The Queer Space projects – as well as the questions raised by the curators – exemplify the diverse and varying understandings of what queer space can be. By bringing them together, the exhibition underlines that diversity, but also suggests that they can coexist and create productive tensions. The curators seem to hint that queer space might be this challenging reading of space, a layered and multiple way of understanding and experiencing our environment that complicates traditional fixed notions of space. Queer Futures

In the November 1993 call for manifestos and proposals for Queer Space, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick asked: “What makes space queer? How to give queer space a history and a future, a powerful presence? What’s the queerest in utopias, in EMERGING VOICES IN THE 1990S

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diasporas, in environments, in intimacies, in bowling leagues, in health and illness, in solidarity, in urban pets, in nationalism and cosmopolitanism, in selfdefence, in cyberspace, in jobs and no jobs, in film and video, in the Christian Right, in memory, in the hypothalamus, in the high schools, in dancing and walking, in civil society, and in interior decorating?”29 The exhibited projects tackled only a limited number of these issues. However, most seem to understand Sedgwick’s final question as a request to define or describe queer spaces gone or still present. None of the projects is interested in designing spaces that could be described as queer; the projects are instead attempts in some cases to identify characteristics of queer spaces and in others to create opportunities for queerness to appear. Some of the only projects to present a complete design, such as Dollennium 2000, were tellingly not selected for the exhibition. In one of the main essays for the exhibition, the team of curators further state that “queerness is not simply a property of certain subjects or certain spaces or certain relationships between them. While all space may be queer, that queerness is not necessarily related to the way that it is occupied. Not even specifically queer space is always queer. The ‘transitional’ or ‘marginal’ spaces often occupied by ‘queers’ are not necessarily themselves queer … At the very least, queer identity (and all forms of identity have their queer sites and moments) involves transactions with both the queerness of space and its repression.”30 This transitional state thus also manifests itself in the projects’ formats and processes, far from the typical “model and drawings” approach. For the curators, “a whole array of institutional practices seek to regulate queerness by defining it in a way that allows it to be either excluded from a space or included within it … To think about how queerness is reflected, embodied, denied, or sustained in spatial form requires a whole different understanding of space, one made possible by new alliances between architects, artists, activists and cultural critics.”31 It is the same point of view that leads Robbins’s House Rules exhibition that opened a few months later, as will be discussed in the following chapter. The Storefront’s Queer Space exhibition was important and innovative in its investigation of the links between (queer) sexuality and space; however, its longerterm impact seems limited and mixed. Many of its protagonists continued their research in related topics in the following years, but few specifically kept working on queer spaces.32 It is notable, however, that an important number of them – Beatriz Colomina, Mark Wigley, Jürgen Mayer, Henry Urbach, and Mark Robbins – have since risen to prominent positions in the architectural world: directorship of major architecture schools, museums, and institutions, high profile commissions.33 Robbins is the only one who has kept an explicit focus on gender, sexuality, and race in almost all of his subsequent works, but 38

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others have also integrated some of their thinking about queer space in later projects, albeit less explicitly. For example, Colomina’s celebrated work on privacy and publicity has been widely cited and has brought the topic to the forefront, while Mayer’s is still developing his work on identity protection – although it has already played an important role in the development of his increasingly celebrated and visible projects. His Metropol Parasol in Seville has, for example, been the scene of many protests and important social meetings that underline the political potential of architecture.34 Finally, for the educators, their understanding of the challenges linked to gender and sexuality has also meant that they have developed inclusive programs for their respective schools.35 The exhibition only got limited reviews, with most only presenting a broad overview of the themes.36 However, as part of a group of exhibitions and publications that came out in a short period of time, it brought attention to a set of theoretical questions that had almost never been discussed in architecture, if only for a short period of time. While no other project was directly designed in reaction to the Storefront show, it serves as an interesting point of departure for comparison due to its scope and the recognition some of its protagonists have had since. John Paul Ricco’s disappeared and the Queer Potential of a Minor Architecture A few years later, art historian John Paul Ricco curated the exhibition disappeared at the Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago (1996). Ricco – who in 1992–93 was a graduate exchange scholar in the School of Architecture at Princeton University working on queer space theory alongside Jürgen Mayer, Henry Urbach, and Joel Sanders – used the exhibition to illustrate some of his thinking about the potential of understanding queer space as a minor architecture. Extending queer theory’s notion of performativity that can only exist in relation to others, Ricco borrows the idea of a minor literature from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s readings of Franz Kafka’s writings.37 For Ricco, a minor architecture understands queer space as an architecture that overcomes the binary reading of public and private by being situated within what he calls the majority, rather than outside of it. A minor architecture is neither the inside of architecture nor the outside of architecture, but architecture outside of architecture – the architectural Outside. Ricco posits this Outside in relation to Elizabeth Grosz’s interrogation: “Can architecture be thought, no longer as a whole, a complex unity, but as a set of and site for becomings of all kinds?”38 A minor architecture EMERGING VOICES IN THE 1990S

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reinvents architectural tropes from the majority to contest its relationship with the majority within which it resides. Ricco uses as an example the gay sex club, which creates a network of relations within itself but obtains its “minor” status when appearing in public display in major media, such as newspapers and televisions.39 While Ricco, as is common in queer space discussions, links queer to specifically gay male (sexualized) spaces, his idea that queer space is a minor layer of meaning within a major network of buildings and city spaces can help us understand the plight of other marginalized groups. Ahmed, taking cues from Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s suggestion that the “queer world is a space of entrances, exits, unsystematized lines of acquaintance, projecting horizons, typifying examples, alternate routes, blockages, incommensurate geographies,”40 underlines the importance of not idealizing queer worlds or simply locating them in an alternative space, not unlike Ricco’s idea that queerness needs to reside within the majority. Describing these spaces as “neither to be architectural, nor to not-be architectural,” Ricco understands them as sites where architecture is betrayed by forms of sociality, sexuality, and spatiality that betray architecture.41 If Ricco includes in his understanding of minor architecture spaces that correspond to a more traditional definition of architecture, albeit an architecture very rarely discussed by architectural historians (cruising grounds, sex clubs, eroticized domestic environments),42 he also discusses the radical “minor” potential of art installations in bringing to light the characteristics of queer space. To do so he builds from disappeared, the 1996 exhibition he curated in Chicago.43 Ricco invited artists and planned the spatial layout of the exhibition to echo queer spaces and to support his theorization of a minor architecture. For example, access to the exhibition is made by walking behind or around a screen where Derek Jarman’s film Blue (1993) is projected; Ricco points out that this creates paths similar to the spatial layout of many independent movie houses, gay bars, porn theaters, or sex clubs, but also that it places the visitors neither inside nor outside but alongside the exhibition, a characteristic of minor spaces.44 To further explain the particularities of a minor architecture, Ricco discusses the anonymity and non-objectness present in two works: artist Tom Burr’s Approximation of a Chicago Style Blue Movie House (Bijou) (1996) and architect Jürgen Mayer’s Housewarming (1996) and Guest Book (1996) (Figure 2.5).45 The title of Burr’s work conflates canonical architectural histories (with its reference to the “Chicago Style”) and anonymous buildings that will never be granted the status of architecture (“blue movie house”). Burr’s installation combines with Jarman’s film to welcome the visitors and give physical reminders of the types of spaces that interest Ricco. In continuation with his earlier series 42nd Street 40

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Figure 2.5 Jürgen Mayer. Housewarming: Guest Book, 1996, disappeared group show curated by John Paul Ricco, Randolph Street Gallery, Chicago.

Structures that commented on the war on public sexuality in New York,46 Burr builds two sets of wooden risers, partitions, and theatre seats that echo porn theatres. The work’s conceptualization in relation to Jarman’s Blue, as well as their physical proximity, bring a series of “monochromatic approximations,” in Ricco’s words, to suggest socio-political relations (Blue, blue movie houses, blue movies, blue laws) without settling on one and without reproducing a specific minor architecture. It represents an abstraction of the anonymous sociality and sexuality it seeks to present,47 but it also underlines that social relations exist in (sexualized) cinemas. Building on a review of an earlier exhibition, Ricco insists on the fact that Burr abstracts the shapes of “the architecture of sex” by not showing erotic images.48 This absence of traditional imagery, leaving no object to be appropriated by the viewer, is also present in Mayer’s take on the domestic. Mayer’s work is a continuation of the work presented in the Queer Space exhibition two years earlier. For disappeared, Mayer designed two pieces: a square of temperature-sensitive paint on a wall, titled Housewarming; and a guest book in which the pages are covered with data security patterns – motifs used for example on the inner sides of an envelope to protect confidential correspondence from prying eyes – printed with a temperature-sensitive ink. Whatever is written on these pages by visitors is thus obscured by the data security pattern, until someone’s touch reveals – temporarily – the signature. The use in these works of disappearing paint or ink and data security patterns that both hide and reveal, in a similar way to queer architecture, underlines the hidden signification behind the domestic. In Ricco’s words, the white traces left on the surfaces by physical contact are “ghosts EMERGING VOICES IN THE 1990S

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that haunt the architecture of the familial, the domestic, and the social,”49 creating a direct link to the exhibition’s title. This research by Mayer, started during his graduate studies at Princeton University, was later further developed in a stillcontinuing series of work using data-protection patterns’ possibilities to control, to simultaneously veil and reveal, and to blur private and public.50 A later work, Lie (1997/2006) (Figure 2.6), created for a group show organized by Henry Urbach in New York, uses the same temperature-sensitive pattern – but this time on cotton sheets on a bed. While the use of the patterns and their relation to the formal experimentations visible in his later projects can be understood as an attempt by Mayer to translate a computer-generated two-dimensional form into a three-dimensional volume, as most critics have observed, it also suggests a strong interest from the architect towards the potential of the patterns to be both strange and familiar because of their omnipresence and because they are designed explicitly for public consumption while protecting privacy. The close relation between surveillance and queerness in Mayer’s work underlines an uncertainty about the future for queer people, a fear that the current positive climate for lgbt+ people in most Western countries could quickly disappear despite the years of effort in building it.51 Both disappeared and Ricco’s larger project are attempts at expanding understandings of queer space and critiquing existing queer space discourses. Although based in similar theoretical bases than the last, broader, understanding of queer space presented above, Ricco attempts to position himself outside of “queer space” by promoting, instead, the idea of a “queer sex space theory.” Inspired by Butler, he posits that “queer space gains its epistemological authority through the designation of its object of inquiry; yet, the object of inquiry is purely a product of discourse which is in turn named by it.”52 Both approaches may be understood as performative, but Ricco argues that queer space attempts to leave unremarked the fact of its discursivity. On the other hand, his queer sex space theory “foregrounds its discursivity and configures itself as one materialization of queer sexual insurgency and erotics.” Queer sex space theory is thus antinormative or queer by “citing that which forever eludes capacities of identities, representation, and objectification,” that which is difficult and nearly impossible to cite and site.53 Ricco’s understanding of theory in relation to history is also informed by Butler’s reading of Foucault’s theory of discourse and power. He argues that “discourse has a history, that not only precedes but conditions its contemporary usages”54 to suggest that a discourse of queer sex space theory is not simply located in history, but has a particular role to play in the materialization of history.55 It is, in part, this knowledge of its own discursivity and role in history that differentiates for Ricco “queer sex space theory” from a “queer space 42

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Figure 2.6 Jürgen Mayer. Lie, 1997, HOM-Y Collection group show curated by Henry Urbach Architecture, Gramercy International Art Fair, New York.

theory.” Ricco thus sees queer sex space theory as inscribed in debates over the place of sexuality within movement politics and theoretical production that surrounded the parallel emergence of neoconservative gay discourses and of queer studies and theory in the academy. Borrowing from Foucault, Ricco understands the housing of more radical queer theoretical practice within the academy as a means to contain and control. His queer sex space theory is thus “dedicated to thinking post-identity social-sexual politics and to fabricating queer counterpublics” by overcoming this academic containment.56 Ricco presents examples to illustrate his alternative theory; an important number of them are art installations, including some from disappeared, but he also discusses built spaces such as gay sex clubs. For him, both art installations and cruising spaces force a EMERGING VOICES IN THE 1990S

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physical implication from the visitor through a path of thresholds that controls one’s movement. They are also linked by their inscription in public discussions and debates over gender and sexual differences, media representation, etc. Ricco, in both his writings and the projects he selected for the exhibition, approaches the erotic as a fundamental part of an understanding of queer space. In this sense, he criticizes Betsky’s Queer Space (1997) as an attempt to totalize the field with a historicizing logic presenting a reformist history of architecture through an exploration of same-sex desire. Betsky frames his chapter on cruising grounds, bars, and public gay-oriented spaces with discussions of two queer sex space theory essays by Ricco and Urbach, who both reflect on the inventive sexual persistence of spaces and users.57 According to Ricco, Betsky neutralizes these essays with a “queer space” discourse, a structuralist approach that understands the “parts and pieces” as the constituent elements of a cruising network, and in turn, as communicative/signifying networks for the expression and coalescence of identity and community. For Ricco, Betsky appears to be suggesting that the queer erotic is in the past, that it is a ruin upon which queer communities and queer spaces are being built.58 In opposition, Ricco implies that the queer erotic still exists and holds a strong political potential. This ties in with Jon Binnie’s call for a better understanding of the connection between acts, practices, and identities through a turn towards erotic practices. “Focusing on the erotic rather than the category of sexuality may be fruitful in helping us to get the materiality and physicality of sex as opposed to identities and communities ... (although this is, of course, an artificial distinction as erotic connection may be seen as the foundation of sociality – even community – within some sexual dissident communities) ... I must reiterate that I am not simply calling for a celebration of the erotic for eroticism’s sake, but rather to acknowledge the politics of erotics in knowledge creation.”59 The idea of the political implications of sexuality and its materiality is also pointed out by Binnie through a reference to Michael Bronski’s idea that “the explosion of private sexual fantasy into public view is a powerful political statement.”60 Their acknowledgement of the political potential of queer sex spaces is, I believe, useful for understanding how the deconstruction of assumed oppositions between private and public can change how we perceive both spaces and their users. Ricco’s notion of a “queer sex space theory” challenges queer theory’s place in the academic world; it calls for both a consideration of the physicality of space and for a rethinking of the role of theory through the queer voice. It does not only point out the normativity of discourses, but also underlines the relationality and subjectivity of academic discourses often perceived as either neutral or already above constructed discursivity. Ricco’s insistence on the eroticization of 44

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theory through a crossover into social, political, and cultural context signals the importance of links between theory and politics. He further challenges architectural discourse by looking at spaces, such as sex clubs, public restrooms, and other gay cruising spaces (once again all urban gay male spaces), through art works. Although his “queer sex space theory” might be unnecessarily polemical, as it seeks to critique a queer space theory which is not yet well developed or static and homogeneous, and too much focused on gay male sex spaces, it rightfully reminds us of the difficulties associated with the diverse ideas of “queer space.” The fluidity of queer space must be understood politically, in relation to Ricco’s “minor architecture.”61 Consequently, the political power of a queer architecture, seldom realized, comes from its relation to others, from its challenging reappropriations and resignifications of the “majority.” Exhibiting Domesticity at the Museum If Queer Space was the first major exhibition devoted to queer space discourse, and one of the only – if not the only – organized by a specifically architectural institution. Queer critiques also emerged in exhibitions with broader themes, often with a focus on domesticity. This focus on domesticity appears as a continuation of feminism’s challenge to the gendering of domestic life, but also, as was discussed in relation to Jürgen Mayer’s projects, as a reaction and challenge to the perception of the home as a safe haven. To highlight how these critiques impacted understandings of architecture, this section focuses on two major architectural exhibitions that particularly approached the topic of how changing social conditions impact domestic space, including the increasing visibility of queer domesticities: House Rules at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio (1994, curated by Mark Robbins, catalogue published as a special issue of Assemblage), and The Un-Private House at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1999, curated by Terence Riley, catalogue published by the museum).62 Both exhibitions seek to portray changes – actual or wished for – happening to domestic environments in reaction to new contemporary conditions and challenges, but they do in divergent ways, with House Rules a call for teams of theorists and practitioners to come up with purely speculative projects and The Un-Private House a more traditional selection of completed houses, under review designs, or unbuilt projects designed for specific clients. Furthermore, the two exhibitions differed greatly in the importance they respectively gave to social and formal issues, with the latter’s formalist discourse erasing much of the social and political aspects of the more critical projects exhibited. EMERGING VOICES IN THE 1990S

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House Rules: Reinventing Social Architecture

In House Rules, Robbins called for ten teams of architects and theorists – many representing a marginalized racial, ethnic, sexual, and/or gender identity63 – to work together to rethink the typical North American suburban house from various social points of view.64 Each team developed a house proposal for a generic 80-by-160-foot lot. The resulting drawings and models were supplemented by photographs, artworks, and historical material investigating the forces that shape the single-family house, including building codes, plans, materials, or marketing.65 In an introductory essay for the Assemblage issue that serves as a catalogue for the exhibition, Robbins links House Rules to what he describes as the recurrent theme of “architecture as a social tool,” citing as examples Fourier’s phalansteries (early nineteenth century), Le Corbusier’s housing projects (1910s–50s), and the Case Study houses (1945–66). These projects engaged with the importance of dwelling for the healthy functioning of society, but were also infused with a belief that better living could be attained through a rational and scientific investigation and rethinking of domesticity.66 Such belief is replaced in House Rules by a desire to pay closer attention to the lived experience of the house. Robbins alludes to canonical examples of modernist domesticities, but he does not explicitly discuss in his introduction feminist explorations of radical transformations of domestic spaces, including broader rethinking of the relation between community and domesticity. He thus ignores, for example, and as Haar and Reed note, the late nineteenth-century feminist housing projects documented by Dolores Hayden in The Grand Domestic Revolution (1981).67 They suggest that this silence by Robbins is also apparent in “the acceptance of a suburban setting predicated on the single family home [that] discouraged considerations of community.”68 However, Robbins suggests that “the relation of the individual dwelling to the aggregate, its proximity to other units, the gradations of public and private zones, and the type of community thus formed were also part of the investigation. The designers were encouraged to reevaluate the community planning strategies of the typical suburban development and provide alternatives to the repetition of the single plot with a lawn and garage.”69 While not all projects attempted this, some, like Jonathan Crary and Joel Sanders’s, are almost completely focused on rethinking the relation between neighbouring suburban houses (Figure 2.7). Most projects in the exhibition use the rare opportunity of a collaboration between architects and theorists to suggest radical rethinking of the ways we experience life in society in relation to the domestic, be it through critiques of the legal constraints on housing lots (in bell hooks, Julie Eizenberg, and Hank 46

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Figure 2.7 Joel Sanders and Jonathan Crary. “Sight Specific,” from House Rules exhibition, 1994, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH.

Koning’s, or in Heidi J. Nast and Mabel O. Wilson’s projects), in a reflection on how queers explore and subvert the public in order to survive in the private (in Michael Moon, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Benjamin Gianni, and Scott Weir’s project), in a physical deconstruction of the mirage of suburban homogeneity (in Crary and Sanders’s project), or in an attempt to respond to someone’s “transgendering process” by transforming the typical bungalow to follow processes of gender codification in the virtual community (in Allucquere Rosanne Stone, Steven Fong, and Suzan Selçuk’s project).70 The tensions between the modes of thinking (practice and theory) are sometimes themselves the object of the proposal, most explicitly in hooks and Koning Eizenberg’s project, in relation to which a letter exchange between hooks and Eizenberg was reproduced in the catalogue and included in the project presentation.71 EMERGING VOICES IN THE 1990S

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Figure 2.8 House Rules exhibition, 1994, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH.

Most of the exhibition setup is fairly traditional: the projects are displayed individually with models and drawings and with some art works and archive material spread out throughout the projects (Figure 2.8). Though grounded in realistic land regulations, the projects themselves are innovative – and sometimes radical – departures from traditional house designs or presented in an unconventional manner. For example, Crary and Sanders’s project (discussed in the following section) merges two single-family houses and proposes that they share some spaces and views. Interestingly, two of the most unusual presentations are hooks and Koning Eizenberg’s “House, 20 June 1994” and Moon, Sedgwick, Gianni, and Weir’s “Queers in (Single-Family) Space,” two projects specifically thinking about feminist and queer critiques. In both cases, the creators insist on the discourse around the projects, on the perception of the ideas at the core of the houses designed. They show plural voices and opinions around an issue – such as the reproduction of the discussion between hooks and Eizenberg around their project – that hints at a feminist desire to eschew overarching narrative. Similarly, “Queers in (Single-Family) Space” references in its presentation mainstream design magazines and real estate ads, asking us to think about what they are hiding, underlining that queerness exists as a layer that can become visible or invisible depending on how people experience the space in relation to others. 48

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Some of the projects suggest that new forms of domesticity, including queer ones, must acknowledge that previous borders are no longer valid, that different groups do not exist within separate spheres but share spaces that are now understood and used as a collective sphere where these groups and individuals, no matter their differences, interact in full relationality. As Moon and Sedgwick suggest in their essay published in Assemblage, “queer lives and impulses do not occupy a separate social or physical space from straight ones; instead, they are relational and conditional, moving across and transforming the conventional spaces that were designed to offer endless narcissistic self-confirmation to the unstable normative systems of sex, gender, and family.”72 The project developed by Gianni and Weir to dialogue with Moon and Sedgwick (Figure 2.9) aims to support queer kids’ and adults’ survival habits, to explore the uses of secrecy and exposure, and to use the leverage of access to the public sphere as a way to survive in the private sphere. They also attempt to create queer private space in a private domestic space, while simultaneously insisting that “no spatial/domestic manifestation of the issue of queerness” can be designed; “the same space might be lived in and experienced in a variety of ways.”73 This can be interpreted, however, as being itself an important character of queer space, as other theorists have identified. For example, in her analysis of Eileen Gray’s E.1027, Katarina Bonnevier notes that “E.1027 is a house filled with secrets, pockets in walls, sliding passages, and tempting clefts. Gray’s architecture hides and reveals simultaneously. It is out in the open but still closeted. It tells the story of the visually exposed that remains overlooked if you are not familiar with the codes.”74 However, making safe spaces for everyone implies creating enough flexibility to support any uses and the over-layering of private and public. Therefore, designing for queer users means first designing for any user in a way that also permits queer uses, eschewing the normative systems of familial organizations to permit subdivisions, zoning, separate circulations, and non-exposed spaces, as Gianni and Weir explore. It means, as Sharon Haar and Christopher Reed point out, recognizing that “conventional houses already both contain and mask diverse living arrangements” and that inhabitants play as much of a role as architects in defining a living situation.75 Gianni and Weir’s project and Moon and Sedgwick’s essay underline how architects must learn to create spaces that encourage all self-identifications, something that is not that easy to do, as will be discussed around the design of the boom communities in chapter 5. Gianni and Weir propose that it can be done by designing parallel spaces for different expressions to coexist safely within one house. If, as Haar and Reed argue, “the embeddedness of identity within normative structures of home and community is at the core”76 of the project, the EMERGING VOICES IN THE 1990S

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Figure 2.9 Benjamin Gianni and Scott Weir. “Playing It Straight,” from House Rules exhibition, 1994, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH.

architects also challenge normative domestic designs in a similar way to Bonnevier’s argument that “by repeating the same principles for homes over and over again, these principles are naturalized … The act of building can be a way to develop new realities. In this sense, some architecture, such as E.1027, can be performative; it takes place within a given frame but manages simultaneously to stage something new. The inexact repetition is consciously pushed a step further.”77 Thus, the other title given to the project by Gianni and Weir, “Playing It Straight,” might not be as straightforward as it sounds. While passing as heterosexual might seem to be “the suburban strategy par excellence,” is it only about fitting in a heteronormative framework or could it also be about rewriting it? Assuming that queer people lives are normative because they live in what appears to be a normative house is itself an assumption on the relation between lived experiences and architectural tastes – themselves linked in large part to having the financial means to make decisions about housing – but it also highlights the very close links that tie them together, as well as the perception of domestic spaces as private spaces without recognizing that they are understood as being part of one’s social persona. Bonnevier as well as Weir and Gianni thus clearly highlight the importance of constantly rethinking the parameters of design to create domestic environments that respond more closely to their owners’ needs and that allow unexpected uses

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and careful control over the blurred threshold of privacy. The project developed by Gianni and Weir also shares preoccupations with the project presented by Gianni and Robbins in the Queer Space exhibition, conceived at approximately the same time. If different in their strategies – the Queer Space project is strictly descriptive while the House Rules one is projective – they both share a commitment to avoid prescribing characteristics that would define queer space. While Robbins puts feminist and queer critiques on the same foot as the other critiques brought to the exhibition, a survey of the reviews discussing the exhibition exemplifies how these issues were perceived at the time. While some reviews mentioned the various issues tackled on by the teams,78 at least one, Muschamp’s for the New York Times, put aside completely discussions of the projects dealing with sexuality.79 Muschamp further questions the validity of the proposals by noting that, in opposition to earlier projects that sought to define new middle-class norms, “the projects at the Wexner are pitched against the mainstream. Their designers want to break the grip of homogenized norms and allow heterogeneity to flower across the land.”80 Similarly, in his review for the professional magazine Architecture, Darris Blackford notes that the projects exhibited “strive … to address class, gender, race, and other social and political issues affecting the concepts of residence and neighborhood,” sidelining sexuality to the “other” issues. Later, while describing the project “Queers in (SingleFamily) Space” by Sedgwick, Moon, Gianni, and Weir, he similarly mentions that “this team’s overriding suburban house focus was to build flexibility into a house in order to be as inclusive as possible for a wide range of inhabitants,” once again ignoring completely the queer users providing the context for which the house is designed.81 Unfortunately, none of the projects designed for House Rules were realized, but a limited number served as drafts for later built and unbuilt designs. For example, the ideas investigated in Sanders’s “Sight Specific” were later developed in his House for a Bachelor, as will be discussed in the following section.82 As for Robbins himself, his interest in the domestic will continue in later projects, including Households (2003–06), discussed in chapter 3. The Un-Private House: Privacy and the Media

In 1999, a few years after the Wexner exhibition, the Museum of Modern Art’s curator of architecture and design, Terence Riley, organized an exhibition about the house at the turn of the twenty-first century, The Un-Private House (1999– 2000).83 The show neither explicitly engages queer space theory nor is it organized to highlight social critiques; nevertheless, Riley discusses gender and

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sexuality throughout his introductory essay for the exhibition’s catalogue. The exhibition also includes projects such Joel Sanders’s that link the exhibition to earlier queer space exhibitions. 84 Riley further notes that his approach is informed by architectural historian Beatriz Colomina’s extensive research on the interaction of architecture (mostly from the modern canon) and the media: “the way the house occupies the media is directly related to the way the media occupies the house,”85 an idea that Colomina has developed in her own work on gender and sexuality.86 However, Riley’s focus on technological gadgetry, surfaces, and formal aspects creates a discourse and impact at odds with what Robbins curated at the Wexner, following his own background and experience with queer space theory. In comparison with the Wexner exhibition, which was the centre’s first inhouse attempt at displaying architecture,87 the Museum of Modern Art’s place in the history of American architecture made the exhibition much more visible, even if, as one of the m oma exhibition’s reviewers commented, “one of the most amazing things about [the exhibition] is that this will be the first show [at the m oma] devoted wholly to domestic architecture in more than thirty years.”88 As architectural historian Sylvia Lavin notes, “the Museum of Modern Art has long considered itself to be the very home of good architectural design. It remains the institution of record for architecture, using its exhibits and collections to constitute itself as the standard bearer of value and importance, not only in the United States but for Europe as well. In other words, what happens at m oma does not stay at m oma but rather aspires to the status of disciplinarity as such.”89 The museum’s attempt at reflecting on society’s changing demographics and its impact on the house typology was thus an important step in bringing these topics to mainstream discussions. As the exhibition title suggests, Riley’s main focus is on changes affecting the notion of the private, both in the sense of a private ownership and of privacy: “Although it is precisely defined in the dictionary – ‘the quality or state of being apart from company or observation: seclusion’ – the term privacy is a thoroughly relative one. It has evolved over centuries and continues to do so. Nonetheless, the privacy in the private house, since its inception, has been predicated on a discernible separation of its inhabitants and activities from both the public realm and other houses. The private house has also been from its establishment a building type that enshrines family life to the exclusion of all other activities. Furthermore, as a space so dedicated, it has been for almost four hundred years largely responsible for the creation and development of those rituals and comforts that we now associate with the domestic.”90 Riley points out that the private house – associated with a range of political, moral, social, and economic issues – has 52

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been criticized for its association with the bourgeoisie and middle class. Furthermore, “the current ubiquity of the private house in its most traditional form is rife with contradiction. The social conditions and structures that drove the development of the private house … have all changed drastically.”91 For Riley, the transformation of the family and family life since the Second World War has led to changes in the concept of privacy that have not necessarily been integrated in mainstream dwelling design, but that appear in the projects he selected for the exhibition. Relating to the theorists discussed earlier, when asked if what makes contemporary houses more interesting is an increased architectural quality or changing sociological issues, Riley answers that “it has to do with the shifting boundary between public and private. You used to have a fairly strong connection between the idea of individual liberties and privacy, meaning that you could not be observed in your home, that you had a kind of anti-Orwellian perimeter around yourself. A hundred years ago people could relate to this ‘home sweet home’ sense of seclusion. In the intervening century, people have relentlessly invited more of a public presence into their house.”92 Surprisingly, however, if the critiques brought forward by Riley seem to call for a rethinking of the historic form we envision as a house, very few of the projects he presents in the exhibition explicitly challenge that form. Riley thus starts from the same premise as Robbins – changing conditions for contemporary domesticity – but uses varying means that push the m oma exhibition in a different direction. Whereas in House Rules theorists and practitioners teamed up to think about specific social issues through essays and design-research projects, in The Un-Private House Riley selects twenty-six existing built houses or unbuilt designs that do not focus on specific issues but instead represent his understanding of how future domestic spaces could be designed. Interestingly, as one reviewer notes, “although Riley doesn’t mention it, ‘The Un-Private House’ is unusual among recent architecture exhibitions at his institution. In addition to repeat appearances by such Riley favorites as Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, Steven Holl, Rem Koolhaas, and Bernard Tschumi (semi-finalists and finalists in the almost all-male 1997 m oma expansion competition), this show is noteworthy for its comparatively high representation of women architects. Among those included are Liz Diller, Winka Dubbledam, Merrill Elam, Danelle Guthrie, Victoria Meyers, and Kazuyo Sejima. Of particular interest to readers of House Beautiful will be sister-architects Gisue and Mojgan Hariri’s Digital House, commissioned for the magazine’s three-part ‘Houses for the Next Millennium’ series and published in 1998.”93 The exhibition is itself set up as a series of domestic spaces designed by David Schaefer/Furniture Co, with the projects printed on wallpaper. One of the major EMERGING VOICES IN THE 1990S

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elements is an interactive rotating table (an updated lazy Susan) designed by Schaefer with Riley and an mit Media Lab team led by Neil Gerschenfeld.94 While the projects selected are often more “realistic” than the House Rules projects, because many houses are already lived and experienced by people, it is also less socially focused and the critiques are harder to comprehend precisely. This once again highlights the difficulties in integrating or pointing out critiques in built projects, but also shows the potential of alternative architectural endeavours such as installations that were integral parts of the earlier exhibitions discussed in the previous sections. It also suggests that a broader rethinking of the “house” is needed. Riley also focuses much more, in both his essay and the selection of projects, on how “the private house has become a permeable structure, receiving and transmitting images, sounds, text, and data.”95 Curating the exhibition in the first years of the mainstreaming of the internet,96 Riley notes an awakening to the duality of the real and the virtual in many projects, for example Diller + Scofidio’s Slow House (unbuilt, 1990), Hariri & Hariri’s The Digital House (concept house, 1998), or Herzog & de Meuron’s Kramlich Residence (2000). According to Riley such projects show that the politics of privacy are being transformed by the “increased presence of the electronic media in people’s homes and daily lives.”97 Building on Donna Haraway’s suggestion that the cyborg is “no longer structured by the polarity of public and private,” and instead “defines a technological polis based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household,”98 Riley demonstrates how much concern is made about how media and surveillance in a house constitute a presence antithetical to privacy. This extensive discussion of the intruding presence of media and focus on superficial experiments in integrating electronic media technologies in the home, however, sidesteps the argument made by many critics that, even without such media, privacy in domestic spaces is never so clearly protected from outsiders’ view, as discussed in the previous chapters, and therefore its consequences on people living in those buildings are never discussed. Riley’s preference for a formal reading is also clearly visible in the lengthy last part of his essay where he argues that, throughout history, the private house is “both a collective bellwether of the current state of architecture and a harbinger of its future direction.” The houses discussed by Riley are thus for him reflective of the “two most influential areas of contemporary architectural theory … ‘blobs’ versus ‘boxes.’”99 As a reviewer pointed out, this formal approach is reductive and hides serious issues and challenges: “to reduce the entire theoretical and practical realm of these architectures to these two hypotheses is myopic. We can see in these houses formal, spatial, mathematical, structural, semiotic, cinematic, 54

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biological, anthropomorphic, naturalistic and urbanistic themes being studied, tested and built!”100 To these themes could be added social and identity preoccupations that are problematically discussed by Riley, as shown by some of the examples analysed in the next pages. Although his focus is formal, Riley still discusses how non-traditional households impact the reception and reading of domestic spaces, and especially how society’s changing views towards sexuality and family has rendered previous anxieties less visible. “Part of the anxiety – which has not completely disappeared – about unmarried adult men and women was the ambiguity of their social status and by inference their sexuality. It is difficult to separate the legitimation of the house built for a single person from society’s somewhat increased tolerance for social and sexual relationships and lifestyles that fall outside the traditional nuclear-family structure.”101 Riley presents some examples of houses built for single people – although at least one, the T-House by Simon Ungers with Thomas Kinslow (Wilton, ny, 1992), originally designed for a single man, was by the time of the exhibition also occupied by the woman he had married in the meantime – but he discusses in most details Joel Sanders’s well-titled House for a Bachelor (Minneapolis, unbuilt, 1998, Figure 2.10). “The belief that marriage and parenthood are the most desirable state for an adult man or woman is still quite evident in society today. Yet the single person who builds a house for … [them]self is certainly becoming more common. Joel Sanders’s unbuilt House for a Bachelor for Minneapolis can be considered to be a sort of domestic manifesto for single people, men and women alike. ‘If the traditional suburban home laid the foundations for the production of the nuclear family, this project, literally built upon the foundations of a pre-existing developer home, reconfigures the interior to sponsor new spatial and visual relationships attuned to the domestic lifestyle of the contemporary bachelor,’ writes Sanders.”102 House for a Bachelor is one of the projects that most acknowledges and challenges the rigidity of the “house” artifact. Sanders, an important voice in the development of thinking about how architecture and design interact with sexuality and gender through his edited collection Stud: Architectures of Masculinity (1996), is the only architect represented in both House Rules and The Un-Private House.103 Sanders’s projects for both exhibitions address the 1950s–60s suburban house typology. While the earlier project is entirely conceptual and is an attempt to subvert the type, the House for a Bachelor is an extensive renovation of a 1950s house. In this project, Sanders “rethinks the American suburban single-family residence, adapting it to meet the requirements of a single professional man [and] addresses, in often witty and sometimes ironic ways, the many issues faced by men and women who choose to live alone or in relationships that are not defined EMERGING VOICES IN THE 1990S

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Figure 2.10 Joel Sanders, Architect. House for a Bachelor, unbuilt, 1998, Minneapolis.

by marriage and raising children.”104 As such, it adds on to the traditional house “non-domestic” spaces such as a gym, as well as creating opportunities to open up interior spaces to the outside. The description, in addition to the images of undressed men inserted in Sanders’s photomontages (Figure 2.11) and to Riley’s references to the return of Mies van der Rohe’s influence, prompted reviewer Raymund Ryan to note that “the word from Manhattan is that Mies is back – most likely as a thin gay channel-surfer … This guy … enjoys working out behind or below his extensively renovated 1950s home, selecting clothes off semitransparent mirrored panels and viewing a combination terrarium/window/television screen. It’s both splendid and intensely narcissistic, slim, taut and image-conscious.”105 Ryan’s comment reflects on the superficial and formal presentation by the m oma exhibition of the issues at play in the design of domestic spaces, but also reinforces popular associations between homosexuality and an obsession with the body, even if neither Sanders nor Riley explicitly states the bachelor’s sexual orientation. Ryan is right, though, in pointing out that Sanders’s choice of representation through a half-naked fit white man instantly suggests a vision of who should live in that house. It is for a bachelor, but a particular type of bachelor.106 Regardless of sexual orientation, it once again underlines the masculine bias of the architectural profession and of most discussions of queer space in architecture.107 Sanders displays his interest and questioning of masculinity and gender in this project as he does elsewhere, but unfortunately silences other elements that form self-identifications as well as dictate in many ways how this house can be used and who can use it, such as class and race. Tellingly, The Un-Private House’s presentation text for the House for a Bachelor focuses on “the surfaces that clothe the building [that] work like clothing that warps the body, helping the bachelor to fabricate identity.”108 But what is that “identity” that can be fabricated? What needs to be present to begin with to allow someone to own and use such a house? The representation of the project (Figure 2.12) highlights the play of layers and levels that surrounds the (male) bachelor, without however showing how these can be controlled by him. Riley, in his introductory essay to the exhibition’s catalogue, underline the association with gym culture exemplified by Sanders’s project, but also with a deconstruction of the ultimate symbol of privacy, the bathroom, by noting how “the space of the bedroom also flows into the bathing area, complete with pool and, like the Piscator Apartment [in Berlin, designed by Marcel Breuer, 1927], exercise equipment. However, in this instance, the health and hygiene associations are overridden by the design’s more contemporary and more sensualized references to bodybuilding.”109 He links this idea to other domestic spaces designed for single people, for example Thomas Hanrahan and Victoria Meyers’s

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Figure 2.11 and 2.12 (opposite) Joel Sanders, Architect. House for a Bachelor, unbuilt, 1998, Minneapolis.

Holley Loft (New York City, 1995) where “an unexpected view reveals the bathtub from the bedroom.”110 Riley then notes that in many examples there is an opening up of private parts to public parts with, for example, an easy access to bedrooms and bathrooms. Apart from linking this characteristic to changes in the composition of households, especially the rising number of single people, Riley does not attempt to explain how this opening up translates into differing uses of the space nor how it can impact differently various people. For example, he omits any discussion of how the examples chosen are almost all designed for privileged people; what renders possible the experiments exhibited by Riley is the class status, often linked to race and gender, of the clients commissioning these projects. For example, wealth often provides an easier control on a home’s surroundings, allowing a level of privacy that creates room for experimentation inside. While experiments with domestic privacy exist in less privileged homes, they are silenced by the m oma’s focus on high design for affluent patrons. In comparison, Sanders’s project for House Rules, conceptualized in dialogue with art historian Jonathan Crary and titled “Sight Specific,” “attempts to reconfigure the spatial/scopic, and thus public/private, relationships already inscribed within the enclosing surfaces of the suburban houses.”111 Considering the premise of the exhibition, the project is also designed with middle-class households as targets. Sanders and Crary question the suburban house’s enclosing surfaces, arguing that instead of reinforcing the demarcation between public and private, they are, in fact, unstable visual boundaries. They shape this by getting rid of the backyard – or more appropriately making it a “front backyard” – and by putting back-toback two houses with a shared inhabited and porous boundary (Figure 2.7). While this seems at first similar to the goals expressed in the House for a Bachelor, the text accompanying the project, which takes a prominent role in House Rules, underlines that these boundaries are, in a suburban context, linked to the “the mirage of sexual, ethnic, and class homogeneity … This house, with its slipping and interrupted boundaries, is evidence not just of the deterioration of a private domestic sphere, but of how the rich adaptability of this culturally loaded site can be made home to many possible ‘families.’ Partitionings here no longer house primal scenes but a proliferation of scenic projections of effective identities, sexualities, and mobile relations.”112 While this project is not for a specific single client, and thus the parameters of tself-identification are left open, Sanders and Crary are clearly calling for a new typology that links non-traditional households. As an example of a project questioning domesticity, Riley uses the Hergott Shepard Residence (1999) designed by architect Michael Maltzan for two gay men in Beverly Hills. He argues that “the two gay men who commissioned the house were intent that its design would reflect their own needs rather than any 60

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existing notion of domesticity … In Maltzan’s plan, a new kind of order has been created.”113 For him, one of the main characteristics of this new order is the fact that the kitchen is small for the size of the house, because neither of the owners cook on a regular basis, and because it is adjacent to the garage which often becomes a set-up space for catering services. These services are used for, among other things, fundraising events hosted for political causes and taking place in the central living areas, “conceived as public spaces” that also serve as a gallery with two distinct spaces appropriate to the different scale of the works in their “large art collection.” Another transformation to the traditional house plan identified by Riley to “accommodate the owners’ way of living” is the fact that the largest room, which also gets the best view, is the gymnasium, a characteristic similar to Sanders’s project. Riley argues that “Maltzan’s design … may be an implicit critique of traditional domesticity, but it is much more about thoughtfully and articulately seeking an alternative.”114 It is, however, an alternative supported by specific assumptions: in the absence of other examples of same-sex couples in the exhibition, Riley – in a discourse not too far from the m oma’s traditional approach to society defined by its wealthy New York heritage, exemplified by Philip Johnson, founder of its Department of Architecture and Design and born from a prosperous family – seems to say that a queer domesticity is one defined by wealth and race, by men who can afford to spend most of their free time entertaining or training, in line with end-of-century common associations of gay white men with money. This view obviously ignores the existence of a vast number of less privileged queer households who are also seeking – or not – to develop alternative “ways of living.”115 In addition to the catalogue and a dedicated website, the exhibition was covered in many reviews.116 Interestingly, almost all reviewers were impressed by the interactive table designed in collaboration with the mit Media Lab, often noting how it is much more indicative of the possibilities of interactive media technologies than most of the devices integrated into the houses on display.117 However, similarly to my reading of the exhibition, many reviewers criticized the focus on specific aspects of the selected houses: Based on the premise of Jean Helion in 1955 that “All architecture is coloured by the problem of the house,” one expects the exhibition and the catalogue to build a case about the rich territory of the house for theoretical and practical experiment and about how these probes in the house then “colour” all architecture. But the exhibition, without any precise explanation, only shows us the houses as showcases for individual experiments within the house, rarely examining the house in its context of city, EMERGING VOICES IN THE 1990S

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suburb or country, never discussing its effect on the street nor its relationship to the still problematic car, and never helping us (both professionals and lay people) understand anything about how a small, intimate, private house can, or even could, affect all other architectures.118 Most predictable are those that develop the notion of “unprivacy” through technology … The mere existence of technology does not impose unprivacy however, and in any case screens, projections and the like are no more radical than television. More significant are those designs that play with the traditional “technologies” of the house: its physical fabric and formal qualities.119 Riley’s catalog essay strains hard not only to substantiate the trend toward transparency and fluidity but also to argue that the houses reflect sociological shifts in our society. It is true that childless people, a growing segment of the population, may require fewer discrete spaces, that the computer ties our private spaces to the outside world, and that the hybrid home/ office is proliferating. But the show’s custom houses scarcely validate these generalized points, and vice versa.120 One reviewer also notes that, while Riley repeatedly states how families are changing, very few of the houses actually rethink how children can use these spaces. “It’s one thing to recognize the changing form of the American family, but it’s disappointing that an exhibition about contemporary domestic space with such a spirit of invention marginalizes kids so consistently.”121 There is thus a consensus that the exhibition is missing an opportunity to understand more comprehensively how contemporary domestic design can address critiques of the oppositions of public and private and particularly of the impact of such transformations. Nevertheless, as a reviewer notes, exhibiting such houses is already eye-opening and questioning some assumptions. It may not do so as strongly or clearly as the strictly speculative projects of House Rules – showing once again the rhetorical possibilities of non-traditional architectural projects – but it still does it importantly in the rather conservative and mainstream sanctum of modernity of the m oma: “While some of these floor plans seem far-fetched, it is exactly that quality of idiosyncrasy, mystery even, that recognizes the subtlety of the pull between intimacy and isolation. All of these houses may serve as strategies for modern ideas about privacy, but what they do more effectively is document how elusive privacy in fact is. When does solitude become alienation? When does a sense of openness become exhibitionism?”122 In that sense, the 62

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exhibition serves a similar purpose as earlier queer space exhibitions – questioning assumptions about the privacy of domestic spaces – even if its focus on media dilutes its message. Riley himself sees the un-private house as the next step in domesticity, even if it harks back to medieval big houses.123 Following other critiques, I believe that the private house, like all domestic space, is already “unprivate” and constantly open to the public gaze. Therefore, we do not need to strive for a new type that makes this more explicit. What are needed instead are designs that let their users control more carefully how this publicness is enacted. While this can be done by acknowledging the publicness of the house, it does not need to be done through technological means. I agree with Riley, however, when he writes that “it is manifest that the private house developed for a fairly static nuclear family is not necessarily applicable to all householders or even a majority of them” and calls for a transformation of houses over time as owners’ situations change.124 The m oma exhibitions shows that this is easier said than done; the projects discussed in the following chapter will show further attempts at operationalizing those critiques.

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3 Living Pictures Mark Robbins Drags the Home into the Gallery In a 1992 article in Design Book Review, Henry Urbach observed that “offering their readers a glance at gay domesticity, design journals nonetheless do not reveal all … In interior design magazines, gay couples are simultaneously shown and masked, written and erased.”1 In a similar vein to other queer space theorists from the early 1990s, Urbach further notes that “former boundaries of public and private are unstable, and public experience is increasingly defined as the shared experience of others’ exposed lives.” He adds that “design magazines conspire with the voyeurism of readers, gazing attentively into others’ private spaces and domestic arrangements. Yet, when it comes to peeking at gay couples, intimacy is the one thing we cannot see.”2 In the twenty years since then, representation of domestic spaces owned by out gay males has increased, but this representation has often been limited to the houses and apartments of superstar designers3 and has built on stereotypes linking “the domestic aptitude of gay men [to] their feminisation,”4 building on separate spheres ideology. Same-sex couples that do not correspond to this wealthy successful mobile white gay male model are still few, although this is obviously also the case for the representation of heterosexual couples and bachelors, where wealthy people dominate home or culture media.5 These magazines are shaped by consumer culture and devoted to offering images to aspire to, and as such their choice of represented homes depends more on the dweller’s financial means and class – obviously in both cases shaped by racial and gendered considerations – than on their sexual orientation. However, as Urbach discusses, the question of sexual orientation plays a role in the ways the spaces are depicted once they are chosen. Advertisers and television shows have also increasingly showed same-sex couples, although there again in a very controlled way that often considers gay men and lesbians as consumers

rather than as social subjects, using encoded images and messages to reach gay people without losing a mainstream audience.6 Queer lives are thus kept invisible as they become more visible, denied a full existence while at the same time being brought to the forefront. A decade after Urbach’s article, American architect Mark Robbins (born 1956) developed Households (2003–06), an alternative look at domestic interiors that explicitly includes gay couples, building from his earlier projects such as the one he developed for Queer Space with Benjamin Gianni (see chapter 2). In this photographic exhibition and catalogue, Robbins documents living spaces housing a variety of people (of diverse age, sexual orientation, marital status, etc.). As his publisher describes, Robbins’s project is in part a reaction to the magazines described by Urbach: “Driving the glossy shelter magazines – Architectural Digest, House & Garden, and many more – is an enduring fascination with other people’s lives and houses. But the pristine photographs in these publications do not represent reality. In his ‘Households’ series, artist and architect Mark Robbins has invented the ‘flip side’ of interior design magazines: a compelling series of photographs of actual people in actual homes.”7 As developed throughout Robbins’s career, Households includes an important number of people perceived as queer. They are, however, not presented as separated from the other “households” represented. Conceived for a different audience from those addressed by the house magazines Urbach was discussing, the project questions the relation between interiors and people, but does not necessarily address explicitly the issues brought forward by Urbach. However, both house magazines and Robbins exhibitions raise questions about the representation of domestic spaces, commonly understood as private, in the public space of the gallery or the media. In its concept and formal resolution (full-scale photographic reproductions montaged to remind viewers of panel paintings), Households questions popular presumptions about the relation between dwelling and dweller and on the public meanings of these spaces, challenging how associations are made between interior decoration and furnishings choices and a person’s identification. Mark Robbins and the Body in Architecture Robbins started developing his photo and installation works in the early 1980s while still in architecture school. After spending time at the Peter Eisenman– directed Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies and working for architectural firms som, Polshek, and Emilio Ambasz, Robbins taught, wrote, and MARK ROBBINS DRAGS THE HOME INTO THE GALLERY

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exhibited critical works that engaged with the intersection of the body and architecture, as well as the politics of architectural representation. His installation Framing the American City at the Institute for Contemporary Art in New York and at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus led to his appointment as inaugural curator of architecture at the Wexner, where his first exhibition was House Rules, discussed in chapter 2. He later became director of design for the National Endowment for the Arts – almost sparking a controversy when a New York Times article highlighted his interest in queer space8 not long after the nea was shaken by morality-based culture wars9 – before becoming dean of the School of Architecture at Syracuse University in 2004, while working on his Households project. Robbins has presented his work in a number of self-edited monographs. The earliest monograph, Angles of Incidence (1992), traces the evolution in Robbins’s practice from its beginnings to 1992, from small contained boxes, inspired by the work of artist Joseph Cornell, towards larger-scale installations.10 In his early works, Robbins investigates how form carries content, for example by using the symbol of the religious reliquary, but also uses sexual references and visual puns to catch the attention of the viewer.11 Robbins’s interest in how structures of representation impact our understanding of architecture is discussed in the essays by Patricia C. Phillips, Benjamin Gianni, and P.A. Morton included in Angles of Incidence. As Phillips points out, “Robbins’ programmatic preoccupations involve behaviors and perceptions that architecture frequently conceals – and only inadvertently exposes.”12 More precisely, Gianni discusses the importance for Robbins of the intersection of sexuality and space, already present in his World Trade project from 1980,13 predating by more than a decade publications on the relation between sexuality and space such as the oft-cited collection Sexuality & Space.14 Morton similarly notes how Robbins creates a relationship where the body is not just the creator of the city, but where the body and the city produce each other and are inextricably intertwined, linking his work to Elizabeth Grosz’s argument in “Bodies-Cities” (1992). She also points out that Robbins “further investigates the body in the city as the point at which the politics of the body’s sexual formation (by the city) becomes explicit” and insists on the importance in Robbins’s work of a rethinking of the place of the male body in architectural representations, subverting the traditionally neutral “scale figure” role given to it.15 This interest in the intersection of the body and (representations) of architecture or the city comes back in later projects such as in “Fashion Plate” (1996), one of the artworks published in Joel Sanders’s Stud: Architectures of Masculinity, or in some of the exhibitions organized by Robbins while he was curator of architecture at the Wexner, such as House Rules (1994) and Fabrications: Bodybuild66

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ings, Full Scale, the Tectonic Garden (1998).16 Robbins’s projects have also become increasingly explicit about how gender, race, and class issues play into our perceptions and representations of architectural spaces, such as Of Mies and Men (1997), Import Export (2001), and Student/Teacher (2011) – often (but not always) through the lens of the potential homoeroticism of space.17 Households: Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So … Robbins’s interest in the domestic culminated in his Households project. Conceived from 2002 as an exhibition (presented at the Agassiz Gallery of the Radcliffe Institute (2003) and at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (2003–04)), it was later developed and published as a monograph with essays by Robbins himself, Julie Lasky, and Bill Horrigan.18 Households is thus essentially a photographic project, unlike other projects by Robbins developed as elaborate installations. It links the city and the house and documents the living spaces of people of diverse ages, sexual orientations, and household arrangements. In development over many years, the project is an extension of Who We Are and How We Live (1994), presented in the Storefront’s Queer Space exhibition (republished as Family Values (Honey I’m Home), 1997, Figure 2.4). This earlier project was coauthored by Robbins and Gianni and similarly questions assumptions about the correlation between domestic spaces and self-identifications.19 Unlike Households, however, it focuses on the architecture of the spaces and does not linger on the specificities of their inhabitants. It also only includes spaces occupied by self-identified homosexual men and women, whereas Households questions selfidentifications more generally, making sexual orientation only one of the variables taken into account in understanding domesticity. The Households exhibitions and book share photographic series that juxtapose living spaces and their inhabitants, posing full-length for the camera. Each series is formally organized to recall panel paintings and presented close to full-scale in the exhibition (Figure 3.1). These panels are accompanied by the names of the sitters, the place, and the year in which the photographs were taken. The book presents in its last pages descriptions of most of the sitters and their living spaces, in a dry and descriptive manner. The project is shot in three series, presented separately in the gallery shows, but mixed together in the book. A first one, from 2002, is composed of couples and individuals, mainly gay men, inside their homes in cities in the North and Southeast of the United States. The second, from 2003, focuses on vacation or transitory homes, with the addition of exterior shots that present the landscape MARK ROBBINS DRAGS THE HOME INTO THE GALLERY

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Figure 3.1 Mark Robbins. Households, 2006, “Giuseppe, 39, Jonathan, 35, 10 years, New York City, 2002.”

as being as important as the interior in telling about the occupants’ life (Figure 3.2). The third, completed in 2004, covers modernist houses in the Netherlands and presents a broader group of subjects, including a larger proportion of heterosexual families.20 Many of the sitters, especially in the first two series, are friends or family of Robbins. All of the sitters selected the objects and interiors depicted in their panels.21 The interiors depicted, and their occupants, thus vary greatly – from spartan student rooms to luxurious, finely designed spaces. Every panel is composed in a similar fashion, with vertically cropped photos of the sitters, often partially or fully undressed, framing views of the interior and exterior of the house occupied by them. The compositions are often almost symmetric, giving a formal quality of unity that suggests that people, furnishings, and architecture are part of a whole and have to be taken together to understand both the space and its inhabitant. For Robbins, body types and decor have a similar role in telling histories; his interest lies in highlighting the similarities and divergences between them and in building on the humour present in both body types and furnishings.22 The nakedness of the sitters, in most cases male, objectifies the sitters and makes them an integral part of the domestic environments, but also echoes preoccupations identified by Morton in Robbins’s earlier work: by making male bodies the object of the gaze, Robbins reacts to how, in architectural representations, the male body signifies sexuality differently than the female body and subverts the traditionally neutral “scale figure” role given to it.23 Scale figures, where men would traditionally be represented, were understood as separated from the architectural spaces represented.24 Robbins’s male figures are closer to the female figures present in canonical representations of modern houses where women are used as decor 68

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Figure 3.2 Mark Robbins. Summer Places & Households, 2003–04, The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.

or depicted in highly gendered roles. Gill Matthewson underlines how, for example, celebrated architectural photographer Julius Shulman uses “human accessories” to “humanize” the “radical modernism” of the post-war projects and to sell a modern domesticity to a public not necessarily familiar with its language. Women in particular are used “not [as] real people but [as] decorative objects.”25 Joseph Rosa further notes that Shulman does not necessarily document houses but rather an image of a postwar lifestyle through architecture that is constructed by the positioning of human figures by Shulman in typical gendered roles.26 While Shulman’s human models were often hired to pose for the photograph and therefore not the houses’ occupants, in Robbins’s project, the people depicted own, live in, or have designed the domestic spaces represented. The way Robbins presents his subjects as part of these spaces and as objects to be looked at as equally as everything else in the picture is thus linked to Shulman’s approach, but simultaneously subverted by the unusual overrepresentation of male figures. Robbins MARK ROBBINS DRAGS THE HOME INTO THE GALLERY

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also significantly uses sexualized male bodies in reaction to what he perceives as mainstream media’s trouble with nudity,27 and once again challenges the differing treatment of men and women in architectural photography.28 Households echoes earlier challenges to the alleged privacy of domesticity. For example, David Hockney’s paintings, such as Domestic Scene, Los Angeles (1963), Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool (1967), Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy (1968), or Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1971), often depict scenes that take place in the assumed privacy of a domestic environment, and even more specifically the bathroom or the bedroom, but are then made public in exhibitions. In many instances, the couples depicted are same-sex couples, making the scene even more transgressive for a 1960s audience.29 Kenneth E. Silver notes the directness of Hockney’s junction of “the domestic, the gay, and the modernist,” and the unselfconscious way the gay men are represented in his work, arguing that this straightforwardness diminishes “the exoticism that might accrue to gay representation.” Silver further notes that Hockney seems to say that what binds these couples is not their sexual attraction, “relegated to the private, unseen part of their lives, but their shared living space, and the objects with which they cohabit.”30 Hockney’s paintings are visibly entangled in gender and sexuality issues, as well as themselves producing discourse around these issues.31 Hockney depicts both mixed and same-sex couples on an equal footing. Furthermore, as historians have pointed out, Hockney is among the first artists to explicitly depict same-sex desire.32 In all of Robbins’s photographs, the occupants are presented as the curators of the spaces depicted. They do not only appear in the image; they are responsible for the choices behind it. Robbins insists that his authorship is mostly in the panel compositions and that the interiors themselves have been designed and decorated to express one’s self-identification. Households is thus, in Robbins’s view, part of an ongoing project to understand how ritual and decor, identity and the body are linked, shaped by his interest “in the way we align ourselves – and are aligned – in relation to each other and to the market culture, notably in advertising and media.”33 Robbins echoes here Urbach’s observation that, in design magazines, “decor is presented as an expression of personality and lifestyle.”34 The series of photographs raises questions about popular presumptions about the relation between dwelling and dweller, most importantly underlining how domestic spaces acquire public meanings. Repeatedly described as private safe havens, they are, however, constantly shared with strangers coming into the household, willingly or not. Robbins appears to suggest through Households that, when understood as public spaces, domestic spaces have to be approached with a new set of questions. What does our environment say about who we are, with whom we live, and how 70

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we live? How are assumptions about how interior decoration and furnishings appear appropriate or not to a person’s identification constructed? When do we control how others perceive our domestic spaces? By installing the photographs in a public space – the gallery – Robbins explicitly offers to the public gaze what is assumed by most people to be private. He does not, however, explicitly address assumptions about how dwelling and dweller relate. The project hints at these questions in its accompanying material (essays in the monograph, introductory notes to the exhibition), but the panels themselves are not specifically discussed in relation to these assumptions. Some viewers might analyze and critique what they see, especially if they have read the accompanying texts, but most would probably not. The choice of exhibition spaces – university and contemporary art galleries – aims at a specific group of people that are probably more aware of the issues questioned by Robbins and that share knowledge and intellectual frameworks with him. These conditions, however, do not necessarily guarantee that people will put aside their preconceptions about the decor and people they see in Robbins’s photographs. Furthermore, the wider distribution of the book and its similarity with coffee table books suggest a broader audience that might not be as familiar with those questions and that might instead focus more on the interiors themselves, trying to understand the stories of these people. Similar questions arose from the publication of the House Rules catalogue as an issue of Assemblage. As Kay Bea Jones notes, “the catalog presents the collaborators’ written exposes, model photographs, and representations (which differ from those in the exhibition) in a modest and inexpensive format.”35 But this impulse to reach to the mainstream is undermined by the choice of an academic publication not easily available outside of specialized bookstores. Would the questions brought forward by Robbins be stronger and potentially of more impact if they had been published, for example, in a mainstream publication such as Architectural Digest? Even if the viewers do not critically analyze what they see, by presenting with similar compositions a diversity of people, and therefore a diversity of interiors, Robbins neutralizes expected associations between identity, clothes, and decoration, most importantly around how gender and sexuality play into decor choices. Whereas in 1992 Urbach, referring to the absence of bedroom images or references to personal lives, notes that, for “gay homes” presented in design magazines, “decor becomes, instead, a metonym for undisclosed lives,”36 ten years later Robbins insists on the disclosing, underlining the similarities between all households. Among the spaces depicted in Households are bedrooms, living spaces, and working spaces. An important number of the depicted households are formed by gay men, couples, or roommates, but numerous other panels show MARK ROBBINS DRAGS THE HOME INTO THE GALLERY

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lesbian women or heterosexual men and women to underline that this project is not (only) about sexual orientation, but about all elements that contribute to someone’s self-identification, and that sexual orientation cannot be directly related to environment design or clothes. The published version of Households presents photographs of sixty-four households with thirty of them being complemented by written descriptions.37 Some of the people are represented twice, in both their permanent and summer homes. Some of the pictures depict more than one family or couple, when they are sharing a space. Of the people represented in Robbins’s book, 26 are women and 88 are men; 103 are white and 11 are not white. The photographs show twenty gay male couples, ten heterosexual couples, a household involving three gay males, six families (including five babies and three older children), and one household of two women. Unlike what he does for other couples, Robbins does not state the number of years these two women have been living together and there are no descriptive notes at the end of the book for their picture, opening up the possibility that they are only sharing the space without being a couple. This silence is somewhat troubling considering that it is the only representation of two women living together; as well as echoing the articles discussed by Urbach, it seems to once again fall into the largely masculinist inclinations of much “queer” work. A comparison between some of the households depicted by Robbins can shine further light on his methods and highlight some of the potential readings of his work. One of the common households depicted is the gay male couple, often, but not always, wealthy. For example, “Country: Anthony, 42, Pierantonio, 41, 17 years, Amagansett, New York, 2003” (34; all page numbers in the panels description are from Robbins’s Households book38) and “Anthony, 41, Pierantonio, 40, 16 years” (35) are two similarly composed panels of five photos (Anthony/exterior/ living room/mirror exterior/Pierantonio) on opposite pages. They juxtapose the bright and open country house occupied by an unbuttoned Anthony and a shirtless Pierantonio with the darker and more cluttered New York City house and the dressed-up couple. In both images, the two men are photographed outside and appear relaxed, but controlled. Compared to other examples, the exterior occupies an important part of the composition, even if the interior shot is at the centre of the composition. The descriptive text on page 141 similarly notes that the terrace of their New York brownstone looks like the country more than the city. The text also underlines their class status as it presents them as operating an art and architecture publishing house from the ground floor of their Chelsea brownstone and owning a contemporary art collection displayed in their country

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house, built in the late 1990s. Another gay male couple, “Ryan, 28, Gary, 27, Nashville, Tennessee, 2002” (74–5; no descriptive notes) is the object of a complex three-row composition against a white page: the first row presents two horizontal sky views; the second row is composed of Ryan with cowboy hat, a blank space, a wide view of the loft interior, Gary shirtless with cowboy hat, a city view, Ryan, and Gary shirtless; the third row presents two horizontal city views of different lengths. The composition emphasizes the stereotypical cowboy hats associated with Nashville’s country music culture and questions gender and sexual stereotypes associated to this culture. The maps on the wall and the city views anchoring the composition suggest that the couple has links to architecture or city planning. In both cases, decors and objects explicitly demonstrate the sitters’ class status and social position. Heterosexual families are also depicted, for example in “Radjinder (‘Dino’) and Judy, Frans and Marja, Kiefhoek, Rotterdam, Netherlands, 2004 (Building architect: J.J.P. Oud, 1930)” (46–7, with descriptive notes on 142), part of the third series photographed in the Netherlands. The composition depicts the boyfriend of the family’s daughter, the daughter, her father, the outside door of the house, her mother, the living room with a dog, and another point of view of the outside door. The exterior shots show the modernist character of the house, while the interior has been transformed with eclectic furnishings. Everyone is fully dressed in relaxed clothing. Another group of compositions show single men, often lightly dressed or naked. For example, “Tom, 42, with Tiger, Pines, Fire Island, 2003” (80–1; no descriptive notes) shows, against a white page, a three-panel symmetric composition composed of Tom in swim briefs with a dog (Tiger) in his arms, a pool, and a mirror image of Tom and his dog. Photographed on Fire Island, a popular gay and lesbian vacation destination, the composition focuses on the sitter’s body and on the pool. Another, “Peter, 48, New York City, 2002” (128–9 with long descriptive notes on 150) presents against a white page an inverted T-shaped composition with two central vertical photographs of Peter (naked on top, fully dressed in relaxed clothes on the bottom); the bottom image is flanked by two square mirror images of his 250 square feet studio living room, with Murphy bed closed on the left and open on the right. Peter is presented naked, with one leg up, in a pose less rigid than other sitters. The notes and the photos underline the stereotypical artist’s cramped apartment with traces of artistic production. While the sexual orientation of the sitters depicted in this group is not explicitly stated – their relationship status being single – readers can be lead to assume they are gay by contextualizing clues such as the Fire Island location – a gay

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vacation destination – or the genesis of the project in Robbins’s circles of friends and colleagues. Other compositions present groups of people who appear to be friends or roommates. For example, “Houseguests, Pines, Fire Island, 2003” (48–9; no descriptive notes) presents four young- and middle-aged-looking shirtless men in a linear composition: man, living room, man, exterior pool, man, living room from the other side, and man. Unlike other panels, this one does not give the sitters’ names and has no descriptive notes. The viewer thus has to create for themselves a story around the images, although a few visual hints and the context in which the photographs are presented helps, as with the previous group. For a start, it can easily be supposed that they are guests at a vacation house, but few other links can clearly be made between the men and the decor, since they are not regular occupants of the spaces. The combination, and its presence in the project, still suggests, however, that we might be able to create relations between the place chosen by these men for their vacation and themselves. Or is Robbins implying that the location is not important and that here we should just focus on their bodies? The book concludes with “Thanksgiving: Dad, 82, Mom, 77, 52 years, Torrington, Connecticut, 2002” (138–9, with notes on 151). Against a white page, Robbins presents a three-panel composition with his father and mother in winter clothes in the snow on each side of a photo of their living room. The composition presents their weekend condo bought in the 1990s. Robbins notes in the descriptive text that some furnishings were created by them and that the choices reflect his mother’s training in interior design. Interestingly, the range of people Robbins presents are in some ways not so different from the articles discussed by Urbach in 1992: “All white, all fortysomething, disproportionately male, professionally accomplished, these couples reflect – almost – the design industry’s image of the tasteful good life.”39 Ninety-six per cent of Robbins’s sitters are white and most are in their thirties, forties, and fifties; the youngest (excluding the children) is twenty-eight and the oldest, Robbins’s dad, is eighty-two. There appears to be diversity in the income level of the households represented, from students and artists to a doctor and a museum director, with a large number of architects in between – but all share class and culture traits linked to Robbins’s choice to photograph people in his circles. However, unlike the mainstream articles that Urbach describes, Robbins does not shy away from representing the bedrooms of gay couples, with nine out of the twenty gay couples shown with their beds; the only household that comprises two women is shown with an exterior landscape only. This focus on sexualized spaces could be potentially criticized for reinforcing stereotypes about homosexuality and promiscuity, 74

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but it simultaneously highlights how domesticity is linked to intimacy as well as underlines the taboo associated with queer intimacy. Robbins also states for many couples, both same-sex and heterosexual, the number of years they have been together, thus focusing on the relationships and their potential understandings in relation to the domestic environments depicted and, more generally, to stereotypes about queer relationships. Finding Narrative in Aesthetic Choices Robbins’s project is based on the depiction of “real” households. The observers assume that the sitters are being photographed with their respective living space. As they walk through the panels or browse through the book, they are invited to imagine the sitters’ history or lifestyle based on what they see and their own presuppositions. The people photographed often seem uncomfortable and vulnerable, as if they are not sure exactly how they will appear to the public eye or how their life story will become open to the imagination of the public. These stories can never, however, be fully guessed solely from the photographs, or even from the descriptive texts. The audience can only get the story “right” by coincidence. While the staged photographs make explicit this tension between privacy and publicity, Robbins implies in his accompanying essay that the same situation also happens in everyday living spaces, rendering all domestic spaces public: “The images in Households reflect the ways in which we make places and fashion ourselves.”40 Robbins’s decision to present the project in a “neutral” way – with the images and descriptive texts presented without any discussion – somehow muffles the critique implicit in Households: how are the images presented by Robbins unlike design magazines spreads? The unusual representation of the spaces’ users – naked, awkwardly posed, etc. – and the choice of domestic spaces represented – not all highly designed spaces for wealthy people as would usually be found in magazines – differentiate Robbins’s photographs, as does the limited discussion of the photographs and the careful montages that he designed. But his decisions render the panels no more neutral than the carefully edited features in home and design magazines. However, if the photographs are not accompanied by a subjective description as in magazines, they are also not accompanied by an implicit critique of the ways domestic spaces are assumed to be private, even if this critique is explicit in the accompanying essays in the monograph. Robbins present his project as a descriptive method. He supposedly leaves untouched the spaces photographed and thus records the sitters’ original choices in objects and spatial organization, even if they are indeed transformed through MARK ROBBINS DRAGS THE HOME INTO THE GALLERY

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Robbins’s staging, editing, and composition decisions. Robbins’s descriptive approach thus can more easily leave the critique ignored by the viewer. Compared to more humour-based approach or unexpected juxtapositions, such as Elmgreen & Dragset’s works discussed in the following chapter, that can have an eyeopening effect on viewers, Robbins does not set up a moment leading to a rethinking of a work’s first reading, as Robbins himself acknowledged in an interview with me. Robbins claims that his project builds on a certain humour that he sees in body types and furnishings choices,41 but this is not necessarily obvious to an outsider looking at Households. It could be argued that this is where Robbins’s project is less successful: at once too didactic in its approach and not explicit enough in its critique, it does not offer a clear entry point for an uninformed audience to understand Robbins’s critique. He is not the only artist to present works without explicitly stating his critique, obviously, but in his case, in part because of his background as a curator, public advocate, and educator, the intention of his critique is clear but does not come through in the photographic project alone. Robbins himself acknowledges this and claims that his works are often overdetermined because he wants to get his ideas across.42 While this leaves open potential critical readings of the work, it can also paradoxically frame the project as a simple photographic survey of domestic interiors. Robbins’s Households questions how domestic interiors relate to self-identifications and reveal to others about one’s life; it emphasizes sexual orientation without explicitly stating it, but also includes other elements of identity. These issues were already part of some early queer space discourse, in continuity with initial understandings of queer space as space specifically used by gay, lesbian, bisexual, or trans people. However, unlike these early projects and discussions, which often concentrated on shared spaces in which few objects or design decisions could be associated to a specific person and their self-identifications, by choosing domestic spaces as his subject of investigation Robbins’s project also broadens its focus and reaches to queer theory’s investigation of how other variables interplay into others’ perception of one’s identity. Through its approach based on objects and decors, Robbins hints at notions of taste and critiques of consumer culture – ideas that were already present in his project with Gianni for the Queer Space exhibition and that will be discussed more extensively in relation to Elmgreen & Dragset’s work in chapter 4.43 The question of how objects relate to understandings of architecture that Robbins bring to the table is critical. Often relegated to interior design – presented as a minor field to architecture’s major discipline – it ignores how people experience space every day. Houses and apartments are presented as neutral architectural containers, but Robbins high-

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lights the layering of meanings that emanate from spaces created by both designers and users. These openings also highlight how sexuality and gender are themselves associated closely to class and age but also to race. As Urbach already noted in 1992, the presence of gay (mostly male) couples in mainstream design magazines is intrinsically linked to associations between “good taste” and sexual orientation; such imagery also subtly reinforces links between whiteness, the upper classes, and the “good gay” image. While Robbins somehow evokes these assumptions by showing a diversity of households that do not necessarily correspond to stereotypes and associations between taste, wealth, and sexual orientation, the vast number of decors that correspond to these associations – linked to Robbins’s circles being mostly in design professions and academic careers – without being questioned or discussed can create further problematic connections. Robbins focuses on identity and visibility in his reading of how gender and sexual orientation intersect with the design and use of domestic spaces by highlighting how processes of commodification impact the way we make assumptions about people and their living spaces. By trying to question how we create these relations, he underlines the gendered and sexualized assumptions that the viewer has, without however explicitly questioning how these expectations about gender and sexual orientation were constructed to begin with. Robbins thus positions his project in a very different framework than queer theory’s questioning of categories: Robbins is interested in showing that there are no typical tastes or values associated to specific genders, sexual orientations, classes, races, or age groups, but he is not interested specifically in deconstructing these categories in this project. Households, in its photographic part, documents domestic spaces in a descriptive way without including explicit comments about the spaces, letting viewers focus on the aesthetics of the spaces and bodies depicted. The multiplication of interiors – and by extension of domestic aesthetics – is not presented as challenging design norms, but instead as depicting a diversity of aesthetics that challenge the association of well-kept domestic spaces with women and gay men. Robbins questions some of the assumptions popularly made about domesticity in the essay included in the monograph, but this text is outside the main work and supports rather than participates in the representation of the spaces. The images are a critique of traditional home representations in design magazines, but simultaneously use the same broad language; it is a project by an architect to be seen by architects or people knowledgeable of architectural and design conventions, limiting its audience and raising questions about the relative invisibility that critical exhibitions and publications about architecture experienced.

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Magazines such as Architectural Digest or Dwell reach wide audiences, but they contribute to reinforcing the assumptions and stereotypes that Robbins and others seek to challenge without having access to a similar audience. The following chapter will discuss how this could be made possible through the work of Elmgreen & Dragset, a duo of artists that have approached domestic spaces in a series of high-profile exhibitions in which they have invented characters and designs that overlay new meanings to the original architecture and highlight their queer-informed critiques.

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4 Perfect Homes/Queer Homes Elmgreen & Dragset Destruct(ure) the Domestic

Robbins’s Households works with representations of existing spaces but does not involve its audience physically. The case studies in this chapter – large-scale installations by Berlin- and London-based artists Michael Elmgreen (Danish, born 1961) and Ingar Dragset (Norwegian, born 1969) – expand Robbins’s twodimensional focus to propose three-dimensional experiences that transform existing spaces into imaginary domestic spaces exposed to the public view. I discuss a series of works, but the chapter focuses mainly on The Collectors, Elmgreen & Dragset’s transformation into imaginary domestic spaces of the Danish and Nordic Pavilions for the 2009 Venice Biennale, and Tomorrow, their 2013 exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, where they further develop the Venice ideas. Presented at the Art Biennale and in a decorative arts museum, but concerned with architecture and space, the installations question and critique assumptions about privacy and the public, domesticity and the institution, identity and built space, and art and architecture. Part of the latest stage in Elmgreen & Dragset’s career, these projects bring together interests in performance and space that have sustained much of their earlier works, but also add a focus on domesticity informed by broader social questions that had not been as explicitly present before. The juxtaposition and blurring of the limits between private and public acts or spaces helps the artists question what are assumed to be domestic spaces and confuse accepted symbols of domesticity by putting them out of context. Elmgreen & Dragset approach social questions with an ironic take that make their critiques more obvious than

Robbins’s. The chapter ends with a discussion of how these projects present a queer look at domesticity and an investigation of how the theoretical critiques developed by Elmgreen & Dragset have informed the transformation of their own house-studio. From Powerless Structures to the Welfare State: Elmgreen & Dragset and the Political Elmgreen & Dragset have been working together since the mid-1990s, and their contributions are increasingly discussed. A series of major exhibitions developed since 2005 (The Welfare Show [2005–06], The Collectors [2009], Celebrity – The One & the Many [2010–11], Biography [2014–15]), as well as high-profile public art commissions and programs (Powerless Structures, Fig. 101, The Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square [2012–13]; A Space Called Public/Hoffentlich Öffentlich, curated art program, Munich [2013]; etc.) have brought international interest to their collaborations.1 Their backgrounds, as well as discussions of their work, characterize them clearly as artists. They have, however, focused importantly from the beginning of their career on a critique of spatial structures that positions their work closely to architectural theory. Furthermore, because many of their works transform space on an architectural scale, they have been reviewed and discussed in architecture or design publications, such as Abitare, Domus, Canadian Architect, and the Architecture Now! book series.2 Elmgreen and Dragset started their careers with little formal art education. Dragset did some acting and mime training (in the Lecoq tradition) in theatre school and also worked as theatre instructor for children, while Elmgreen had some art training, wrote poetry, and had odd jobs as an interior decorator. A year after starting a romantic relationship in the mid-1990s,3 they decided that they could combine their experiences while Elmgreen was preparing a show in Stockholm. The work exhibited was supposed to be touched and hugged by the audience, but, as Dragset recounts, since “in Stockholm nobody feels relaxed at openings … we had to show the audience how to feel confident … and then everybody thought it was a performance – so it became our first performance … by coincidence.”4 From this early “coincidental” combination of visual art and performance, Elmgreen & Dragset developed a practice oscillating between those two poles, often performing themselves or hiring actors to play with the works they created, but also asking the audience to perform within transformed spaces. The projects studied here are the direct legacy of a series of solo exhibi-

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tions they began in 1997 that allowed them to develop increasingly complex pieces of fictional twisted architecture. From the beginning of their careers, Elmgreen & Dragset directly engaged issues of gender, sexuality, and class. Their initial use of performance – still present today but supplemented by transformations of built spaces, sculptures, videos, photos, etc. – developed in reaction to the perceived reception of their work and of their queer self-identifications and as a way to frame themselves within the Scandinavian art world. Their inexpensive performances and self-identifications as gay performers meant that they could be included in group shows early on. Their work later caught the attention of critics and was sometimes associated with curator Nicolas Bourriaud’s recently coined concept of relational aesthetics.5 As they moved to larger pieces engaging with space, Elmgreen & Dragset applied the same critiques to architecture and spatial structures that they understood as major instruments of societal control. Much discussion of their work has thus focused on their attempt to shape into built form their understanding of Michel Foucault’s interest in the mechanics of power and the ways order is maintained.6 Unlike other historians and philosophers developing understandings of space as a conceptual device, Foucault was interested in how the physicality of spaces impacts social relations, for example in how asylums, hospitals, and prisons distance and confine the Other, often in order to “reform” or “cure” them. Dragset summarizes their understanding of Foucault’s thinking by stating that “no structure has the power to suppress anyone, and that the term ‘power structure’ is misleading since no structure can impose authority in itself. It is only the acceptance of the structure that creates the notion of power. This means that any structure can be altered, interchanged, mutated, etc. ... and basically become something else.” They used this idea to group many of their works under the Powerless Structures umbrella, in reference to a working method where they “interchange structures.”7 Art historian Dorothea Von Hantelmann connects this idea with Henri Lefebvre’s thinking on the production of space8 when she argues that in Elmgreen & Dragset’s work “space is created by acts revealing it as an ephemeral, indeterminate construction.” Lefebvre is a French philosopher and sociologist who built a critique of modern everyday life based on a careful reading of space and the material environment. He developed an influential theory of the production of space in which he investigates how understandings and experiences of space are cultural and in evolution along three axes: perceived space (le perçu) of everyday life; conceived space (le conçu) from cartographers, planners, and speculators; and lived space (le vécu) of the imagination that balances the first two axes. For Hantelmann, Elmgreen & Dragset thus “exhibit and stage artistic and social

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ideas of production set in a performative relationship to each other – and that is where the politically interesting aspect of these works lie – a relationship that can constantly be reconfigured without being entirely controllable … Objectified in a mise en scène, they also embody a classical social, heterosexually standardized model of production.”9 In addition to being explicitly concerned with the relation of sexuality and space, it is in this interest in the performativity of space that their work resembles, while problematizing them, discussions of queer space presented earlier. The Powerless Structures works twist common objects or references into nonfunctional elements, for example through doors that cannot be opened (Figure 4.1) or in a performance where white paint is repeatedly washed off (Figure 4.2).10 In these works, Elmgreen & Dragset used a formal vocabulary – white, minimalist, modernist – that also echoes their interest in understanding and deconstructing the modernist white cube of the art gallery, most specifically in relation to artist and critic Brian O’Doherty’s theorization of this space.11 Elmgreen affirms that in their work “the white cube gets queered.”12 This is a self-conscious attempt to demonstrate that it is not a neutral space, but that it is sexualized, gendered, classed, and racialized. For example, as Von Hantelmann discusses, their Cruising Pavilion/Powerless Structures, Fig. 55, first built in the Marselisborg Forest (1998) and then in Mindeparken (2017), both in Århus, Denmark (Figure 4.3),13 is a paradigmatic example of their attempt to present a complex interrelationship between space, time, and action. The pavilion, a white cube with a single open doorframe and glory holes in its interior walls, sits in a park setting used at night by homosexual men for cruising. An attempt to bring underground networks into public view, it deliberately creates a space to legally pursue cruising activities in a privatized space owned by the artists and their gallery and thus protected from police harassment. Cruising Pavilion also gives Elmgreen & Dragset an opportunity to queer the use of Scandinavian functionalist design codes, associated with efficiency, simplicity, cleanliness, and the domestic environment in daily life, to create a “welcoming” gay sex venue, a space of non-functional pleasure.14 The clean lines associated with functionalist designs are present, but they are punctuated by circular holes dedicated to sex. Furthermore, the pavilion’s white colour and geometrical form jars in the natural setting of the park. The pavilion thus loudly recodes the meanings associated with the park, from a publicly coded site, a family park, into a performative space bringing into the public view acts usually thought of as private. Because they are presented as art, Von Hantelmann argues that the activities taking place in the pavilion are simultaneously “real and staged.” Building on

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Figure 4.1 Elmgreen & Dragset. Powerless Structures, Fig. 122 (Two Doors), 2000; Powerless Structures, Fig. 123 (One Door Two Handles), 2000; Powerless Structures, Fig. 129 (Corner Door), 2000; Powerless Structures, Fig. 133 (Triple Door), 2002.

Figure 4.2 Elmgreen & Dragset. Powerless Structures, Fig. 44, 1998.

Figure 4.3 Elmgreen & Dragset. Cruising Pavilion/Powerless Structures, Fig. 55, 1998, Marselisborg Forest, Århus (bottom) and 2017, Mindeparken, Århus (top).

Foucault, the artists raise questions about how space is both produced and appropriated by physical actions and how political power relations materialize in the process.15 The pavilion’s visibility in daytime also underlines the presence of ephemeral nighttime activities, the status of the park as “queer space.”16 By doing so, Elmgreen & Dragset are trying to invert gay men’s creation of subcultural spaces within heterosexual planning: daytime activities, such as family picnics, are reframed as subcultural activities in relation to the cruising pavilion, while sexual cruising activities, usually invisible during the day and discreet at night, are now officially sanctioned and made visible by a publicly commissioned building.17 But, as Lars Bang Larsen argues, in the pavilion more conservative understandings of queer space are also “being queered; the codes and routines that hold it together as a cultural arrangement are worn thin … To find yourself in Elmgreen and Dragset’s displaced ambiences is to feel the pull of your identity, whether you are straight or gay … On one hand, there is the suggestion of a fading ‘we’ that refers to the loneliness of violently separated identities; on the other hand, the sense of a failure to condense things into a representational logic that can speak for the coherence and relevance of group identity. Space is collapsed via insertions that slice through the membranes of public, semi-public and mental spaces, destabilising their physical and ideological walls.”18 In the pavilion Elmgreen & Dragset engage with public space, but they also bring forward similar questions about the boundaries between public and private acts and spaces to the ones developed later more specifically in projects dealing with domestic spaces. As Elmgreen & Dragset’s practice evolved towards larger and more complex works, they also moved away from the white-coloured minimalism of their earlier projects towards an increasing messiness. This move paralleled a realignment from social critiques focused on art institutions settings towards a broader questioning of how contemporary society deals with – or even acknowledges – social and political issues. Whereas early works highlighted how the art gallery’s space was itself shaped by gender, sex, class, or race, later works are part of a complex scenography that intersects imagined and real lives, art and institution, the political and the domestic, etc. even if they are sometimes set in art-related spaces (such as collector’s houses or museum galleries). For example, their large-scale exhibition The Welfare Show, presented in different iterations at the Bergen Kunsthall in Norway (2005), the bawag Foundation in Vienna (2005), the Serpentine Gallery in London (2006), and the Power Plant in Toronto (2006), is set in fictional institutional settings (administration offices, television talk show, hospital,

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museum, airport, etc.) where everyday situations are twisted and rendered inefficient and powerless.19 The artificiality of these set pieces positions viewers outside of the works even as they walk through them, making explicit their position as spectators that need to question what they see. The first in a series of largescale exhibitions, The Welfare Show focuses on a critique of the welfare state and its institutions. One of the duo’s most explicitly political projects in terms of developing a critique of public policy, it has prompted Dragset to reflect: “I don’t even know if Michael and I actually see ourselves as political artists, but we definitively see ourselves as political human beings, and, in that respect, it has been important to deal with some of the issues raised in The Welfare Show.”20 If issues of class and economy take centre stage in this project, Elmgreen & Dragset also keep underlining how sexuality and gender are constructed by power and space, themes that figure prominently in their catalogue for the show, a binder alphabetically organized with files discussing topics such as adoption, the Canadian Pension Plan, death, gentrification, homosexual rights, justice, marriage, patriotism, public space, tourism, unemployment, and xenophobia.21 While initially conceived as an independent exhibition, The Welfare Show was retroactively thematically linked through a common catalogue titled Trilogy with two other large-scale exhibitions: The Collectors (2009), at the Venice Biennale; and Celebrity – The One & the Many (2010–11) at the zkm in Karlsruhe, remodeled as The One & the Many (2011) at the Submarine Wharf in Rotterdam.22 These two exhibitions complement the institutional settings of the first project by investigating the domestic and the intimate and will be discussed in more detail in the following section. Peter Weibel and Andreas F. Beitin, respectively chairman and curator of the zkm, note that “when taken together, [the three exhibitions] represent an attempt to map out in a unique manner some of the key changes in Western culture over the initial ten years of the twenty-first century … Elmgreen & Dragset’s triptych of thematic shows is not a sociological fact sheet of such tendencies, but an uncanny depiction of the current cultural climate as seen from a personalized perspective.” Among many themes, they underline that the artists point out how “the hybrid and exceptional constitution of identity and, by extension, our behavioral patterns, have recently become far more complex and confused.”23 All three exhibitions build on earlier Elmgreen & Dragset works as they dramatically alter the spatial frame of the exhibition venue. In contrast to earlier works that often concentrated on rebuilding an art gallery space or creating single-room installations,24 the Trilogy projects broaden the scope of the reconstructions to reimagine everyday multi-room spaces in a gallery context.

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Inventing a Private Life: Elmgreen & Dragset and the Domestic The trilogy of large-scale installations developed by Elmgreen & Dragset since 2005 (The Welfare Show, The Collectors, and Celebrity – The One & the Many) continues their interest in social issues, developed initially in the Powerless Structures works. The Collectors and The One & the Many challenge common understandings of domesticity by transforming art spaces into fictitious domestic spaces, accessible by visitors through mediated experiences. Elmgreen & Dragset’s approach to domesticity builds on works dealing with their personal lives. Their eagerness to expose their private lives underlines the importance of identification and biography in their work, as demonstrated by the title of some of their works or monographs, such as The Incidental Self (used twice, to title both a work composed of between 500 and 1000 snapshots of the artists or their friends [2006] and a special artist-curated supplement to ArtReview [2008] that includes some of these snapshots and other autobiographical texts) or This is the First Day of my Life (2007–08, retrospective exhibition and publication).25 Both of these works presage Elmgreen & Dragset’s interest in the domestic that will appear in The Collectors, The One & the Many, and other later works, but they do so by using material from their own lives whereas the following works will be constructed around invented characters. The autobiographical works appeared as they were ending their personal relationship, which had until then explicitly shaped their career. Elmgreen & Dragset themselves participated in building up the importance of their personal lives in numerous interviews, for example by highlighting that they had limited formal artistic training; describing themselves as being outside of every discipline; or sharing the story that they originally became a romantic couple after meeting in a bar, unaware that they lived in the same apartment building.26 When questioned about this, however, they insist that their works, despite being built around photographs and artifacts from their own lives, are no more autobiographical than the works built around imagined characters.27 The control exercised by the artists over the selection and presentation of the artifacts displayed make these projects as far from (or near to) the “reality” of their lives as they want them to be. In Households, Robbins described his project as being based on the sitters chosing carefully how they wanted to be photographed. He consequently chose to limit his discussion of how both the construction of the photographs and the selection of background objects and decor were also carefully thought; in contrast, Elmgreen & Dragset clearly state and acknowledge that these art projects are constructions

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Figure 4.4 Elmgreen & Dragset. How Are You Today, 2002, Galleria Massimo de Carlo.

that comment on how one decides to present oneself. However, the limit between fiction and reality in their work is left blurry, mirroring the continuum between public and private that is underlined by queer critiques. In addition to those photographic works, Elmgreen & Dragset also started investigating domesticity in How Are You Today (2002), a project in which they cut out a hole in the ceiling of Galleria Massimo de Carlo in Milan to open the room to the apartment above. Visitors to the gallery could climb a ladder and watch the everyday occupations going on in the private apartment above through a transparent dome (Figure 4.4). The project is at once in continuity with earlier work, transforming or building gallery spaces that moved away from understanding the gallery as a neutral container for art, and in rupture, as it leaves aside the white cube of the gallery to invade a domestic space. Later installations will fully merge the public and the private, but here the two are only linked by a limited opening that apparently acts as a window, but also as a limit between them. However, as with Robbins’s Households, although the initial impression is of an outsider’s view towards the uninterrupted daily activities, the dweller is clearly aware that she is being watched. The unusual position of the viewing dome, in the middle of the kitchen’s floor, further underlines the constructedness of the situation. In this project, Elmgreen & Dragset seem to insist less on the social structures that regulate and organize spaces, but the positioning of the dome in the kitchen also links the project to feminist discussions of domestic work in the separate spheres model. Overall, How Are You Today is one of the earliest attempts from Elmgreen & Dragset to question relations between private and public in a domestic setting. 88

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The One & the Many

If How Are You Today was still attached to a real-life setting, although limited by the awareness of the dweller being watched, Elmgreen & Dragset’s later largescale works add narratives about fictitious characters to their investigation of domesticity that underline the artificiality and constructedness of the works, but also put more emphasis on the issues raised through the use of humour. In The One & the Many, Elmgreen & Dragset insert a 9 x 12 metre replica of a fourstorey (nearly 11 metre) Plattenbau – an industrially prefabricated Cold War socialist apartment building – into an exhibition space.28 As in How Are You Today, in this project there is a barrier created between domestic spaces and the gallery space as visitors can only get a look at the empty apartment interiors from the outside, through the windows (Figure 4.5). These apartments are almost all empty, with only one occupied by a visible human figure, a mannequin of a gay teenager (a reinstallation of a work from 2007, Virtual Romeo [Figure 4.6]). Other spaces seem to have been vacated only moments ago, with their occupants maybe in another neighbouring room: televisions are on, empty beer bottles and cigarettes packs are left on the tables, newspapers are open.

Figure 4.5 Elmgreen & Dragset. Celebrity – The One & the Many, 2010–11, ZKM.

Figure 4.6 Elmgreen & Dragset. Virtual Romeo. Photo from original installation in This Is the First Day of My Life, 2007, Malmö Kunsthall.

The One & the Many was staged in two contrasting contexts that underlined different questions.29 At zkm | Museum of Contemporary Art in Karlsruhe (11 Nov 2010–27 Mar 2011), the work was exhibited in tandem with Celebrity, a large, empty ballroom inhabited by golden sculptures of maids, a performing security guard dressed in a butler’s uniform, a sculpture of a young boy hiding in a fireplace (a younger version of a character from The Collectors), and a video projection with sound depicting a reception behind translucent doors. The focus on the cult of celebrity in relation to the everyday life of working people in this initial installation disappeared in the subsequent incarnation of the The One & the Many at the Submarine Wharf in Rotterdam, presented by the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (28 May–25 Sept 2011). In this second iteration, Elmgreen & Dragset transformed the 5000 m2 cavernous industrial space of a former submarine factory into a run-down urban neighbourhood, as a commentary on the plans to use the Submarine Wharf as a gateway to the transformation of the old industrial harbour into a posh cultural district. The original exhibition in Kalsruhe focused on the juxtaposition of the cultural intelligentsia and working90

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class housing present in the city. In Rotterdam, the artists instead reflect on the disappearance of public space prompted by people being afraid of going out at night.30 In addition to the public housing building brought over from the zkm version of the exhibition, the exhibition thus includes a parking lot with (live actor) mechanics working on a white limo, public toilets, a large neon sign stating “the one & the many,” a functioning Ferris wheel allowing views into the apartments, and actors (without scripts) playing a teenage single mum, two male hustlers, and a street musician. In both settings, The One & the Many represents an investigation of how identities are constructed in relation to social and physical contexts. If Elmgreen & Dragset use their usual trope of transforming the public gallery space into something else – here, private domestic spaces – The One & the Many is not as explicitly a questioning of the relation between private and public as The Collectors is, as will be discussed in the following section. The boundary between the apartments and the visitor spaces created by the distance limits the mixing up of both environments, although the visitors are encouraged to question the control we have over our domestic environments through their peeking at the diverse environments, trying to guess the story of each dweller, as was the case in Households. The Collectors

In the earlier The Collectors (7 June–22 November 2009), Elmgreen & Dragset transform the Venice Biennale Danish and Nordic pavilions into two houses. Both the Danish and Nordic art agencies were interested at the same time in having Elmgreen & Dragset work on their exhibit; the project is the first time the two agencies collaborated on curating their national pavilions. The project unusually positions Elmgreen & Dragset as combining the roles of artists, curators, interior designers, industrial designers, and directors. This expands on earlier projects where they invited other artists, often younger ones outside the institutionalized art world, to collaborate. The multiple roles assumed by Elmgreen & Dragset continue their career-long critical experimentations with disciplinary divisions, but also reflects the complexity that comes with the expanded scale of their recent projects. The choice of artists who were invited to collaborate on the project is shaped by the differing missions of the agencies, with the Danish team being more open to international artists.31 Elmgreen & Dragset decided to develop these domestic reconversions when they initially visited the two pavilions and experienced a feeling of walking through a residential posh neighbourhood.32 They worked from the existing spaces, using unique design characteristics to shape life stories for the two households, transforming the empty rooms to reflect their own understanding of what ELMGREEN & DRAGSET DESTRUCT(URE) THE DOMESTIC

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is domestic.33 The two houses exhibit contrasting spatial organizations, as if designed for two very different households, one a traditional, albeit dysfunctional, family, the A Family, and one a bachelor, Mr B.34 The family house has more traditional room divisions (Figure 4.7), including a large dining room with a broken table (Figure 4.8; #21c on the plan in Figure 4.7), a kitchen with overflowing porcelain (#19), an abandoned living room with covered furniture and a video playing on the television (#20), a larger living room with an inaccessible mezzanine (#30c), and a room left burnt down by the teenage girl (#32). The bachelor inhabits one large open space (Figure 4.9) organized around a central glazed bathroom (#8 in Figure 4.10). In the first house, only the father – an architect – and the “troubled” rebel goth teenage daughter characters are suggested and sketched through the accompanying texts in the catalogue or in the works exhibited; the rest of the family is not described. On the bachelor side, some of the artifacts exhibited, for example naked men lounging in the space (Figure 4.11) and gay erotic drawings and pornographic videos, strongly suggest to visitors that the bachelor is gay. These signs are supported in the catalogue by a letter from the “dead” bachelor written by artist Dominic Eichler following cues from Elmgreen & Dragset and describing Mr B’s vision of how his own house tells a story about his life.35 Both the family and the bachelor are imagined as collectors, of art but also of unique objects such as porcelains, insects, etc. In their choice of designing the two houses for collectors, Elmgreen & Dragset respond to the Biennale’s context of an art exhibition, but also comment on the idea that collecting art is today reduced to a financial investment instead of being understood as a way of expressing what one’s tastes are – although being able to make this financial investment is itself a sign of one’s identity and cultural capital. They also highlight how collectors have kept and saved things written out of art history, for example art produced by minority groups.36 This is done partly by integrating in the two pavilions objects and artworks that would rarely be in art exhibitions, for example signs made by homeless people, but also through some of the works “collected” by Mr B, for example the erotic drawings by Tom of Finland (Figure 4.12) about which Mr B comments (in the Eichler-written fictional letter already mentioned): “I

Figures 4.7 and 4.8 (opposite) Elmgreen & Dragset. The Collectors, 2009. Danish Pavilion plan (top) and interior (bottom), 53rd Venice Art Biennale. Figures 4.9 and 4.10 (following page) Elmgreen & Dragset. The Collectors, 2009. Nordic Pavilion, inteior (top) and plan (bottom), 53rd Venice Art Biennale.

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Figure 4.11 Elmgreen & Dragset. “Untitled (Home Is the Place You Left)” in The Collectors, 2009, Nordic Pavilion, 53rd Venice Art Biennale.

Figure 4.12 Elmgreen & Dragset. The Collectors, 2009 (with Tom of Finland. Untitled, 1979; Tearoom Odyssey, c. 1968; Black Magic, 1984; No Swimming, from the AMG Series, 1965; The Loggers, from the AMG Series, 1974; David, a Beauty, 1989; Tom’s David, 1981), Nordic Pavilion, 53rd Venice Art Biennale.

wonder if others like them will finally find homes in more serious museums, or if it is still left to people like me to treasure them?”37 While the invented apartments in The One & the Many can only be seen from a distance, in The Collectors, visitors are guided through the family house by real estate agents, played by British performance artists Cocoloco (Helen Statman and Trevor Stuart), in charge of selling the house after the family has abruptly left (Figure 4.13).38 The presence of the “For Sale” sign outside is surprising, and announces the project in the Biennale’s international art fair context (Figure 4.14). Combined with an overstuffed mailbox and the state of abandonment of the house, it suggests that “it is as if the family is ready to explode, implode or extinguish itself, and to some extent they already have,” as Jacob Fabricius states 96

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Figure 4.13 Elmgreen & Dragset with script by Trevor Stuart. Real Estate Agents, 2009, Danish Pavilion, 53rd Venice Art Biennale.

in his text for the Bagalogue’s calendar distributed to visitors.39 But no clear explanation is given, only potential stories left to the visitor to make up from the signs left in the house. The fake realtors, working from a script written by Trevor Stuart with cues from the artists, describe the architecture of the house in terms such as: “This marvelous house was designed in 1930 by Carl Brummer. It’s in the neo-classical style at the rear, with some delightful late modern extensions by another Danish architect,” and comment on the inhabitants, stating that ELMGREEN & DRAGSET DESTRUCT(URE) THE DOMESTIC

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Figure 4.14 Elmgreen & Dragset. The Collectors, 2009, Danish Pavilion, 53rd Venice Art Biennale.

“The teenager who lived here was a bit crazy as teenagers tend to be, so please disregard the rather Gothic nature of the room.”40 The realtors also highlight how the collections exhibited relate to the owner’s love of order which, according to them, comes from his profession as architect. However, these collections, such as the porcelains (borrowed from gallerist Massimo De Carlo), are presented to the visitors mixed up and chaotic, echoing the descent into excess and dysfunctionality of the family. Visitors are then invited to enter the neighbouring bachelor pad which is occupied by partially undressed and naked young male actors (also working as security guards for the exhibition) playing the bachelor’s guests/lovers (Figure 4.11). Like the works of art collected by Mr B, they are left over after his disappearance. Whereas in the Nordic pavilion, actors pretending to be real estate agents are presented as outsiders discussing their own understandings of the house and thus suggesting a particular reading inspired by the artists’ vision of the work, in the Danish pavilion, the undressed men do not vocally express anything about the work, but instead become a living part of the decor, fused with

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Figure 4.15 Elmgreen & Dragset. “Death of a Collector,” from The Collectors, 2009, Nordic Pavilion, 53rd Venice Art Biennale.

the furniture collected (and abandoned) by the absent owner. The use of the naked reading men as one of the emblematic images distributed to the press to promote the project further underlines the importance of the relation between the body and space in the artists’ proposal. The tour ends at an outdoor pool where a mannequin, representing Mr B, floats face down, contributing another emblematic image for the project; like other examples in Elmgreen & Dragset’s works, including the Bergman table displayed in the A Family house, the mannequin references cinematic sources, this time the opening scene of the classic film noir Sunset Boulevard (1950) (Figure 4.15).41 By offering visits of apparently lived-in spaces, in an international art fair context, Elmgreen & Dragset question common assumptions about private space by confusing accepted symbols of domesticity, by recontextualizing viewers, and by blurring the usual limits and barriers between private and public acts and spaces. In their projects, in a similar way to Robbins’s Households, the visitor is invited to discover decontextualized domestic spaces in the physical absence of their inhabitants, although here the spaces are three-dimensional and completely

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imagined. Whereas in Robbins’s project the assumed privacy of the domestic is exposed into the public space of the gallery, here the public domain of art pavilions is transformed into spaces not usually available for visits, private spaces. The visitor is suddenly transported into a domestic space when walking through an exhibition space. In The One & the Many, visitors view the intimate environments of the dwellers from a distance, through the windows, as if they were peeping into still-occupied apartments. In a return to the earlier performance work of Elmgreen & Dragset, in The Collectors, the relation between viewer and space is more ambiguous; participants are guided through the spaces as if they were prospective buyers, but the houses are not empty and clean spaces ready for visits but rather messy, still-occupied rooms where the presence of the owners is visible. Participants also experience the two houses with all their senses: hearing the descriptions and ambient noises, smelling the other visitors’ odours, touching the furniture, etc. The installation thus transforms the visitors from observers to participants and suggests that they can do more than analyze the representation of space. They are not only looking at a domestic space, but walking through it, sensorially experiencing it. But these experiences are queered by the numerous other visitors visiting the space simultaneously: the normally lonely investigation of a house for sale is reframed as a collective discovery. The public gallery transformed into a private house is thus experienced also as a public exhibition. This is where the project gains its major strength: even if probably all visitors know that these spaces are not usually domestic spaces, they nonetheless express domesticity and question our relation to both domestic and institutional spaces, blurring limits between constructed and spaces. This uncertainty – and its impact on viewers’ reception and on the effectiveness of the critiques brought forward by the artists – would be pushed even further in a follow-up project at the Victoria & Albert Museum (v&a), discussed in the next section. Unlike Robbins, Elmgreen & Dragset choose to represent space in three dimensions. Although the fictitious inhabitants are not present, the artists paradoxically insist on leaving traces of the absent users to help visitors understand the spaces. This is also acknowledged in the letter left by Mr B: “It’s annoying, but there is so much of ourselves in objects – however you look at them … It’s a funny thought to me when I think that I am being made public in a manner I didn’t anticipate – although people with means and of my age do tend to make houses implicitly public.”42 Furnishings and room designs are described by the actor-agents as being selected or “collected,” as the name of the installation implies, by the art collectors who own and used to live in these spaces. Carefully designed by Elmgreen & Dragset and collaborators, the objects fictitiously col-

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lected by the absent inhabitants are almost all slightly off, impossible to use even if they look at first glance like functional objects, underlining the constructedness of the space. Some of the objects replicate as miniature versions the overall form of the houses-pavilions, some cannot be used for what they appear to be designed for, and some are broken. For example, in the Danish Pavilion, “Nina Saunders’ collapsed furniture sculptures are everything but welcoming; her Chesterfield style armchair [Delicate Landscape (2009)] seems to have melted or maybe swallowed up whoever was last sitting on it,”43 while Martin Jacobson’s Urn I & II (2008) appear from afar as if regular vases, but up close are revealed to be broken, all shards and glue. Massimo Bartolini’s Black Floor (2009) raises the garden floor fifty-three centimetres without having moved the garden furniture, rendering the garden completely dysfunctional. In the Nordic Pavilion, Han & Him’s Butterflies (2009) exhibit a collection of swimwear behind a glass as if Mr B considered his former lovers as prized insects carefully preserved, Simon Fujiwara’s Desk Job (2009) replicates the design of the pavilion in miniature form as a desk (Figure 4.16), Elmgreen & Dragset’s Marriage (2004) renders the bathroom’s sinks useless as they twist and connect their plumbing, and Nina Saunders’s unusable furniture is again featured with Payload (2009) (Figure 4.16). Despite the strangeness of the spaces and objects within, the installations invite visitors to imagine how life in these dwellings could be and what values the inhabitants share. The artists underline the need to imagine a relation between dwellers and their environment, to assume an adequacy between them, echoing Robbins’s Households. By doing so, Elmgren & Dragset also suggest that exposing one’s “private” domestic space, and its presumed meanings, to an outsider has impacts, without, however, explicitly describing them. Once again, Mr B’s letter expresses this idea: “It strikes me as flattering but absurd that my Italian summerhouse is on display to you as art … I imagine you strutting in and looking around at the things gathered there in lieu of me.”44 The installations and focus on collecting in the project title suggest that it is possible to understand one’s identity from its belongings, but also that people are themselves items in someone else’s collection, not living their lives in assumed privacy, but part of a public social network or value system. The disconnection between the realism of the visiting experience and the ironic construction of the spaces create an opportunity to question what is being seen; the art biennale context, the absence of the fictitious inhabitants, and the strangeness of the furniture and spatial organization create a shift towards a more analytical view of the project. Visitors are thus forced to reconcile contradictory understandings, to analyze their emotional responses to these spaces emerging from their sensory memories

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Figure 4.16 Elmgreen & Dragset. The Collectors, 2009 (with Simon Fujiwara. Desk Job, 2009 [above], and Nina Saunders. Payload, 2009 [opposite]), Nordic Pavilion, 53rd Venice Art Biennale.

and usual understandings of domestic spaces but disturbed by unexpected objects and juxtapositions, and to challenge presuppositions about domestic space. In Robbins’s Households, visitors walk through full-scale images of domestic spaces. The photographic reproductions position them as observers, outside of the spaces, and force them to look at them from a distance, as images to be analyzed and reflected upon. Unlike Households’s more neutral presentation, the visitors’ imagination is guided in Venice by Elmgreen & Dragset’s characters, invention, and design decisions, as passed on through the real estate agents’ description. The exaggeration of the objects highlights the constructedness of domestic spaces, but simultaneously offers entry points for storytelling, implying that humans always try to guess life stories based on one’s possessions. Tomorrow and Past Tomorrow

Following The Collectors, Elmgreen & Dragset were invited by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London to stage a follow-up exhibition that would, like the Venice project, combine their works with curated pieces, this time artifacts from the v&a collection and objects found in garage sale, antiquaries, and flea markets.45 Rejecting the initial offer from the v&a to use their black-box contemporary galleries, which Elmgreen & Dragset considered too bland, they settled on the former textile galleries, abandoned for some years in preparation for longdelayed renovations, because of what they saw as a decidedly domestic atmosphere. The exhibition is conceived as an extension of the Trilogy although, in the words of Elmgreen, “this time … we have allowed ourselves to be less thematic. There are a lot of different themes.”46 Tomorrow (1 Oct 2013– 2 Jan 2014) brings together in a domestic setting themes from the previous exhibitions, as if to say that the home is the place where everything converges, where public and private personas are revealed. The exhibition thus addresses how the domestic is enmeshed with obvious issues such as sexuality, class, and age, but also with broader questions such as national identity, spectatorship, and museum culture. It also fits within a trajectory of projects that have since the 1990s intervened in museum collections to question curatorial practices and the different histories that are staged by museums and galleries, such as Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum (1992) at the Maryland Historical Society, Mark Dion’s projects, or Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska’s collaborations as chanceprojects (1995– 2008).47 Elmgreen & Dragset themselves had already staged installations or performances that attempted to understand anew museum and gallery collections and architectural spaces, for example the mock historical tour of London’s Tate Modern in 2004 (with performance artist and actor Trevor Stuart, who was also involved in the tours for The Collectors), discussing the industrial past of the 104

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former power station and particularly the human part of that history. The work was part of a series of displays titled Untitled: The Public World of the Private Space, which considered “the human condition in public and private environments, and in particular, the representation of space in these spheres.”48 Tomorrow transforms five exhibition rooms into the posh upper-class flat of Norman Swann, a sick, retired, and broke architect, on the night before his former protégé, Daniel Wilder, takes ownership of the space. Unlike their previous works, the physical transformations undertaken by Elmgreen & Dragset at the v&a are fairly simple: apart from a new kitchen and two temporary walls added to a room (to create a corridor and two inaccessible rooms, a bathroom and a guest room), they left the spaces almost as they found them, including humidity stains on some walls. The rooms are located on the third floor of the museum, in a remote corner (Figure 4.17); indications replicating “for sale” signs are positioned outside and throughout the museum to announce the exhibition (Figure 4.18). To access the apartment, visitors first walk through a long grand tapestry gallery where are hung the Devonshire Hunting Tapestries. Ironically, the v&a acquired the tapestries in 1957 as a donation in lieu of tax by a broke aristocrat, recalling the story invented for Swann by Elmgreen & Dragset.49 Visitors then enter the Tomorrow apartment through a glass door opening in a hall where they can pick up a copy of a script, worked up with professional playwright Leo Butler,50 setting up in a few scenes the story of Norman and Daniel’s evening.51 Visitors are then invited by gallery assistants dressed as butlers and maids – and asked by the artists to talk as if they were domestic workers – to visit a combined living and dining room, walk through the corridor, peek through the bathroom keyhole where the sound of a shower running can be heard, look at Norman’s papers in his study, or stumble on the empty pizza boxes on the floor of the newly renovated kitchen, before finally reaching the dark bedroom where a piano sits (Figure 4.19). Throughout, objects are displayed as they would be in a regular apartment, as if accumulated and collected by Norman during his life. All rooms are furnished with a selection of artworks by Elmgreen & Dragset, with most of them created for previous exhibitions and recontextualized here, such as the broken table from The Collectors or the fireplace and boy portrait from Celebrity. These works are complemented with approximately a hundred artifacts from the museum’s collections, as well as objects the artists found all over the world. Apart from the museum objects and some of Elmgreen & Dragset, works, in most cases carefully placed out of reach of visitors, everything else can be touched: visitors can sit on the couches, play the piano, or read the books and magazines left all over the apartment. If visitors get too close to one of the objects that cannot be manipulated or try to take photographs, the gallery ELMGREEN & DRAGSET DESTRUCT(URE) THE DOMESTIC

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Figure 4.17 Floor map of Level 3 (Tomorrow exhibition in rooms 95–9), Victoria & Albert Museum.

Figure 4.18 Elmgreen & Dragset. Tomorrow, 2013, Victoria & Albert Museum.

Figure 4.19 Elmgreen & Dragset. Tomorrow, plan, 2013, Victoria & Albert Museum.

assistants, in character as butlers or maids, calmly ask them to respect Mr Swann’s privacy. Most visitors interact with the installation, often sitting down to read the script or discuss with a friend the imagined life of Norman. For Elmgreen, Tomorrow can absolutely be viewed without reading the script. It just adds one element; if you want to make your own story from looking at the objects, you can. And if you sit on the couch and take a book from the bookshelf, another viewer can look at you and suddenly you’re an actor. We’ve made the exhibition like a film set: we always envied film-makers such as Ingmar Bergman or Michael Haneke for their ability to describe something wider, like cultural tendencies, by showing one life, the failure in just one life. So what you can see are all the traces of a life that didn’t turn out the way he, Norman, expected it … It’s a bit of a crazyman’s study, filled up with dreams and desires. There are unpaid bills, old love letters, passports, travel tickets and other fabrications; there’s a leak from the ceiling dripping down into a bucket. Lots of things – you can spend ten minutes in it, or three hours.52 Typical of Elmgreen & Dragset’s work, some of the elements that appear familiar at first take more complicated meanings upon closer observation or when taking into consideration their position in relation to others, as reviewer Shumi Bose notes: “The stage-set suite is extremely evocative. The carefully considered placement of creature comforts holds a sense of the uncanny; a space in which to read a life lived almost to the end, through subtle clues of inhabitation. These intimate cues have been arranged with meticulous attention to detail, planting back-dated postcards, archival copies of architecture periodicals and collected objets d’art.”53 The sculpture of a vulture perched on the bed (Figure 4.20) –

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golden, like the sculpture of a maid standing in the corridor that was already present in The Collectors and Celebrity – and the broken table (Figure 4.21) are examples of this, but other smaller details, such as a small model of Elmgreen & Dragset’s Powerless Structures, Fig. 101 that stood on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth from February 2012 to April 2013 or a cigar holder found by the artists in a sale that echoes High Expectations, a sculpture of Mr B as a small boy in the fireplace (Figure 4.22), also attract attention and link the domestic narrative to other networks of sociality. As one reviewer remarks, “Fragments of Elmgreen & Dragset’s recognisable back catalogue lurk among the period replicas and artifacts borrowed from the v&a. Motifs from the artists’ greatest hits almost blend in, but for their deliberate exaggerations, giving themselves away with a bluffer’s whistle … In Brechtian fashion, these echoes jar the visitor from a total suspension of disbelief. In effect, the fragments of Elmgreen & Dragset’s previous works assume personalities and narratives themselves; friends who show up from time to time, but with different stories to tell.”54 While these references are not legible to every visitor – the model of the apartment building from The One & the Many is for example probably not recognized by most – the high visibility of Powerless Structures, Fig. 10155 in London suggests that many Londoners could link the smaller model to their recent experience of the city. Those familiar with Elmgreen & Dragset might also associate the table (Figure 4.21) with The Collectors’ A Family or the boy in the fireplace (Figure 4.22) with the younger version of The Collectors’ Mr B presented in Celebrity and The Afterlife of the Mysterious Mr B (2011, Galerie Perrotin, Paris). In Tomorrow, the sculpture of the boy in the fireplace could be interpreted as a portrait of Norman Swann56 as a young boy, while the A Family’s table is his. By doing this, once again the artists insist on the idea that changing combinations of objects, space, and context creates different stories and that, if these stories can be made explicit, for example through a script, they can also be left to the imagination of the viewers as would be the case in a real apartment. As Louise Shannon, the v&a curator working on the exhibition with Elmgreen & Dragset, noted during the exhibition’s preparation: “In their work, people are the uninvited visitors. [Elmgreen & Dragset] use objects to weave spectacular narratives around things that may

Figure 4.20 (top) Elmgreen & Dragset. Tomorrow, 2013 (with Omnes une manet nox (The Same Night Awaits Us All), bed for Louis Vuitton, 2012), Victoria & Albert Museum. Figure 4.21 (bottom) Elmgreen & Dragset. Tomorrow, 2013 (with Table for Bergman, 2009), Victoria & Albert Museum.

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Figure 4.22 Elmgreen & Dragset. Tomorrow, 2013 (with model for Powerless Structures, Fig. 101, 2012 [left], and found objects with High Expectations, 2010 [right]), Victoria & Albert Museum.

seem completely mundane.”57 As Shannon remarks, unlike The Collectors where most objects displayed were artwork or high design furniture, here the objects are much more ordinary, but their combination and context give them meanings. The position of the transformed galleries themselves, in a remote corner of the museum not usually used for special exhibitions, also supports these unexpected relationships between mundane house objects, personal belongings, and museum and art collections. Of the Trilogy projects, Tomorrow shares most with The Collectors. They are similar not only in many of the themes but also in some of the aesthetics and organizational decisions. Like in Venice, economic preoccupations are prominent as visitors to the v&a are welcomed with a “for sale” sign, this time a gigantic advertisement for a new residential development combined with a plan and images from the Swann apartment (Figure 4.23). Inside the museum, signs for the exhibition are similarly designed to look like those used by realtors (Figure 4.18). However, more importantly than in earlier exhibitions, Elmgreen & Dragset here play constantly with the tension between the domestic and the institution. They question the limits of appropriate behaviour in a museum setting, but simultaneously confront visitors with their preconceptions about what makes a domestic space. This confusion is also apparent in one of the major challenges faced by the artists and the v&a curator working with them: they had to negotiate with the numerous v&a department curators the positioning and access of the objects included in the installation. For most curators, these objects are pre110

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Figure 4.23 Elmgreen & Dragset. Tomorrow, 2013, Victoria & Albert Museum.

cious artifacts to be handled with care, but the artists conceptualized them differently: “Our idea was that all the objects at the v&a, they were never made for being in a museum. We are kind of bringing them back to their original purpose.”58 The found objects are all accessible, the Elmgreen & Dragset works are reachable, but watched by gallery assistants, while the v&a collection artifacts are positioned out of reach, but in a manner that looks believable. No typical museum inscription is included in the exhibition: explanatory information outside of the story is limited to an introductory panel located outside the entrance door and the exhibition credits are only visible once one exits the exhibition. The exit is through a bedroom door; once passed it, visitors see that they just went through a temporary wall with visible studs, referencing a movie set or the artificial character of this domestic space and hinting at the constructedness of any domestic environment. Elmgreen & Dragset chose the space because it corresponded with their sense of what is domestic; its larger than usual dimensions relate to what most people ELMGREEN & DRAGSET DESTRUCT(URE) THE DOMESTIC

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assume upper-class apartments look like. The position of the space in the museum, in a corner removed from where major temporary exhibitions are usually located, also makes it more prone to be discovered by chance by visitors and more surprising for many of them. This preoccupation about what is appropriate to the domestic (even if only to be deconstructed and queered later) was already present in The Collectors, as exemplified by a discussion between the artists in the documentary How Are You: “That doesn’t seem domestic, does it? Not in line with our domestic.”59 At the v&a, interestingly, Elmgreen & Dragset do very little to physically transform the institutional gallery space into a domestic space apart from building a kitchen, and yet one step into the exhibition space and most visitors are instantly transported to a fictitious world and act as if they were in someone’s home. Reviewers commented on it – one reviewer was even outraged that the space did not look like how he imagined a real British architect’s apartment60 – and I observed numerous visitors discussing amongst themselves or with the gallery assistants elements of Swann’s biography as if they were talking about a real occupant of the space.61 Elmgreen commented on the importance of this relation between fiction and reality: “One thing that is lovely is that people read our book. Old people, young people, they sit in the sofas and read the book. And a lot of people find references from their personal lives, maybe their uncle or someone they know. They really play the role of guests in the home. Some even play the piano or open a drawer and find some letters. And the museum guards have been wonderful. They play the role of butlers and maids. They welcome people to the home and speak about the character Norman Swann as if he were a living person.”62 In parallel to the exhibition, Elmgreen & Dragset were guest editors for the popular design magazine Wallpaper. They used the opportunity to further build the fictional character of Norman Swann with a biographical article about him, presented as a true story: “We reveal how one architect’s never-built projects have influenced British architecture, and visit his South Kensington home and studio.”63 They also present a selection of images of fictional homes,64 including some from their own projects, to explore how artists have used the domestic space. “The style of the domestic setting can function as an indicator of social background, talk about a period of time, portray a certain taste, desire and perversion, but it can also create a psychological drama, even be used as a political statement. Or simply function as a relaxed everyday platform for social interaction as in the 1990s ‘relational aesthetics.’”65 Elmgreen & Dragset do not hide their goal: creating an installation that is at first look as close as possible to a regular domestic setting. But the experience quickly gets more unsettling or confusing, as a reviewer writes: “That you’re 112

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actually in a museum rather than someone’s apartment washes over you only occasionally, each wave a testament to the artists’ success in blurring reality and fiction. Approaching and interacting with the refined trappings of Mr Swann’s life is a strangely tense experience. It conveys the voyeuristic sensation of rifling around the cupboards of a host in whose home you are an especially nosy guest. And yet – are these not artworks from the v&a’s priceless collection, and if so, why are we allowed to touch, handle, breathe on them? And don’t some of these pieces seem a bit wrong here, somehow too familiar?”66 The placement of everything is thus of great importance to address questions about how spatial organizations trigger understandings of context and of expected reactions. Unlike The Collectors, The One & the Many, or the gallery projects from the Powerless Structures series, there are properly speaking very few architectural transformations in Tomorrow, and yet the shift from an institutional to a domestic space is complete and, in most commentators’ view, successful. While Elmgreen & Dragset themselves played with this blurring of reality and fiction, for example by collaborating with Wallpaper magazine on a fictional biography of Norman Swann, other unexpected reactions also happened. In addition to the visitors discussing Swann as a real-life person, the v&a also received numerous phone messages – on an answering machine connected to the number displayed on the giant fake advertisement in front of the museum – many of them requesting information about the real estate development or complaining with outrage about the privatization of v&a galleries, missing the fictional aspect of the exterior billboards.67 In a more ambiguous way, a journalist complained in his blog review for Uncube that he “ended up so obsessed by how un-English and un-architecty this installation is that [he suspected he] ended up as a random character in the story [himself ].”68 This success in transforming space says much about how we understand domestic spaces, but it also allows Elmgreen & Dragset to use these settings as powerful rhetorical tools to address a variety of issues. For example, in a follow-up exhibition titled Past Tomorrow at New York’s Galerie Perrotin, Elmgreen & Dragset use Swann, who has now moved to a New York apartment, to discuss, among other topics, the nostalgia of growing older and the aging aids generation. What’s Queer about the Homes of Elmgreen & Dragset?

Elmgreen & Dragset started their career before being aware of queer theory, to which they were introduced around 1997 by reviewers discussing their Powerless Structures, Fig. 11 at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark. If they embrace queer issues and their own queerness as integral to their approach, they do not consider themselves as having one specific discourse, as ELMGREEN & DRAGSET DESTRUCT(URE) THE DOMESTIC

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being uniquely queer artists. They see queerness as a way to open original ideas towards other social issues.69 They are not interested in doing work that speaks to only one community; they want to approach the political in broad, inclusive ways. However, even if projects like The Collectors tackle many issues, the artists and their projects are often linked or discussed in relation to queerness by reviewers.70 But what makes these projects queer? And what does a queer approach bring to the project? Elmgreen & Dragset develop questions about the interaction of public and private inherited from queer space theorists in their interest in letting all types of self-identifications be lived and represented, especially when they are outside the norm. These issues were already present in their autobiographical The Incidental Self and, although the fictional context makes them more light-hearted and humourous in The Collectors or The One & the Many, they are still very present in the depiction of non-traditional households, most particularly in depicting gay men.71 For example, in Mr B’s house, Elmgreen & Dragset insist on how making sexuality visible shapes our understanding of space and self-identifications. Dominic Eichler’s text for the exhibition’s calendar highlights this. Mr B’s self-confession, penned by Eichler, ends with a description of Tom of Finland’s erotic drawings exhibited in the Nordic Pavilion (Figure 4.12): “It’s wrong to have favorites, but I hope you come across my Tom of Finland drawings … Those pictures are partly about not regretting anything … Those drawings also demand that we live bravely and together, not alone.”72 Although queer representation in almost all of Elmgreen & Dragset’s works is limited to gay male identification, through Mr B’s words, as well as through the explicit critique of class separation and isolation in The One & the Many, Elmgreen & Dragset (via Eichler) seem to assert their belief that queerness is not about identifying solely with a gay community, a working-class community, or any other defined group, but about combining individual freedom and society and creating a sense of belonging within various groups.73 Unfortunately, while interviews with Elmgreen & Dragset show that they are indeed aware of the multiplicity of identities not being represented, nevertheless their continuous focus on gay male desires has the cumulative effect of silencing other self-identifications. The gay sex taboo might get visitors’ attention – but does it do so at the price of hiding the very social critique the artists intended? Elmgreen & Dragset explicitly engage with the political and social contexts in which we live, and by extension align and express ourselves. Clear social critiques are presented by the artists in relation to the built environment, for example in The Welfare Show where they materialize in spatial structures some of the contradictions and cul-de-sacs of the traditional welfare state. Their works on domesticity – The Collectors, The One & the Many, Tomorrow, and Past Tomorrow 114

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– focus particularly on issues of class and social status; like Robbins’s work, they highlight how we identify ourselves through our choice of homes and objects and how we are viewed by others as belonging or not to a specific class. In The One & the Many, the lower-class households of the socialist Plattenbau are signified by the objects visible from their windows in the absence of (almost all) inhabitants; in the initial presentation, they are contrasted with the posh setting of the Celebrity ballroom. In The Collectors, the art market – and its relation to upper-class signifiers – is brought to the front by the exhibition’s setting at the internationally renowned Venice Biennale; most of the objects displayed are artworks and the very few “regular” objects present are often part of collections of decorative art. Tomorrow presents a more balanced setting with a mix of artworks and everyday objects; Elmgreen & Dragset are more than ever interested in staging a character’s home, not necessarily in a realistic way, as some of the objects and spaces are obviously non-functional, but in a way that tells something about Norman Swann, about his belonging to a perceived social class, and about his views on political and social issues, for example his attachment to British imperialism and nationhood.74 If these questions were already present in Robbins’s projects, Elmgreen & Dragset’s playful yet likewise careful staging of domestic spaces renders them more explicit and calls to mind, for example, Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social stratification and class distinction.75 For Bourdieu, a French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher, class and taste are closely related: aesthetics are social constructions that stand in for a system of inequality and competition. Taste is symbolic and used to establish social hierarchy: we acquire cultural capital (the knowledge and experience of culture, ideas, and references) and social capital (our social network and influence) that combine to produce and reproduce class structures. Reliance on notions of cultural capital is implicit in much of the duo’s work: their spatial constructions build from references to recognized aesthetic preferences, but also from the manipulation of everyday objects. According to Bourdieu, the acquisition of class distinctions is “most marked in the ordinary choices of everyday existence,” revealing “long-standing dispositions [that lie] outside the scope of the education system”;76 Elmgreen & Dragset explicitly play with this in their projects to paint a portrait of Norman Swann but also of his “self-defined” and perceived belonging to a cultural class, and by extension a social and economic class. The artists develop these ideas in parallel to associations with gender and sexuality that, in the spirit of queer theory, exemplify how all of these elements perform together in reiterating one’s self-identifications. However, while Elmgreen & Dragset explicitly invoke class in their work, they cannot situate themselves outside of class distinctions, and their own Pumpwerk ELMGREEN & DRAGSET DESTRUCT(URE) THE DOMESTIC

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is designed and occupied in relation to their own taste and belonging to art world and queer networks, as will be discussed in the next section. “We’ve Broken Down More Walls Than We’ve Built”:77 The Pumpwerk Neukölln In The Collectors, Celebrity, and Tomorrow, Elmgreen & Dragset address domesticity by creating fictional realms for specific characters. Interestingly, these imagined places are preceded by the design for their own shared dwelling, the Pumpwerk Neukölln studio-house in Berlin, a former water pumping station converted in 2006–08 by architects Nils Wenk and Jan Wiese. The transformed building, a former industrial space on a residential street in the dense Neukölln borough, combines a large studio space, two loft spaces for the artists, and spaces shared between the artists, their guests, and studio employees (kitchen, bathrooms, and a living room) (Figure 4.24). The project is organized following unusual spatial arrangements that echo the duo’s career-long interests, as Dragset

Figure 4.24 (above, opposite, and following page) Nils Wenk and Jan Wiese. Pumpwerk Neukölln, plans, 2007–08, Berlin. Ground floor: gallery, workshop; second floor: Dragset loft; third floor: offices platform, kitchen/conference room; fourth floor: Elmgreen loft; attic: shared kitchen, guestroom, gallery/lounge.

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notes: “both privately, and within our art practice, we love spatial challenges – so we were looking for somewhere we could apply the concepts we had been working with in our art.”78 Although they collaborated closely with Wenk and Wiese to make sure the Pumpwerk would reflect their desire to be in an innovative combination of working and domestic spaces that connected with some of the preoccupations and ideas developed in their practice, Elmgreen and Dragset do not consider the Pumpwerk as one of their projects. In their art, Elmgreen & Dragset do not explicitly suggest design cues for new construction – their projects present distorted, incomplete spaces that cannot be directly translated into new buildings – but they nevertheless imply that current domestic designs could be rethought and modified to acknowledge how people experience space; the Pumpwerk is an example of such changes. Wenk was particularly aware of their desire to experiment with domesticity and, in addition to the attention devoted to the structural and technical challenges associated with the unusual building, he made specific plans to create a spatial arrangement that would disrupt traditional public/private oppositions, and would also acknowledge Elmgreen and Dragset’s changing relationship following the end of their romantic involvement.79 The Pumpwerk presents a rich and rare experiment in merging a critique into an actual design for a domestic space. It is, however, a critique only allowed by their wealth and status as internationally-recognized artists: even if the Berlin location meant that this large space was not as expensive as it would have been elsewhere,80 its price – plus the renovation costs – and dimensions are still much more important than what most people could afford. The artists’ social and cultural status also allowed them a design freedom that is not possible for everyone, but the resulting project is very important to understand how the critiques discussed earlier could be transformed into liveable spaces. The interest in domesticity more explicitly entered Elmgreen & Dragset’s career as their personal relationship ended, not long before the transformation of the Pumpwerk. This change in their relationship made the Pumpwerk an even sharper critique of traditional domestic arrangements. The move into a single building used by the artists, the studio employees, and outsiders presents a clear critique of domestic planning, setting aside both the traditional family model and the dichotomy of (private) living and (public) working spaces in the layering of its different functions (Figure 4.25). While the main working and gallery space is adjacent to the primary entry, a multi-purpose space in the attic mirrors it but can only be reached by going through all of the building’s spaces, putting the visitor in close proximity to the artists who may be performing intimate acts or working. The interlacement and layering of studio and living spaces in section ELMGREEN & DRAGSET DESTRUCT(URE) THE DOMESTIC

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Figure 4.25 Nils Wenk and Jan Wiese. Pumpwerk Neukölln, section, 2007– 08, Berlin.

and plan creates a building that shows similar concerns to the ones developed in their installations. Designed and discussed as a house,81 the Pumpwerk is at the same time mostly a public space where studio employees spend more time than the artists themselves, and where clients are hosted for private shows in the attic, the furthest space from the entrance. The artists’ lofts are centrally located at the heart of the Pumpwerk, but they are also mostly invisible to the visitor. The attic space, at once a private lounge and an exhibition space, explicitly combines the private and the public, creating a space sheltered from the exterior, but where outsiders are invited to participate in the performance of the artists’ mix of art(work) and domesticity. Not only are Elmgreen & Dragset presenting their work in the place where they live, in the tradition of other artists’ studiohouses;82 they also display a new type of household arrangement where two gay ex-lovers live within the same semi-domestic space. The attic lounge resembles the bachelor space in The Collectors with its open structure, Scandinavian furniture, and general ambiance of a performative display space (Figure 4.26), but unlike The Collectors’ glass house, the Pumpwerk’s attic space is invisible from 120

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Figure 4.26 Nils Wenk and Jan Wiese. Pumpwerk Neukölln, attic lounge, 2007– 08, Berlin.

the outside. The occupants can thus control who can access the space, but once inside, those visiting can still read and interpret the space as they wish. The unusual spatial organization of the building positions queer lives, long forbidden to be seen, as worthy of being visible, but simultaneously allows its inhabitants to keep a strict control on who is permitted to access the spaces. As Dragset states, “we deliberately made the borders between the work and living spaces fleeting. The combination of vast floor space and the small, quirky nooks means you can be very hidden here, or very exposed depending on your moods or needs.”83 The building is in a residential neighbourhood, but it is sheltered from intrusive gazes, in the middle of a fenced garden, unlike other residential buildings in the area that touch the sidewalk. Like their seemingly autobiographical works The Incidental Self and This Is the First Day of My Life, the Pumpwerk opens a window on the artists’ lives, but ELMGREEN & DRAGSET DESTRUCT(URE) THE DOMESTIC

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Figure 4.27 Pumpwerk Neukölln interior with Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, Berlin, 2009.

it does so under their careful control. Elmgreen & Dragset have allowed (and themselves released) numerous publications of the studio-house, including a few of them where their works or themselves appear (Figure 4.27). Going back to Urbach’s argument about professional partnerships usually concealing same-sex relationships in design magazines,84 at least one review of the Pumpwerk acknowledges that the duo was once a couple,85 but most of them only briefly mentions the living spaces as being used by both artists, here using the professional partnership to imply that they are still living together and to conceal the fact that they are not together anymore. The presentation of the house thus often silences the unusual, queer living arrangements of the duo. Interestingly, Elmgreen & Dragset also shot most of their contribution to the limited-edition artist-curated journal Gayhouse (2011) in the Pumpwerk. The photographs have been staged by the artists to depict young male models, often naked, in intimate domestic scenes (Figure 4.28).86 The staging of these photographs in the Pumpwerk further confuses the references to private lives, and in a similar way to The Incidental Self or This Is the First Day of My Life. 122

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Figure 4.28 Elmgreen & Dragset. Image from Gayhouse, 2011.

Elmgreen & Dragset’s experimentation with domesticity is at once similar to and divergent from canonical examples of modern houses that have been discussed as challenging, or in certain cases restating, normative views on gender and sexuality. Alice Friedman, for example, discusses the explicit and implicit importance of assumptions about gender and sexuality values in architectural design, and more particularly in domestic architecture.87 She underlines the possibilities for men or women outside the (hetero)norm to create or sustain the creation of innovative domestic spaces. Examining Philip Johnson’s Glass House and Guest House (both 1949, with an interior remodelling of the Guest House in 1953), she argues that the house shapes the gay architect’s commentary on the invisibility of homosexuality in mid-twentieth century society.88 While the Pumpwerk is not a glass house, its blurring of public and private limits in its interior space brings it close to the experimentations of Johnson. The control over the space is similar to Johnson’s project, especially its contrasting use of a Glass House and a Brick House. Annmarie Adams discusses the contradictory aspects of Harwell Hamilton Harris’s Weston Havens House (1941) in similar terms, arguing that the house plays a protective role for its original owner’s intimate life, while simultaneously presenting a very strong outside image.89 As in the Pumpwerk, traditional room divisions are subverted here. Three bedrooms of equal dimensions are positioned adjacent to terraces and a badminton court, only visible from the bedrooms. The courtyard plays a similar role to the Pumpwerk’s lounge, at once protected from outsiders’ view, accessible through private spaces but used extensively by people other than the primary dweller. Other houses designed by their (non-heterosexual) users also exhibit a blurred and ambiguous relation between private and public. Eileen Gray’s E.1027 (1926– 29) is often discussed by queer space theorists, not only because of the struggle between Gray and Le Corbusier to claim ownership over the house, but most importantly because of Gray’s careful design of spaces where privacy can be shaped in the pockets between public spaces.90 Similarly, in his New York apartment designed and renovated constantly over the last twenty years of his life (1977–97), architect Paul Rudolph, known for his brutalist modernism, designed a complex labyrinth of Plexiglas, steel, and light that blends private and public spaces. Timothy Rogan argues that, through careful planning, Rudolph created a deeply eroticized architecture where, in apparent contrast to the exaggerated transparency, he could exert an intense control over his privacy, but also over the (male) object of his desire.91 In Elmgreen & Dragset’s case, the Pumpwerk alters ideas of what is visible in the domestic realm as they insist on the need to make what they see as queer lives public, to challenge normative understandings of personal relationships. 124

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Although both artists officially use the space as their part-time home, they have gradually used it more as a workplace than a house after finding out in the first months that the loft spaces were too small, especially as they met new life partners.92 Furthermore, Elmgreen now spends most of his time in London, where the duo is developing projects; but he uses the Pumpwerk when visiting Berlin. The actual experience of living in the Pumpwerk has not functioned as well as expected: the artists have found working and living constantly in the same environment too constraining. The temporary use of the living spaces has proved more successful in challenging traditional understandings of domesticity, as both Wenk and the artists have stated in discussing how the exhibition of the artists’ private life to coworkers and guests has surprised and challenged expectations about the separation of public and private.93 Public and private are not neatly separated in the Pumpwerk; they coexist, they merge at some points – in the attic, in the kitchen, etc. – and at other points public and private actually spill onto each other. As designed, public and private do not disappear to be replaced by a third kind of space; instead they overlap, allowing simultaneous uses and blurred readings. Because they are explicitly interrelated, private and public acts are at once more clearly identifiable and more confused; they can thus be more consciously controlled and used by the occupants to present themselves when and as they want to. Elmgreen and Dragset’s domestic environments are, however, located within a specific, privileged, context, that they themselves critique in works like The Collectors and Celebrity – The One & the Many where they underline how gender, race, and class assumptions play into an outsiders’ understandings of domestic spaces. Their own status and wealth as celebrated white male artists allow them to attempt in the Pumpwerk experiments that others could not. The Pumpwerk design thus suggests clues for transformations to other domestic spaces, but it is also a very specific example for a privileged duo of artists that cannot be easily reproduced elsewhere.

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5 Expanded Territories Applying Queer Space Thinking

An extensive survey of the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals and closer investigation of some of the major architectural journals (Journal of Architectural Education, Journal of Architecture, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Assemblage, as well as some more specialized journals such as Home Cultures and Interiors: Design | Architecture | Culture) reveals that each published since 2000 fewer than one article with a queer topic. For example, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians published no article on queer topics while the Journal of Architectural Education published only my 2013 article.1 In the same journal, an article on diversity in architecture such as Meltem Ö Gürel and Kathryn H. Anthony’s “The Canon and the Void: Gender, Race, and the Architectural History Texts” completely ignores queer people.2 This lack of visibility for queer issues coincides with the observation that, after the initial burst in queer space discourse and exhibitions in the mid-1990s, interest in the topic quickly dropped in the architectural field. Later exhibitions on domesticity such as The Un-Private House expressed a focus more on formal and technological than social issues, echoing the emerging interest in the digital in architecture, but also marking a move away from a post-modern interest in diversity towards a renewed modernism stripped away from some of its social reform roots. However, after over a decade of thinking in architecture heavily focused on digital opportunities and projective practices, mainstream interest for social and political issues has been reignited in the 2010s following rapid changes in society, as well as the recognition that gendered and racialized glass ceilings in the profession were still hard to break despite years of efforts to increase gender and racial balance in architecture schools and professional associations. Furthermore, the changing social landscape means that these discussions now often feel more

intersectional than before. For example, racial tensions inspired a Black Lives Matter project from Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative3 and special issues from The Funambulist.4 A younger generation of feminist architects similarly coalesced around a petition – started by Caroline Amory James and Arielle Assouline-Lichten, leaders of the Women In Design student organization at the Harvard Graduate School of Design – asking the Pritzker Architecture Prize organization to give joint recognition to Denise Scott Brown for the award given to Robert Venturi in 1991.5 Despite the Pritzker Prize board rejecting the petition, the campaign shone a light on the gender imbalance still plaguing the design professions. After years of not being able to raise the number of women architects in the profession, despite high numbers of female students in schools, equity and representation has once again become a visible and pressing issue, highlighted by books such as Despina Stratigakos’s Where Are the Women Architects? 6 This groundwork led the way to an embrace of the #MeToo movement (and the development of a crowdsourced “Shitty Architecture Men” list), with unfortunately limited results (showing the amount of work still left to do).7 These initiatives have brought a reassessing of the field, connecting historic feminisms with contemporary interdisciplinary thinking in special issues of journals,8 edited collections,9 and exhibitions.10 The recognition that queer people experience quotidian oppression and violence caused by architectural and urban structures – such as the ongoing debate around the use of public restrooms by trans people,11 or the experience of queer migrants forced to live in refugee camps surrounded by potentially homophobic people from the same communities they are fleeing12 – has led to a renewed interest in thinking about gender and sexuality in relation to the built environment. In recent years, scholars and practitioners have started new conversations in specialized journals, edited collections, and magazines, such as the special issue of Home Cultures on “Alternative Domesticities” (2015, edited by Brent Pilkey, Rachael M. Scicluna, and Andrew Gorman-Murray); the special issue of Footprint on “Trans-Bodies/Queering Spaces” (2017, edited by Robert Gorny and Dirk van den Heuvel); the thematic section of Log on “Working Queer” (2017, edited by Jaffer Kolb); the edited collections Queering the Interior and Sexuality and Gender at Home; or the “Intersections” series edited by Jacob R. Moore for The Architectural League of New York’s Urban Omnibus online publication.13 A limited number of books were also published, but with the exception of Katarina Bonnevier’s Behind Straight Curtains most were historical endeavours such as Jasmine Rault’s Eileen Gray and the Design of Sapphic Modernity: Staying In, Matt Cook’s Queer Domesticities: Homosexuality and Home Life in Twentieth-Century London, or John Potvin’s Bachelors of a Different Sort: Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture A P P LY I N G Q U E E R S P A C E T H I N K I N G

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and the Modern Interior in Britain.14 Most of the recent scholarship picks up where 1990s work left off in order to reflect changes to theoretical concerns, and/or acknowledge the limits of most gay-oriented focus of 1990s research. For example The Funambulist used the theme “Queers, Feminists and Interiors” for a 2017 issue.15 This research also built on continuing work from geography, sociology, and anthropology that explored the experience of lgbt+ people in architectural spaces.16 Importantly, trans and non-binary voices have also emerged recently, such as Paul B. Preciado, Lucas Crawford, or Simona Castrum.17 This chapter explores how the 2010s saw practitioners expand on early queer space experimentations to both attempt to design safer built spaces and to complicate assumptions that framed early thinking on queer space. This recent stream of projects includes works from both architects thinking about the topic since the 1990s as well as younger generations that came of age in a very different cultural climate. Major advances in legal recognition have changed the visibility of lgbt+ people. Actualizing a Queer Domestic Architecture? Including LGBT+ Seniors As the first generations of lgbt+ people who have been out the majority of their life reach retirement age, both researchers and popular publications have highlighted how existing retirement homes or neighbourhoods are often forcing them back into the closet.18 Such issues are part of a movement towards rights recognition (regarding same-sex marriage, military service, etc.) that has swept North American lgbt+ communities. While some of the questions brought by this challenge are related to the investigation of privacy and publicness of earlier queer space projects, they are also shaped by the difficulty of responding adequately to the lived conditions of the diverse people who comprise lgbt+ communities. This section presents two design approaches to an aging population and their needs – the boom communities and the Center on Halsted’s Town Hall apartments – and explores how ideas about aesthetics can sometimes limit the effectiveness of design strategies. BOOM: New Aging and High Design

Some of the architects involved in early queer space exhibitions have recently been involved in a shift from queer spatial experiments to actual inhabited spaces with the development of boom Community, a series of unrealized planned

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neighbourhoods for aging people aimed particularly at queer people.19 The boom projects come out of broader research on aging and architecture by architect Matthias Hollwich. Hollwich’s work, developed since 2008 within his firm and through his visiting position at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design, where he organized “New Aging: An International Conference on Aging and Architecture” in 2010, seeks to offer an “intellectual, human, and architectural” alternative approach to retirement homes that transforms the current situation where aged people are “out of sight” from mainstream culture. In addition to boom, his firm has proposed plans for the Bauhaus Foundation’s Geropolis in Dessau, Germany; max, a micro-unit “community incubator” in New York City; and Aging in Africa, a retirement facility in the Ivory Coast for Catholic priests. In these projects, Hollwich highlights the need for thinking about the extended family, global health, and shared common areas in addition to individual apartments are of particular significance to the themes developed by queer space theorists.20 While an endeavour based on good intentions, because it relies on stereotypes about gay men and high design and focuses extensively on age prejudices to the detriment of other aspects of self-identifications, boom falls into similar traps as earlier queer work that did not account for the many ways in which class and race play into how gender and sexuality are experienced. If the marketing for boom suggests that the communities should help better inclusion for lgbt+ people, the projects are unfortunately geared primarily towards the needs of privileged white gay male couples, or singles and therefore excludes some of the people who would most benefit from the safety of better inclusion. The boom communities are planned, and the brand managed, by Hollwich Kushner Architects; Hollwich is also partner – along with Mario Gonzalez of gha Communities – in boom Communities, llc, the real estate investment company developing the projects. Hollwich and his partner have previously worked with J Mayer H and Diller + Scofidio, two firms that have been involved with queer space and feminist theory. The dwellings’ designers include architects Joel Sanders, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, J Mayer H, and Nigel Coates, who had all previously thought about the intersection of gender, sexuality, and space.21 The move from exhibitions and conceptual projects to actual liveable spaces has not been straightforward: some of the more radical criticality of the earlier exhibition projects has disappeared. Indeed if marketing images are any indication, the project is aimed at a rich and predominantly white clientele.22 Not unlike the largely male composition of the earlier exhibitions, the boom promotional website also underlines how the architectural profession is predominantly male

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with only one woman, artist-architect Madeline Gins of Arakawa + Gins, presenting part of the project; this is also evident in promotional material that depicts mostly male couples.23 Despite this androcentric approach, the planners make statements that echo more radical queer impulses for recognizing the need for relations outside of traditional familieswish: “the lgbt community is poised to take advantage of … our powerful sense of community, tendency to consider friends family, an increased health consciousness, and willingness to fight for change within society.”24 Unfortunately, the formal neo-modern and digitally informed language of the renderings that form much of the project’s promotion fit easily within contemporary architectural production, hiding the potential radicality of the projects and positioning instead boom in a capitalist framework driven by real estate rather than social concerns. Regarding this image-heavy approach, it is also telling that Hollwich and Kushner were founding partners of Architizer, a digital platform for architects to present their works which has grown since 2009 into one of the largest resources for architecture online. They are thus well informed and engaged with the ways architectural projects are presented and sold in the early twenty-first century. Hollwich stated further in an interview that “the only requirements for [boom’s] architects were that their structures had to epitomize high design in order to fight the stereotypical look of retirement communities, and that none of the firms could have ever done work around aging before, so they could come to the project with fresh ideas.”25 This quote underlines the tension between the pressing social issue of radically rethinking retirement spaces and the “design” image wished for by Hollwich and understood by him as essential to sustain such rethinking. Hollwich underlines common links made between ethics and aesthetics but ignores the social and financial capital that sustains aesthetics. Design for the neighbourhoods began in 2010, but the sustained aftermath of the 2008 housing crisis has stopped their completion.26 The available drawings, however, give a rich opening onto the complex issues at play in such a project. The challenges faced by the team of architects and planners working on the neighbourhoods also mean that the projects have already changed since their initial conception. Originally, a smaller group of architects (comprised of Hollwich, Renfro, Sanders, and lot-ek’s Giuseppe Lignano) developed the project as an integrated comprehensive plan – with all involved architects working together on the whole plan – for a development more strongly enmeshed with neighbouring residents. As the project evolved, however, Hollwich Kushner took over the planning and invited other firms to create independent projects within this larger plan, a move which showcased the branding potential of individual architects and also echoes contemporaneous projects such as the Herzog & de 130

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Meuron and Ai Weiwei-led Ordos 100 in Inner Mongolia, further positioning boom within global trends.27 Following these changes, the final envisioned plan for boom was to develop two (self-contained) gated neighbourhoods: one in Palm Springs in the Southern California Desert, and another in Malaga on the Costa del Sol in southern Spain. Both are popular retirement areas. The model could have then been replicated elsewhere. The larger Californian project included 300 residences totalling 750 bedrooms, sixty hotel suites, six assisted living suites, with each invited architectural firm responsible for a 100-acre plot, while the smaller European development offered 115 homes each designed for a 10 metre x 10 metre plan. The projects were initially dedicated solely to lgbt+ people of retirement age, but the marketing campaign later opened up to anyone over forty, due to economic pressures to broaden their target audience.28 If forced by economic reasons, this nonetheless opened up the project to potentially create more enmeshed communities where differences are juxtaposed and overlayed instead of opposed. In the Palm Springs project, some elements recur across the individual firms’ projects. For example, formally, both lot-ek and L2 Tsionov-Vitkon describe their designs as being inspired by desert landscapes to acknowledge the natural environment of Palm Springs.29 At a less formal level, many of the architects involved also emphasize their attempt to create innovative connections to neighbouring units that would maximize occasions for socializing: The private patio is visually connected to the neighboring homes. (lot-ek)30 This simple but seductive building makes generous domestic space that can be configured to balance privacy with the need to socialize. (Nigel Coates for the Costa Del Sol project)31 A less defined boundary between individuals and the homes they occupy will activate social interactions. An individual occupies a series of volumes and ambiances, identifying themselves within a cluster of diverse individuals … At the micro level, the boundaries of any one individual unit is blurred to increase the awareness of community and to stress the importance of neighbourly interactions. (Sadar+Vuga)32 This emphasis on social relations is also often linked to the assumption that lgbt+ people are used to developing strong relations with others in the absence of traditional family relations, but also that this absence of children means that they will need more support and interaction with other boom residents. A P P LY I N G Q U E E R S P A C E T H I N K I N G

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Once again, as in his projects for House Rules and The Un-Private House, Joel Sanders’s contribution to boom – named The Commons – is one of the most concerned with the subtle transformations to notions of public and private in the domestic realm. Sanders describes his work for boom as a return to the topic of gendered domesticities after a break following his Stud collection and series of projects on masculinity and domesticity. The Commons was also informed by his research on landscape planning; at the time he was thinking about the liminal space where indoors and outdoors meet, seeing this connection as essential to a more inclusive conceptualization of the world.33 He furthermore understands the usual separation between architecture and landscape as grounded in gender oppositions, and in very similar ways to the opposition between domestic and public space. For Sanders in the case of a retirement home the opposition manifests itself in the division between assisted and standard living. His intention for the project, and initially for boom as a whole, is thus to attempt to find out how queer sensibilities can change how we interact with our community and particularly how this division can be overcome.34 In The Commons, assisted living spaces are fully integrated with everyone else; they even become hubs for the neighbourhood. Through landscape design of the communal spaces and shared pool, directly accessible from each residence, Sanders hopes to facilitate a sense of community (Figure 5.1 and Figure 5.2). At the level of the residences, Sanders’s team develop the dwellings following two “queer models” of domesticity (presented on boom’s website as two “gay lifestyles”): as roommates (nicknamed “Golden Girls”), or as partners with children (“Birdcage”) (Figure 5.3). In both cases, the apartments offer equally sized bedrooms with patio access and bathrooms, except for one bedroom without an en suite bathroom in the family model. Sanders’s intention is to rethink retirement housing to align it with examples of queer people not afraid to reinvent household structures. This is materialized mainly in a focus on creating community groups at various scales where domestic spaces such as living rooms, kitchens, outside spaces (patio, pool, etc.) are shared, but also where people with different needs and abilities are carefully brought together to share living experiences. If the larger-scale community aspects of the boom project differentiate it from Sanders’s earlier domestic experimentation with the single house, other elements recall those projects, such as The Commons’ shared infrastructures. The juxtaposed houses designed by Sanders and his team are composed of similarly sized bedrooms that are carefully scaled to acknowledge the changed needs of a community of retired people where children are less present. Starting from thinking about the needs of lgbt+ people, Sanders’s model challenges more broadly what a domestic unit means in the early twenty-first century. 132

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Figure 5.1 Joel Sanders Architect. The Commons site plan (assisted living and common areas at the top), BOOM Community, completion on hold, Palm Springs.

The boom projects are attempts to build places where traditional family definitions dissolve through varying degrees of publicness, although this is done in a closed environment problematically isolated and unconnected from its existing neighbours, far from queer space theory’s understanding of space as being created by relations between a diversity of people. It is instead closer to earlier understandings of queer space as gay- and lesbian-oriented spaces. The blurring of private and public thus appears as a recurrent theme in the projects’ material, for example in J Mayer H’s project (Figure 5.4), titled Puzzle.Buzz (“the next A P P LY I N G Q U E E R S P A C E T H I N K I N G

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Figure 5.2 Joel Sanders Architect. The Commons, exterior view of shared areas, BOOM Community, completion on hold, Palm Springs.

social networking architectural game”) where “the continuous smooth lines” are designed to “maximize the confusion between outdoor and indoor, between privacy and publicity.”35 His project, like his joh3 residential building in Berlin developed during the same years (winner of a 2008 competition, completed in 2012), use extensions such as balconies, bay windows, roof canopies, and screens to blur the distinction between each apartment and between each function. In another example, Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s The Waves, the architects underline formally, with undulating ribbons, the separation between inside and outside. The spaces created underneath the peaks of these ribbons house the interior programmes, including glazed domestic spaces, while the troughs are occupied by private or communal gardens. Adjacent ribbons are offset to create private spaces for each dwelling, but they can also be opened onto the streets, which blurs the transition with public space (Figure 5.5).36 Both of these examples literally and physically open up the traditionally protected domestic sphere. These are glass houses that are not sitting in a large green space, but right next to other glass houses. Their design not only suggests that private and public are blurred, it also assumes that queer people want their domestic life brought outside. Some of the language used to describe the design strategies appears as superficial design lingo, for example in the description of J Mayer H’s dwelling as an 134

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Figure 5.3 Joel Sanders Architect. The Commons, “Birdcage” (top two) and “Golden Girls” (bottom two) dwellings plans, BOOM Community, completion on hold, Palm Springs.

Figure 5.4 J Mayer H. Puzzle.Buzz, BOOM Community, interior view of residences, completion on hold, Palm Springs.

Figure 5.5 Diller Scofidio + Renfro. The Waves, BOOM Community, townhouses, completion on hold, Palm Springs.

“elastic space” that “invites you to create new connections between spaces,” echoing the language used in the Un-Private House exhibition. However, other references to the “strong social network that exists in the gay community” (in Rubin Donner’s project) or to the diverse lifestyle needs that compose “gay identity” (in Joel Sanders’s project) show an opening to a deeper reflection about the relation between social identifications and space, without being as explicit or radical in their critiques as earlier projects.37 That queer space critiques have had such a limited impact on boom, despite the involvement of many of its architects in early queer space thinking, show the difficulties of designing in ways that truly – and radically – challenge the status quo of normative domestic architecture. Behind its commercial profit-based objectives, boom is obviously based in good intentions. But because it focuses solely on age prejudices, it ignores how class and race intersect with how gender and sexuality are experienced. The boom projects are open to all but envisioned as spaces that specifically support gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans people, seen as marginalized people in traditional retirement facilities. Yet as Brent Pilkey points out in his analysis of boom’s marketing, their imagery is stereotyped and filled with inequalities of race, sex, and even age.38 Designed as high-end, isolated developments and visibly targeting mostly men, they will probably attract large numbers of wealthy white gay men, and exclude other more marginalized people. boom’s marketing material suggests that all residents will share an open-mindedness. A careful analyzis of the renderings and texts reveals that this mostly implies, however, that they will share comfortable material and financial means allowing them to buy or rent a space in the communities. As such, it is thus reiterating class and race structures even if it is trying to work against other discriminations. Hollwich’s research on aging focuses on the design of spaces that will make all kinds of people age better. It is thus paradoxical that the boom projects he oversaw present such a limited high-design aesthetics; far from challenging norms, boom builds upon homonormative stereotypes about non-heterosexual domesticities that assume that queer people (understood here as almost exclusively gay male) favour high design modernist projects. Furthermore, although boom’s dwellings are meant to blur private and public – often through the use of highly glassed walls – this blurring is simultaneously dependent on the owners’ wishes. Many of the boom dwellings are designed to give the dweller control over how the relation between private and public is managed. This control relies on the social status of the dwellers, a status that gives them the possibility to own a house in an isolated controlled environment. This context is obviously very far from the original critiques coming from queer space theorists. They insisted that queer space emanated from relationships, but also that everyone should be able to exert a A P P LY I N G Q U E E R S P A C E T H I N K I N G

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control over their domestic spaces, no matter their social class, race, gender, sexual orientation, sexual identity, or age. Despite serious accessibility problems, boom does demonstrate a wish to translate the potential of queer space theory into reimagined dwellings that appeal to all, at least by design. However, the type of dwellings designed for boom, envisioned as unique pieces of architecture not attached to traditional city layouts and regulations, privilege individual safety over integration into existing communities – thereby ignoring the richness of personal interrelations, not to mention hardly satisfying different needs or financial means. The next step is to bring these ideas to less isolated settings, to explode and diffuse boom’s experiments over the tensions between private and public into a broader, more accessible context. The apparent limits of boom raise questions about the difficulties of developing a queer ethics of design. When aesthetics and formal experimentations are described as challenging programmatic and social norms, for example in celebrated projects such as Alison and Peter Smithson’s House of the Future (1956),39 their discussion often assumes specific means and social status allowing such experimentations to be built. In this context, are queer aesthetics compatible with queer politics? Do both challenge the heteronormativity of the built environment, and of the construction industry shaping much of that environment, equally? Projects like boom are designed by privileged white male architects. The lack of diversity in design teams, which is representative of the lack of diversity overall in the profession, creates a context where it becomes easy to focus on a specific segment of the lgbt+ communities that has more financial means, and therefore can more easily access safe spaces, while ignoring more at-risk populations that would benefit from the support of these privileged architects. Town Hall Apartments: Educating through Community-Building

A second case study, Town Hall Apartments in Chicago, presents a completely different approach, in a less isolated context. But like boom, the Town Hall Apartments were meant to offer a space for lgbt+ seniors to feel safe and surrounded by a community. Opened in the autumn of 2014, the apartments are a partnership between developer and property manager Heartland Alliance, an anti-poverty organization created in 1888 as Travelers and Immigrants Aid by Jane Addams (founder of Hull House)40 and Center on Halsted, Chicago’s lgbt+ resources and cultural center. Center on Halsted provides services including case management and programming. Gensler Architects transformed a former police station, built in 1907, into community rooms for classes and special events, to which they added a six-storey building combining lgbt+-friendly 138

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Figure 5.6 Gensler Architects. Plans for The Center on Halsted’s Town Hall Apartments, 2014, Chicago.

senior housing (offering thirty studios and forty-nine one-bedroom apartments, all subsidized) and retail space (Figure 5.6). Importantly, the transformation of the police station, a symbol of discrimination in the 1970s and 1980s, is a strong symbol for the community,41 as “many residents remember spending the night there because of bar raids or other runins with law enforcement.”42 As Michael Goldberg, executive director of Heartland Housing, notes: “We often hear that history repeats itself. Today we see that A P P LY I N G Q U E E R S P A C E T H I N K I N G

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history can also correct and redeem itself. What was once a symbol of fear is now a place of inclusion, expression and community.”43 While this change could be seen as a reclamation of formerly oppressive power structures, it also mirrors a shifting relation between police forces and some members of lgbt+ communities. Town Hall’s administration for example reminds journalists that beginning in the 1990s, the Chicago Police Department established an lgbt+ liaison to improve relations in the neighbourhood,44 a change in policies that has also happened elsewhere. It also builds into a decades-long use of the neighbourhood – dubbed “Boystown” – by the city of Chicago to brand itself as open to diversity.45 These changes have been criticized for protecting only a small number of privileged people while continuing to target marginalized and more at-risk people, such as queer youth of colour.46 These conflicting readings of the needs of different members of a community seem less present in this project where governmental, non-profit agencies, and community members worked together to ensure the well-being and safety of economically challenged seniors, but they call attention to the ways in which the project is driven by security-driven vision of what a safe community can be. They also suggest that the project could have been more inclusive, for example by integrating multi-generational spaces directly in the building to create renewed relationships with potential learning experiences for every generations. Furthermore, it would have brought queer youth in the former police station, a space that had long represented an oppressive force for them. Unlike the top-down approach of boom, the Town Hall apartments were the result of almost a decade of consultation to determine the needs, ideal location, and funding for the project. “These conversations clarified the importance of common and outdoor spaces, a strong connection with the rest of the neighborhood, an interest in maintaining social activity and physical fitness during the aging process, and the sensitivity required regarding property management for trans residents.”47 In addition to the symbolical transformation of the police station into communal spaces, this lead for example to the design of the terrace overlooking Halsted Street and a mailbox lobby envisioned by the architects as the building’s front porch. For the centre’s administration, there is a perception that this is transforming how older lgbt+ people are made visible, bringing the domestic into public life while still offering protection. Britta Larson, Center on Halsted’s director of senior services, notes that it “speaks to how this building is increasing the visibility of lgbt older adults.” During the pride parade, residents watched from the terrace, and “really felt like they were part of the parade.”48 A spacious shared family dining room was also included to respond to a desire for space to entertain, given the small size of the apartments themselves. Both ex140

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amples show the importance of community, something that was also present in boom. Similarly, both projects insist on the need for creating a sense of safety to counterbalance the challenges lived everyday by lgbt+ people. In Chicago, this was realized by stacking the residential floors atop the community center and retail spaces, with limited access to the residential spaces behind a key cardcontrolled door. Unlike boom, the focus in the Town Hall project was on affordability. Targeting lgbt+ people, but open to all, the apartments also house residents who do not identify as lgbt+. Staff and lgbt+ residents have quickly realized that some of the residents did not seem to know what lgbt+ meant and thus a lot of education had to be done. In a way, this is a great success of the project. Unlike the privileged context of boom where such mixing has less chance of happening, the Town Hall apartments and their relation to a community centre create opportunities for education through social contact in a safe environment, for sharing life experiences at a time where social circles shrink. Thinking more broadly, however, the project would have an excellent opportunity to reimagine what a multigenerational community or home could mean, taking inspiration for example from nursing homes in the Netherlands, in Lyon, France, in Exeter, uk, or in Cleveland, Ohio, usa that offer rent-free housing to students who want to help alleviate seniors’ social isolation and loneliness.49 Life experiences would have thus been shared not only among people of a same generation, but also across generations, allowing younger people to learn about past struggles. Whereas boom architects were trying to rethink the spatial organization of both the apartments themselves and their relation to each other, Gensler’s plans for the Town Hall building are fairly traditional. Every apartment is designed for one person or a couple, with no attempts to acknowledge different forms of domestic arrangements. Similarly, while the project includes communal spaces that are presented by the architects and developers as important to the specific lgbt+ communities they are catering to, these spaces are not different from spaces in other senior’s residence, and neither is the double-loaded corridor arrangement used for the apartments. The approach taken is thus not about challenging traditional living arrangements to reframe social spaces. Furthermore, even though aging in place was discussed by future residents in the planning workshops that led to the project, the notion does not seem to have impacted its development.50 While the project allows residents to stay in the neighbourhood as they age, it does not include services for people who need more help living by themselves. As one of the Town Hall residents worries, having heard of horror stories where partners were forced to separate during the transition to a nursing home: “It’s nice to have senior housing, but what about the next stage? If I’m going to a A P P LY I N G Q U E E R S P A C E T H I N K I N G

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nursing home, I’d hope my lover could be close by.”51 The design of Town Hall indicates that we are still far from radically rethinking how social interactions are shaped by domestic design; instead we are still only trying to make visible the need for safe spaces for lgbt+ seniors and not yet focused on improving in other ways their lives. The two projects are examples of how the built environment is impacted by and reacts to the major shifts that are still occurring around the visibility and acceptance of sexual and gender minorities. They also show the tension between creating safe spaces that challenge common understandings of private and public and the need to make these spaces inclusive of a broad diversity of people outside of the white privileged gay male subjects often discussed by sexuality studies and supposedly inclusive lgbt+ activism. Ultimately, these questions are crucial as they will become more and more present in the future. The domestic is often discussed as a safe space, but this assumed safety relies on a dichotomy between public and private realm that never really exists. Acknowledging this is essential to design in a more inclusive way, taking into account the moving and changing self-identifications of everyone, especially when linked to sexuality that is still assumed by many to be strictly private. Trying Everything: Maximalist Inclusive Practices boom and the Town Hall Apartments show the difficulty of developing a queer aesthetics while navigating the tensions of real lived experiences. Challenges to formal norms can bring attention to the broader normativity of spatial environments, but they must also be carefully used so that they do not weaken or oppose challenges to programmatic, political, or social norms. Projects in the boom communities for example seemed in many cases to prioritize formal experimentations over non-normative programming. This section surveys examples of current practices that are working around the tensions of aesthetics and ethics to broaden the use of queer thinking around space, from mycket’s queer feminist investigation of relational spaces to the Office for Political Innovation’s and the Stalled! project’s research-informed design activism for a more inclusive built environment. MYCKET’s Maximalist Aesthetics for a Queer Feminist Ethics

If the development of queer space theory in the 1990s mostly occurred in a geographically limited area of the United States, later work spread – unevenly – across the world. For example, in 2007 the Queer Space: Centres and Peripheries (20–21 142

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Feb, organized by Naomi Stead and Jason Prior) and Queer Asian Sites (22–23 Feb, organized by Peter Jackson and Mark McLelland) conferences were held at the University of Technology Sydney in Australia.52 The same year, architect Katarina Bonnevier published her PhD research as Behind Straight Curtains: Towards a Queer Feminist Theory or Architecture53 and participated in the creation of fatale (Feminist Architecture Theory: Analysis Laboratory Education) at the kth School of Architecture in Stockholm.54 Behind Straight Curtains celebrates the challenges to social norms enacted through spatial interventions by architect Eileen Gray and authors Natalie Barney and Selma Lagerlöf. Bonnevier’s reading of their use of space as social enactors brings a queer feminist point of view that is still visible in her current work with mycket, a research-intensive art and architecture collective initiated in 2012 with Thérèse Kristiansson and Marian Alves Silva (later joined by Ullis Ohlgren and Anna Märta Danielsson). For Bonnevier and mycket, thinking about a queer ethics of space is tied to thinking about the aesthetics of queer space. The collective’s name itself highlights the importance of their approach to aesthetics in their practice. mycket is a Swedish word that means “much, a lot”; this name underlines their maximalist approach to queering the rigidity of architecture, andtheir interest in excess as a queer feminist tactic.55 It builds on feminist graphic designer Sheila Levant de Bretteville: I will never, never, never forget to include people of color, people of different points of view, people of different genders, people of different sexual preference … Modernism did not want to recognize regional and personal differences. People who have given their whole lives to supporting the classicizing aesthetic of modernism feel invalidated when we talk about this necessary inclusiveness, but this diversity and inclusiveness is our only hope. It is not possible to plaster over everything with clean elegance. Dirty architecture, fuzzy theory, and dirty design must also be out there … Feminist design is an effort to bring the values of the domestic sphere into the public sphere; feminist design is about letting diverse voices be heard through caring, relational strategies of working and designing. Until social and economic inequities are changed, I am going to call good design feminist design.56 Through their focus on aesthetics, they wish to highlight how norms are manifested in spatial and material design, but also to challenge these norms through design. For them, this thinking is a way to, in Bonnevier’s words, create reparative spaces rather than paranoid spaces and to avoid being only critical, as A P P LY I N G Q U E E R S P A C E T H I N K I N G

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proposals for transformations are also important.57 For mycket, contemporary mainstream architecture is still operating within the modernist framework of a universal (young white able-bodied male) body that informs how spaces are planned and then aestheticized. To think about how to create a society where there is room for everyone, they more specifically build from the tensions they feel within their own experience of practice, as Bonnevier notes: To do this we need to question the modernist design and research traditions of reduction and specialization, since they exclude bodies and behaviors and build upon competition. By doing this, our own bodies also come into play. For instance, being an architect trained in a modernist tradition, I sense the aesthetic challenge as a torsion in my body when my preferences are turned towards the un-tight and the inconsequent. This triggers me, since it promises escape from the hierarchical logic of good or bad subjects and research methods. That logic is counterproductive to (artistic) research, since it creates stage fright and the circular reasoning of prescribed answers to given questions (not least aesthetically). In modernist design processes, consequence and discipline are worshiped at the expense of differences.58 Similarly to other queer space practitioners, this desire to explore differences has led mycket to examine how privacy and publicness are experienced by different people. They have particularly focused on making visible the uncelebrated experiences of queer women and non-binary people. Their researchbased practice focuses on the design of performative spaces where personal relations are explored, including the role played by architecture in the experience of intimacy and eroticism. One of their major projects, The Club Scene, evolved over thirteen “acts” between 2012 and 2016 and sought to restage salons, clubs, and other meeting spaces significant to queer and feminist activism and building on Bonnevier’s exploration of a similar method in her PhD research. The different acts explore a wide variety of spaces geographically and historically. For example, the first one, “Lalasalon,” is a celebration of a contemporary Beijing salon restaged in the historic flat of Fredrika Bremer, a Swedish feminist reformer, at Årsta castle in Sweden. Through The Club Scene, mycket underlines how the social, the erotic, and the political are inextricably linked in the space of queer communities, which also shows the similarities between diverse spaces such as a “secret club held in a private apartment” and a “hypervisible nightclub with a confrontational and uncompromising attitude.”59 Like other

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environments explored by queer space and feminist theorists, the (night) spaces mycket examines are examples that highlight how both domestic and commercial spaces are used as community spaces, blurring the limits between the two and creating safer spaces for political conversations. For them, the aesthetics of salons and clubs – recreated through costumes, decor, guests, dance, performances, meals – can be understood as both space and activity, producing “selfdefinition, recognition and a sense of home” that is not specific to queer people, but is nevertheless particularly important to them.60 mycket’s approach is both historical and performative, interpreting historic examples through care and affect. In her 2005 chapter “A Queer Analysis of Eileen Gray’s E.1027,” Bonnevier states: “However, before we proceed, comes my confession: I still have a need for heroines in architecture. And I have a crush on Eileen Gray. This nonconformist architect and designer awakes my desires and dreams, like a triumphant mirror sending sparkles to my own everyday life and professional practice in the male-dominated and heteronormative regime of architecture.”61 This quote is essential to understand mycket’s use of history. History here is an activist tool, used not as a neutral narrative but as a powerful and affective way to reclaim figures and experiences, mixing contemporary preoccupations with past role models. They note: “our methodology can be described as simultaneously critical and reparative; we endeavor to overcome the unproductive and worrying control where analysis gets separated from suggestions.”62 The spaces created thus often function as both installation and something else. For example, the thirteenth and last act, “The styles Salon,” was curated for the 2016 Architecture Humanist Research Association conference Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies, Economies, Technologies at the kth School of Architecture (17–19 Nov) in Stockholm. The salon, “relat[ing] to the long tradition of lesbian literary salons – a kind of semi-disclosed club that negotiates the borders of private and public, openness and exclusivity,”63 served as an installation, as a performance stage, as a panel, as a keynote dialogue space, and as a reception space, gathering close to 200 performers and conference participants.64 Through the use of “objects, props and artifacts, costumes, make-up, accessories, food, music and performances,”65 mycket explored how the dressing of space is integral to understandings of that space, of one’s relation to the space and of one’s relation to others. While interested in the impact of architectural spaces on everyone, mycket are particularly aware of some of the challenges linked to the fact that queer and feminist work in architecture and design is often academic. This makes it easier for it to be developed abstractly, without taking into account lived experiences. For example, Bonnevier underlines that

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“we say that it is a mistake to forget the space we are in, for instance, the seminar room, when discussing how architecture and design play a part in the normalization of certain bodies and behavior at the expense of others. It is a common practice (often for practical reasons) for architecture researchers to situate themselves at a distance from their objects of research when sharing or disseminating their work. However, this risks diminishing the material and embodied aspects of the subjects.” Hence, the desire “to design the public space of research to perform in the manner of the clubs we research”66 allows them to explore the emotions attached to those spaces. The maximalist approach preferred by mycket creates a stage for these emotions: by multiplying stylistic and aesthetics associations, they create points of entry for a multitude of emotional responses. The use of different aesthetics within each of their projects and between projects seeks to empower what mycket calls safer space, acknowledging that completely safe spaces can never exist. Refraining from a single aesthetics allows the creation of different narratives and “emotional lines,”67 something that is further pushed by the blurring of authorship created by mycket’s method. Rejecting the notion of purely original work, they restage spaces created by others and reuse elements from previous projects to multiply their meanings. They also get participants to engage with the creation of the work through props and costumes deployed to alter appearance, extend and support various bodies’ relation to space and sociality,”68 but also by asking them to help each other as well as the performers, creating a safer space where “‘the stewardship’ spreads. There is no doubt we share this public space and we do not pretend to be other than vulnerable.”69 In true queer feminist ethics, mycket’s projects are about both the material and relational aspects of a space, about the visibility and power relations created by physical characteristics of a space, often linking spaces understood as public and private. For example the fourth act of Club Scene, “Exclude Me In” (2013), mapped every queer and feminist night club and association in Göteborg (Figure 5.7) and then staged a 200-person carnival procession (Figure 5.8) through the city to highlight the “constant negotiations” undertaken by queer people within heteronormative society.70 The carnival celebration sought to make visible values and cultures that are often hidden behind the walls of a city. While it can at first be understood as a disruption of everyday life with temporary transformations and unusual sights and sounds, mycket’s carnival is simultaneously a celebration of everyday life, of the hidden spaces and events that exist in the city. It also critiques an earlier celebration Göteborgskarnevalen, the Carnival of Gothenburg (1982–93), that at its peak filled the main street of the city with 400,000 participants. However,

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Figure 5.7 (top) MYCKET with Maja Gunn and the New Beauty Council. The Club Scene of Gothenburg 1980–2013, “Exclude Me In,” GIBCA 2013. Figure 5.8 (bottom) MYCKET with Maja Gunn and the New Beauty Council. Carnival from “Exclude Me In,” GIBCA, 2013.

“homosexual life and desire is strikingly absent from any archival material of the carnival, which is likely a consequence of the prevalence of hate crimes (homophobic, transphobic, and racist) in Göteborg during this period. Exclude Me In is a celebration of the dancing, activist, queer culture that should have been there and dominated the streets throughout the carnival.”71 Through the eruption of queer aesthetics in the street where they are seldom seen, it reveals their existence within the power structures that shape the built environment. mycket turn around social and cultural expectations, showing how queer lives can become visible and overturning cultural and countercultural relations, in a similar way to Elmgreen & Dragset’s Cruising Pavilion (discussed in chapter 4). mycket’s work merges many of the different approaches of earlier queer and feminist architects and historians to create an activist practice with a clearly visible presence in community life. To the focus on making visible spaces of queer and feminist histories that have been hidden or have disappeared, it adds critical interventions and performances that highlight social and political critiques informed by queer and feminist theory. If most of their works have been temporary projects, they are currently moving to more permanent works such as a public space in Råslätt in Sweden, giving hope that their critiques will transform space in a sustained way. The Office for Political Innovation and the Use of Popular Culture

If mycket subverts historical referents and stylistic concerns to offer a queer reading of architecture as a space for relations, Spanish architect Andrés Jaque focuses instead on the interest in the digital of contemporary architectural thought and blends it with queer-informed design research. With his transdisciplinary Office for Political Innovation (offpolinn), founded in 2003, he has developed a series of research-intensive projects “that bring inclusivity into daily life.”72 In addition to built architectural projects offpolinn has also imagined a series of installations, performances, videos, and exhibitions over the last decade intended“to explore design from the perspective of postfoundational politics.”73 They seek to expand the position taken by architects in public life and to “interrogate architecture’s political agency”74 in projects that, while not always explicitly about gender and sexuality, bring lessons from queer theory and activism to the study of the relation between virtual and physical spaces. For Jaque, thinking about how buildings perform as political agents is at the core of his practice, as projects like IKEA Disobedients or Intimate Strangers exemplify.75 IKEA Disobedients, offpolinn’s take on ikea, is an attempt to show how architects can take a more politically engaged role. The multiform project reacts

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to an ikea ad campaign from 2007 devised around the theme “The Independent Republic of Your Home” and what the architects saw as ikea’s role as “the most important architectural agent” in contemporary society.76 First exhibited in Madrid in November 2011 as part of the Performance y arquitectura edition of the El arte es accion event organized by Spain’s Ministry of Culture and curated by Ariadna Cantis, it was then included the following year in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection as its first ever “architectural performance.” m oma staged the performance at ps1 in September 2012 and included a video in the exhibition “9+1 Ways of Being Political: 50 Years of Political Stances in Architecture and Urban Design,” held simultaneously and curated by Pedro Gadanho, then-new curator for contemporary architecture. In Jaque’s words, in ikea’s ad, “domesticity was seen as isolated from many of the processes by which the social is disputed and constructed. It’s as though you leave behind all the conventions of the outer world when you arrive at home, and somehow gain political independence there.”77 Furthermore, for offpolinn, this “political independence” is framed in a problematic and normative way, as they explain in their IKEA Disobedients Manifesto: ikea delivers societies. ikea is a purveyor of social structuration. 98% of the people depicted in the ikea catalogue are young. 92% of them are blond. They all have some sort of family life. They either have children, or are busy having children. Everything ikea manufactures is aimed at turning the sphere of domesticity into a sunny, happy, apolitical space inhabited by contented, healthy, young people. The sense of home or a household’s life, however, may also be constructed from day to day in quite different fashions. Not all of us are healthy.

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Not all of us are young. Not all of us are into having children.78 offpolinn thus devised a multi-disciplinary and multi-format project involving “hacked” ikea furniture voluntarily built without following the instructions (Figure 5.9), live events where “local community members are invited to publicly perform their everyday private talents, behaviors, and discussions”79 in this so-called “improvised set”80 (Figure 5.10), a short video (7:22 min., with a shorter edit of 2:54 min.) presenting the “ikea Disobedients Manifesto,” vignettes on each of the participants and images from the live events, and finally an “action protocol” allowing the research to be repeated in other cities. Through this, the work “comments on the impact of these ordinary objects and systems in determining their users’ lifestyle – suggesting that not all people necessarily abide by the same normative principles or architectural dictates.”81 Most importantly, the project seeks to show that, far from being non-political, the private dwelling “can become a new form of democratic parliament in which the architect is but an orchestrator and collaborator” through “activities, conversations, and community-oriented practices disseminated from one’s own private space,” rethinking political participation as more than only “taking part in state or municipal decisions.”82 Over four months of research in New York where they “interviewed many people to study how they develop their own domesticity,” offpolinn identified households who they saw as not reflecting conventional family patterns, as resisting the universalizing image offered by ikea. Through these examples, they seek to show that “ikea produces a reality that is not universal; people actually engaged in political projects from their living rooms, kitchens, bathrooms or bedrooms. Domesticity is less an independent republic for these people than the center of many political engagements.”83 The interviewees’ various self-identifications are closely interlinked with their living – and often working – arrangements: Denish lives for a few months of the year in a friend’s apartment and the rest of the year in a students’ hall of residence, feeling at home whenever he plays the sarod in the park; Frank brought a cabin from the north of New York state and set it up in the garden of two female designer friends, looking after their garden instead of paying rent; Moody transformed the tv room of his house into a beauty salon, where people from the local neighbourhood get together, have their hair cut, look after each other’s children and 150

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Figure 5.9 and 5.10 (following pages) Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation. IKEA Disobedients.

discuss politics; Rael is conducting research in his own house using aquaponics, a self-regulating food production system, renting out his houselaboratory for parties; Mama Gianna is the chef at one of the most famous restaurants in Queens, spending nearly all day there in the kitchen, which she views as her home, and where all the emotional ties of her life are founded. Lastly Greg, Donnie, Maja and Corentine have created a family of two couples, using their kitchen as a meeting place and a platform for developing a future lgbt library.84

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Another interviewee from the Madrid group “came from a tiny village to a squat for lesbian women. She organized the architecture in a way that produced an upper space for intimacy – where the residents could minimize the risk of changing the way they relate to their bodies or to their sexuality – and a ground floor that promoted a transformation of the way the neighborhood sees lesbianism. The process of finding her sexuality and even her body could never have happened without this space. Now Bertha is actually a male, and the whole transformation of her – of his – body is related to his association with a very

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particular architectural device: this squat.”85 In addition to the direct discussion of gender and sexuality around the people chosen, the focus on the domestic, and more particularly the challenges to its assumed separation from public life, puts Jaque’s project in direct relation to other queer critiques of space, and highlights the strong links between physical spaces, objects, and self-identifications and embodiments. Jaque and the Office for Political Innovation’s understanding of architecture as activism is based on research, as exemplified by the IKEA Disobedients project: “By making an archive of similar cases, we could counterbalance the depiction of reality prescribed by lkea. We could see that research played a political role by bringing forward alternatives to mainstream messages.” Jaque further understands his work as being part of architecture’s “long tradition of producing research as a political tool, bringing diversity and alternatives to particular domains and discourses.”86 He underlines, however, that this research has a specific and activist objective. “It’s very important for me that research is about making things visible. By accounting for the way domesticity is produced, we could recognize how the material reality of architecture had been produced.”87 The work is specifically about making visible people that would otherwise be absent from representations of architecture, from popular ones such as ikea’s catalogue to technical ones such as Architectural Graphic Standards.88 offpolinn’s project is particularly useful in showing how, further than just human representations, understanding the social experience of architectural spaces is essential. IKEA Disobedients highlights and questions how architecture materializes normative understandings of social life, but it also questions the role architects can play in communities. IKEA Disobedients was originally commissioned by Spain’s Ministry of Culture as part of an annual art forum; it was later performed, exhibited, and made part of m oma’s collection. It thus originated as an institutionally sanctioned critique and was further institutionalized by m oma – a museum that is, in Sylvia Lavin’s words, “the institution of record for architecture, using its exhibits and collections to constitute itself as the standard bearer of value and importance, not only in the United States but for Europe as well.”89 According to the curators, this work was acquired to “make a statement” and to add to the collection traces of the transformations happening in the ways we understand architecture, particularly in recognizing the situations created by the buildings more than the buildings themselves.90 While this is certainly a noble endeavour, it presents as new something that has been happening for many years in critical theories and histories of architecture and that until recently had been largely ignored by institutions such as m oma. Furthermore, IKEA Disobedients’ first appearance at m oma 154

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is in an exhibition that, despite being supposedly about new ways to understand architecture as political, mostly presents projects by superstar architects in a way that echoes architectural history’s traditional focus on individuals and single buildings. offpolinn thus unfortunately appears as a token acknowledgment that simultaneously silences the rich histories developed over the years by architectural historians to present the social and cultural relations between people, communities, and the built environment, as well as their resistance to the normative assumptions of the individual designers presented in the rest of the exhibition. Similarly, it highlights the absence of gender and sexuality from the other nine sections of the exhibition, but by doing so it also positions gender and sexuality as something marginal, further reasserting the presence of an assumed universal person and body at the center of all architecture. Being the “+1” in the show’s title (“9 + 1 Ways of Being Political: 50 Years of Political Stances in Architecture and Urban Design”), IKEA Disobedients’ presence shows the limits of social and political critiques within institutional settings. However, its design and use by Jaque points to a potential rethinking of the role of architects as activists that pushes the project further than its place at m oma. IKEA Disobedients presents a queer-informed approach to domestic space, but offpolinn’s more recent work has been more explicitly about sexuality, going back to the exploration of sexualized spaces that early work on queer space focused on. Jaque and his team often focus in those works on understanding how digital technologies and media reframe both the way people navigate physical spaces and the role of architects in these changing conditions. For example Pornified Homes, a video installation created for the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennial, combines historical and contemporary research to show how the “British colonial project of installing sexualized specimens of the Victoria Amazonica water lily in aristocratic domestic compounds, still remains in the way Brazilian male sex workers occupy a network of residual backyard homes in Central London’s most exclusive locations.”91 Building on the Triennial’s theme of “After Belonging” and its focus on our attachment to places and collectivities and our relation to objects we own, share, and exchange, the video presents a contemporary urbanism linking apartments, online profiles, and bodies. It highlights how architectural spaces are carefully used to shape sexual networks. Intimate Strangers (2016), a multimedia installation about Grindr for the Design Museum’s exhibition Fear & Love: Reactions to a Complex World (Figure 5.11), further expands this exploration of digital urbanisms.92 The project, building on two years of fieldwork at Grindr’s headquarters in West Hollywood, is an investigation of how the app is used both by oppressive regimes wanting to track down gay people and by gay refugees seeking to protect themselves in camps and A P P LY I N G Q U E E R S P A C E T H I N K I N G

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Figure 5.11 Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation. Intimate Strangers. Fear and Love: Reactions to a Complex World exhibition, Design Museum, London, 2016.

integrate new communities. But it is also an attempt to rethink the role architects can play in a digital environment. Intimate Strangers furthermore explores how a commercial smartphone app devoted mainly to facilitating sexual relations between men can be more broadly understood, exploring both the network technologies supporting it – including the presence of servers in countries where same sex relations are banned – and its contribution to transforming social relations between homosexual men, as well as activist networks. It presents how spatial structures contribute to controlling sexualities on a transnational scale by analyzing the everyday links between private interiors and publicness. Intimate Strangers also reframes what we understand as the design of space, not only by discussing Grindr as a social network that adds a virtual layer to the physical world, but also by thinking of it as a way to navigate, move around, and subvert the oppressive aspects of the physical world. Jaque, expanding the definition of what an architect is, imagines his new role in a digital world, transforming the relations between virtual and physical spaces rather than merely designing new formal interpretations of digital manifestations. He does so by firmly positioning his research within popular culture, echoing both postmodernist architectural theory’s examples such as Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi, and Steven Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas and queer theorist Jack Halberstam’s use of “minor” cultural forms in the development of a theory of queer failure.93 In addition to ikea or Grindr, offpolinn for example titled their 2018 exhibition at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York Sex and the So-Called City (in collaboration with Miguel de Guzmán [Imagen Subliminal]), in reference to the cult hbo show Sex and the City. The exhibition frames the television show as an architectural manifesto for the cultural shifts that have transformed New York City in the two decades since its first episode, investigating how human reproduction is shaped by architectural changes. All of these examples, in a similar way to mycket’s work, show a fearlessness in their messy approach to history, theory, and critique that render them approachable, framing complex critiques into relatively easy to understand interventions using popular culture as an entry point. Towards Safer Spaces

mycket’s and the Office for Political Innovation’s work are quite different, but nevertheless share a concern with binary understandings of private and public that they express through installations and performances based on research. They thus expand on previous queer space practitioners, understanding queer theory as one lens in an intersectional political approach to the built environment. They are also emblematic of a range of practices that seek not only to A P P LY I N G Q U E E R S P A C E T H I N K I N G

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make queer concerns visible, but also to make changes in the built environment based on rigorous research and public education. dedicated to creating safer spaces for a broad range of people including lgbt+ people. Andrés Jaque and some of the members of mycket teach, and have used these teaching forums to discuss queer issues with students, in similar ways to others around the world.94 Joel Sanders, who has been involved in many of the projects discussed in previous chapters, has similarly used his teaching position to explore various issues with his students, leading to his teaming up with gender studies scholar Susan Stryker and law scholar Terry Kogan to develop Stalled!, an activist research project on gender-neutral restrooms.95 The project comprises a website, articles in mainstream and academic publications, and a series of workshops and lectures. It builds on research on the legal and historical contexts in which gender-segregated public restrooms initially appeared that show that they are social and historical constructs to offer design proposals (Figure 5.12) that explore how comprehensively designed gender-neutral restrooms could provide safer and more comfortable spaces not only for trans and non-binary people, but for a broad range of people including disabled people, families, and people of various ethnocultural backgrounds. Their efforts, in collaboration with the National Center for Transgender Equality and the American Institute of Architects, led to modifications to the International Plumbing Code in March 2019 to allow for all-gender restrooms.96 Stalled! exemplifies the shifts that have occurred in queer space thinking. As Sanders frames it: “my thinking has shifted, from a cis-gay male viewpoint shaped by 90s queer theory to a more inclusive perspective informed by contemporary transgender studies, which take into account a broad range of human identities and embodiments.”97 If a section of Sanders’s 1996 collection Stud focused on the bathroom as a typology where masculinities were challenged, the focus at that point was on how gay men appropriated restrooms in subversive ways to facilitate cruising, to “promote rather than prohibit visual, and ultimately physical, exchanges between bodies.”98 The debates that emerged in the middle of the 2010s in the United States around trans access to public restrooms became a call to suggest specific and comprehensive design proposals to address the safety of trans people, to go further than the transformation of single-stall accessible restrooms into gender-neutral restrooms that were already being implemented in many places.99 Stalled! ’s approach to the transformation of public restrooms suggest that the typology itself must be rethought to challenge social shifts that are relatively recent but are taken for granted. Other trans thinkers have similarly focused on restrooms to highlight how they are framed as spaces for the production of masculinity and femininity.100 They suggest that projects 158

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Figure 5.12 Stalled! Airport Prototype. Joel Sanders Architect, 2017.

like Stalled! are useful in creating safer spaces, but also that discussions of restrooms often dominate discussions of the relation between trans bodies and architecture at the expense of a broader rethinking of how gender is understood in relation to the built environment. For example, Lucas Crawford has developed a “theory of transgender architecture” that builds on architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s critiques of gender in projects like the Blur Building or the Brasserie to suggest that architecture should be thought of much more fluidly.101 Sanders’s engaged practice with Stalled! is the result of more than two decades of thinking about queer issues. An emerging generation has also started to explore similar issues, often while still in school. An example of this is the qspace initiative, founded by Lauren Johnson and Ryan Day, two recent graduates building on their experience with Columbia University’s qsapp (Queer Students A P P LY I N G Q U E E R S P A C E T H I N K I N G

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Figure 5.13 QSPACE. Coded Plumbing, New York, 2016.

of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation). qspace’s research and objectives interestingly targets both public education and support for lgbt+ organizations in architecture schools. Their projects invite a broad audience to understand the biopolitical framing of gender and sexuality in everyday spaces, as exemplified by a May 2017 intervention where they discussed the topic with strangers in Times Square (Crossroads Conversations, in collaboration with the Van Alen Institute). Coded Plumbing (Figure 5.13, 2016–17) focuses on similar issues to these addressed in Sanders, Stryker, and Kogan’s Stalled!, but instead of proposing new design solutions and strategies it invites the public to unravel the laws and standards that create exclusionary spaces before thinking about new standards.102 Sanctuary (2017–19), developed with students from qsapp, explored the implications of safe space theory for queer homeless youth by drawing from various disciplines of the built environment.103 In similar ways to the 1970s and 1980s feminist approaches to architecture and planning that focused on popular education and service, qspace’s projects bring together non-experts and professional to learn together and think about ways to change their environment. In addition to their public education mission, qspace’s research and objectives interestingly 160

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aims to support lgbt+ organizations in architecture schools.104 Their desire to work for queer students is based on a recognition that hidden assumptions still exist regarding gender and sexuality in our relatively conservative discipline, but also that gender and sexuality are important factors in the well-being of students. By underlining and exposing the power structures implicit in spatial organizations and design methods, such projects multiply the agents of change and queer the roles of professionals. Senior retirement projects, the Office for Political Innovation, mycket, Stalled!, or qspace are only a few of the current initiatives seeking to bring attention to how lgbt+ people experience the built environment. These projects blend the historical and theoretical frameworks of earlier research with a desire to change the practices of design and architecture in both incremental and radical ways. Their practices underline the importance of thinking about aesthetics and ethics in parallel, while simultaneously highlighting the tensions created by architecture’s overwhelming focus on visual aesthetics over other senses. This visual focus is shaped by normative understandings such as the association of domestic architecture with the feminine that contributes to a privileging of the visual impact of public architecture’s formal vocabulary. As such, these practices underscore the need for a rethinking of the use of aesthetic concerns in design.

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Conclusion A Queer Use for a Queer Place

There are no explanations – only indications. Jacob Fabricius, 20091

When asked to describe my dream house as a child, I always thought of a glass house. I soon learned, however, that such a house raised many questions about “respectability” – that a glass house would not protect my privacy as a house should, that unless I lived remotely it would expose me to the gaze of others. Architecture school would later teach me that some of the best-known houses of the twentieth century – Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House and Philip Johnson’s Glass House – were indeed glass boxes in open landscapes. While this transparency is now happening even in urban settings, as Terence Riley points out in the catalogue for The Un-Private House,2 debates around the privacy of contemporary online networks point to the still relevant questions that surround the protection of intimacy, domesticity, and private life. The enthusiastic response to the insertion of the public gaze in the private house by some historians, architects, and clients has been questioned by other commentators as it leaves aside many of the impacts of this transparency as well as the conditions allowing it. It, however, underlines the changes that have transformed our perception of privacy. My childhood questions came back to me years later as I began a PhD in architecture and started thinking about architecture’s obsession with the oppositions of inside and outside, open and closed, private and public, etc. Whereas many mainstream architectural publications reiterate these oppositions, I have shown that a growing

number of texts, installations, and built projects question their relevance. They suggest that these binary points of view do not reflect the fluid complexity of actual spaces and are often based in normative understandings of social issues. I came to this research project with a desire to understand how sexuality and gender play a role in the design and use of space, not as essentializing characteristics, but as two of the multiple lenses through which we understand the world around us, including our built environment. As Alice Friedman has shown in her analysis of modern houses, including the Glass House and the Farnsworth House, the domestic environment and challenges to its normative traditions are closely linked to beliefs about gender and sexuality.3 I initially came to question private and public oppositions through my interest in sexuality and its relation to space; they are, however, inextricably linked with many other aspects that impact design decisions and use of spaces. Using these oppositions to understand spaces prevents transformations of design paradigms that could improve the well-being of many people who do not or cannot correspond to the typical user targeted by normative designs. The research project at the heart of this book thus seeks to assert the potential of a queer perspective on architectural design, history, theory, and education: a politically responsible approach that can create more inclusive, more integrated, and safer buildings and neighbourhoods for everyone. The genealogy of queer space discourses and critiques shows that they vary greatly – from limited analysis of spaces occupied by gay, lesbian, bisexual, or trans people, to nuanced understandings of how a queer perspective allows for new readings of space. Challenges to normative understandings of privacy have been at the core of discussions, from the queering of spaces perceived as public such as bars and parks – presenting queer acts and uses as a layer within a multitude of layers creating public spaces – to understandings of domestic space with a queer lens, following the lead of feminists. Such discussions have been more sustained and continuous in the art world; in architecture they slowed down after an initial burst in the mid-1990s, but have recently emerged again in an increasingly diverse range of venues and publications – including more institutional ones such as Venice, where in 2018 curators Pierre-Alexandre Mateos, Rasmus Myrup, Octave Perrault, and Charles Teyssou staged the exhibition Cruising Pavilion as a critique of the official Venice Biennale.4 Recent developments surrounding lgbt+ senior housing as well as the ongoing repression of trans bodies in public restrooms show that we are not yet at a point where a complete history of queer space theory or of the thinking about the interaction of gender, sexual orientation and architecture can be accurately and comprehensively sketched. Many of the critiques associated with queer theory

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– and particularly the call to be more intersectional, inclusive, and representative of the broad diversity of people outside of privileged male subjects – have not been successfully addressed by architectural theorists, and even less so by practicing architects. This book is in many ways an attempt to resist architecture’s generalization of queer space. In the rare cases where the idea is discussed, it often falls victim to a tendency to attempt identifying characteristics that would make a space essentially queer because it is built for – oriented towards – lgbt+ users or designed by a non-heterosexual designer or architect; there are, however, more nuanced theorists, often from outside architecture, who have inspired my work. Building on the case studies, a queer space approach is a political stance on architecture and an opportunity to design in a more inclusive way, one that acknowledges shifting self-identifications and questions normative understandings of gender and sexuality as belonging strictly to the private or to the domestic sphere. A queer design is informed by everyone’s need to be able to control how their selfidentifications are expressed through their living spaces; it includes sexual orientation, gender, and sexual identity, but also takes into account the role one’s background, age, race, wealth, and/or gender may play in how spaces are experienced and lived. Still today, for many architects and designers, project-based thinking seems to mean assuming that, if they do a good project, users will automatically be safe and happy, without questioning what “good” means and for whom a project is “good.” In parallel, however, other disciplines have been thinking in increasingly more sophisticated ways about the complexity of self- and community identifications, merging theory and activism to reflect the political importance of these issues, as well as the very real life-threatening consequences on many people. The last few years have thankfully seen a resurgence of interest in how gender and sexuality play a role in shaping the discipline of architecture as well as in the use and design of spaces. While not all equally pushing forward what architecture can bring to the discussion, recent discussions and projects are making more visible the issues and calling for the discipline to once again become more socially and politically active to reflect the importance that architecture has on everyone’s lives. While theoretical investigations have played a role in architecture for a long time, for example in Le Corbusier’s city plans or Peter Eisenman’s numbered houses, the integration of these ideas into actual buildings or cities is the goal for most architects. As such, it is not surprising that many of the architects involved in the early queer space exhibitions later moved their critiques to the development of built projects. Similarly, although artists do not have the same urge to 164

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apply their insights to lived practical experiments, Elmgreen & Dragset, when it came time to build the Pumpwerk, their own live-work space, integrated many of the ideas they had played with in their work. The Pumpwerk and the boom projects show, however, that critiques easily presented through installations are hard to translate into actual architectural designs, particularly when attempting to reconcile ethical considerations with aesthetics. While these ideas are easily expressed through exaggerated discussions in a gallery space, the move back to living spaces is not always straightforward. Exhibitions present an opportunity to question social issues and make them explicit in a way that everyday spaces seldom can. Social critiques are often present in innovative designs, but the regular use of domestic spaces render them invisible for most users. When made too explicit, they risk becoming obnoxious, tiring for the occupants, unliveable, the public exhibition taking over the possibilities for self-performance. The consciously public transformation of the dwelling exposes critiques in a similar way to exhibitions, but it can hardly be a universal design solution. These critiques must instead serve as a base point for rethinking how we design and experience domestic spaces in relation to the performativity of self-identifications, carefully making sure that less privileged groups are taken into account. Queer ideals will only be achieved when discussions – and even more so completed architectural projects – fully include and consider the different needs of women, non-white, poor, and other marginalized people. The projects studied also question the relationship between architecture and its representations and between traditional forms of architecture and spatial experimentations by artists and architects. For example, Elmgreen & Dragset’s large and complex transformations of space underline the varying uses and possibilities of architecture and art. Notwithstanding the absence of technical training of Elmgreen & Dragset requiring the assistance of licensed architects in many of their larger projects, the major reorganization of gallery spaces undertaken by the artists are architectural endeavours even if they do not consider themselves architects. Their mise en espace creates complete spaces that could almost be really inhabited, but Elmgreen & Dragset’s use of irony and subverted tropes highlight their critiques of architectural and social structures instead of the liveability of the spaces. Architectural installations similarly insist on the rhetorical potential of spatial manipulations and are therefore used prominently to present social critiques, such as the feminist and queer critiques discussed. The critiques, however, often lose their coherence or disappear when architects start developing projects that must satisfy regulations, budgets, and other constraints, even if that often means that the projects do not fully satisfy users’ individual needs and self-identifications. A project like House Rules attempted to address CONCLUSION

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that issue by asking the teams to conform to typical regulations and norms, but the tensions in some of the discussions between the architects and theorists underline the challenges linked to creating a socially responsible architecture. Recent projects by mycket or the Office for Political Innovation show, however, that architects can learn from artists’ spatial interventions – combining formal and social manipulations – to develop new forms of architecture that better respond and consider the diversity of needs experienced by people and especially allow for a user’s subtle control over the visibility and “publicness” of their domestic space. Queer space works and theory complicate discussions of space in oppositional terms that are omnipresent in architectural discourse. These binary understandings do not reflect the fluid complexity of actual spaces and are often based in normative views on social issues. Furthermore, the blurring of limits between art and architecture in the cases studied mirrors the fluidity of private and public underlined by queer space theorists. Their creators bring the visitors face to face with their own assumptions and values, underlining how these are constructed and how they play a role in understanding how others live. Visitors are confronted with the ways in which they make assumptions about how people live and who they are by looking at their living space, making allegedly private space very public billboards. Because they exist as representations of spaces, both real and imagined, these installations are comprehended as discursive tools. Their position between disciplines further questions our relation to space, underlining how we often forget to question how spatial designs, by both architects and users, contribute to one’s self-identification. The projects studied ultimately share the implication that not only is the often-reiterated distinction between public and private irrelevant when discussing domestic spaces, but that people consciously set up their dwellings to perform their self-identifications. Their living environment is designed not only to sustain their daily life, but also to support or subvert their relation to social assumptions about identity. However, these enactments often appear in relation to existing spaces: a dweller transforms a space they move into, personalizes a house designed by someone else, and adds meanings to the initial space. As the works by Elmgreen & Dragset discussed here imply, these changes are developed in relation to shared social and cultural symbolism associated with spaces that are assumed to attach to specific identifications. By highlighting these critiques, the artists and architects studied move away from a simplistic understanding of queer space as strictly attached to sexual orientation and gender toward a broader, more all-encompassing approach that intersects various elements of identities and self-identifications, pointing out specifically how class and race play a role 166

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in making more or less visible and safe sexual orientation, gender inequalities, etc. However, the difficulties that arise when those elements are integrated or taken into account in the development of built spaces point out the complexity of such interplay between different layers of identities and self-identifications. Early queer space theorists and practitioners in architecture have already played an important role in architectural education in academic institutions (for example Beatriz Colomina, John Paul Ricco, or Mark Robbins) and museum and galleries (for example Henry Urbach or Mark Robbins).5 They have led to an opening towards diversity in architecture, as well as an increasing interest in the potential of social theory and critical installations in moving forward the discipline. Moving from critical installations to architectural education, the discipline is now ready, I believe, to clearly acknowledge how all identities are essential elements in the design and use of not only domestic environments, but also all architectural and urban spaces. Traditional divisions between private and public force an understanding of spaces as either driven by social networks or family life. Acknowledging that domestic spaces are spaces where public displays of both collective and self-identifications also happen highlight how architecture is always political. A firm knowledge of the social and political issues at play in architectural design must thus become part of the architectural curriculum as much as programmatic, technical, or formal aspects, as I discuss in a recent article.6 As interest in queering architecture regains momentum, it must be channelled into a rethinking of our pedagogical methods to ensure that future designers know about the transformative potential of queer methods. An important part of early queer scholarship focused on identities and visibility. If notions of identities and self-identifications have been increasingly problematized, these discussions still need to be more widely shared. There are still many examples of oppression across the world – such as the ongoing attempts to control trans bodies in public bathrooms rendered visible by “bathroom bills” or the impossibility of hiding from repressive regimes in many countries, even on social networks7 – and the visibility of positive and diverse role models remains one of the most effective way to transform society. Rendering queer lives – and their diversity – visible through the discussion in schools of queer people’s use and design of architecture is thus important. Queer architectural pedagogies – and more broadly queer design methods – must seek a global approach that moves away from the white North American and European focus that has nurtured and framed much of queer space theory. Instead such pedagogies must acknowledge the diversity of ways that people experience their self and collective identifications, particularly in relation to gender and sexuality. Similarly, discussions must move away from focusing on high design aesthetics toward a diversity CONCLUSION

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of aesthetics and challenge everyday, “banal” and “ordinary” spaces, spaces that are experienced more broadly by those who suffer the most from their oppression. A queer perspective is closely entangled with other architectural pedagogies, and particularly those of feminist and critical race educators, seeking to support diversity, equity, and inclusion in schools and in the profession.8 Accordingly, this brings a lack of role models for younger architects and interior designers identifying as lesbians, which impacts confidence, as suggested by a 2015 survey from the Architect’s Journal. In this uk-based survey (where “gay” is used to talk about gay, lesbian, and bisexual people), “just a third [of lgb architects] said they saw openly gay employees at senior levels in the profession, and a similar number said they felt discouraged in their careers by the lack of senior gay employees,” highlighting that role models in senior and leadership positions are essential “to demonstrate that sexual orientation is not a barrier to success in the construction industry.” More worryingly so, “just one in five gay architects said they saw support from senior colleagues in industry, and 86 per cent said they wanted to see more support from senior employees.”9 Follow-up surveys showed other worrying trends, with the 2018 survey showing a drop to 73 per cent of the number of lgbt+ respondents saying they were out in their practice, compared to 80 per cent in 2016, and 30 per cent of respondents feeling that being lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or trans has created barriers to their career progression, rising from 24 per cent in 2016, with obvious impacts on mental health and productivity.10 We need to challenge the assumptions about what constitutes architecture, about the bodies for which architecture is designed, about how design can be understood, and about how the design professions frame the way we understand our work. Is the role of architects solely to design “good” projects, or is it to be engaged citizens as built environment experts? The projects discussed here suggest that a queer ethics of design could exist, but that this ethics – like queer thinking itself – is hard to define. And maybe this difficulty defining a queer ethics is a good thing: queer thinking challenges normative understandings that support categories and the existence of positivist truths. As such, encouraging architects and designers to question and challenge the apparent neutrality of their profession and the hidden assumptions (such as the binary understandings of public and private) that sustain its practice can be done by replacing these assumptions with other ones. If early queer studies in architecture approached aesthetics with the intent to identify specific characteristics that would distinguish spaces designed by or for non-heterosexuals, later uses of queer aesthetics instead sought to draw attention to ethics. Going back to Philip Johnson, so omnipresent in discussions of queer domestic architecture, while it can be argued 168

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(as Richard J. Williams does) that his architecture might be “queer, in other words, because Betsky and others say it is, rather than because it is based on much evidence,”11 his Glass House nonetheless challenges traditional understandings of domesticity. The house is interesting not because it offers clues as to what could constitute “queer architecture,” but because it opens up multiple interpretations and questions that can help think about the assumptions that shape our built environment and traditional understandings of domesticity. Learning from this, we need to imagine approaches that refrain from looking for a single truth behind design impulses and instead welcome uncertainty, experimentation, and productive messiness.

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Figures

2.1 Queer Space exhibition poster, 1994, Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York. Credit: Storefront for Art and Architecture 30 2.2 repohistory. Queer Spaces, from Queer Space exhibition, 1994, Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York. Credit: repohistory 32 2.3 Gordon Brent Ingram. “Open” “Spaceueer Space,” from Queer Space exhibition, 1994, Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York. Credit: Gordon Brent Ingram 33 2.4 Mark Robbins and Benjamin Gianni. Detail from Family Values (Honey, I’m Home), 1997. Credit: Mark Robbins and Benjamin Gianni 36–7 2.5 Jürgen Mayer. Housewarming: Guest Book, 1996, disappeared group show curated by John Paul Ricco, Randolph Street Gallery, Chicago. Credit: Jürgen Mayer H 41 2.6 Jürgen Mayer. Lie, 1997, HOM -Y Collection group show curated by Henry Urbach Architecture, Gramercy International Art Fair, New York. Credit: Jürgen Mayer H 43 2.7 Joel Sanders and Jonathan Crary. “Sight Specific,” from House Rules exhibition, 1994, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, oh. Credit: Joel Sanders and Jonathan Crary 47 2.8 House Rules exhibition, 1994, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, oh. Credit: Mark Robbins 48 2.9 Benjamin Gianni and Scott Weir. “Playing It Straight,” from House Rules exhibition, 1994, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, oh. Credit: Benjamin Gianni and Scott Weir 50 2.10 Joel Sanders, Architect. House for a Bachelor, unbuilt, 1998, Minneapolis. Credit: Joel Sanders, Architect 56 2.11 Joel Sanders, Architect. House for a Bachelor, unbuilt, 1998, Minneapolis. Credit: Joel Sanders, Architect 58

2.12 Joel Sanders, Architect. House for a Bachelor, unbuilt, 1998, Minneapolis. Credit: Joel Sanders, Architect 59 3.1 Mark Robbins. Households, 2006, “Giuseppe, 39, Jonathan, 35, 10 years, New York City, 2002.” Credit: Mark Robbins 68 3.2 Mark Robbins. Summer Places & Households, 2003–04, The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. Credit: Mark Robbins 69 4.1 Elmgreen & Dragset. Powerless Structures, Fig. 122 (Two Doors), 2000; Powerless Structures, Fig. 123 (One Door Two Handles), 2000; Powerless Structures, Fig. 129 (Corner Door), 2000; Powerless Structures, Fig. 133 (Triple Door), 2002. Credit: Elmgreen & Dragset/Galleri Nicolai Wallner 83 4.2 Elmgreen & Dragset. Powerless Structures, Fig. 44, 1998. Credit: Pez Hejduk/Elmgreen & Dragset 83 4.3 Elmgreen & Dragset. Cruising Pavilion/Powerless Structures, Fig. 55, 1998, Marselisborg Forest, Århus, and 2017, Mindeparken, Århus. Photo credit: Anders Sune Berg (exterior); Elmgreen & Dragset (interior) 84 4.4 Elmgreen & Dragset. How Are You Today, 2002, Galleria Massimo de Carlo. Credit: Thor Brødreskift 88 4.5 Elmgreen & Dragset. Celebrity – The One & the Many, 2010–11, zkm. Credit: Didier Leroi/www.vernissage.tv 89 4.6 Elmgreen & Dragset. Virtual Romeo. Photo from original installation in This Is the First Day of My Life, 2007, Malmö Kunsthall. Credit: Galerie Perrotin 90 4.7 Elmgreen & Dragset. The Collectors, 2009. Danish Pavilion plan, 53rd Venice Art Biennale. Credit: Elmgreen & Dragset/Danish Arts Council/Nordic Committee 92 4.8 Elmgreen & Dragset. The Collectors, 2009, Danish Pavilion, 53rd Venice Art Biennale. Credit: Anders Sune Berg/The Danish & Nordic Pavilions and the artists 92 4.9 Elmgreen & Dragset. The Collectors, 2009, Nordic Pavilion, 53rd Venice Art Biennale. Credit: Anders Sune Berg/The Danish & Nordic Pavilions and the artists 94 4.10 Elmgreen & Dragset. The Collectors, 2009. Nordic Pavilion plan, 53rd Venice Art Biennale. Credit: Elmgreen & Dragset/Danish Arts Council/Nordic Committee 94 4.11 Elmgreen & Dragset. “Untitled (Home Is the Place You Left)” in The Collectors, 2009, Nordic Pavilion, 53rd Venice Art Biennale. Credit: Elmgreen & Dragset/The Danish & Nordic Pavilions 95 4.12 Elmgreen & Dragset. The Collectors, 2009 (with Tom of Finland. Untitled, 1979; Tearoom Odyssey, c. 1968; Black Magic, 1984; No Swimming, from the amg Series, 1965; The Loggers, from the amg Series, 1974; David, a Beauty, 1989; Tom’s David, 1981), Nordic Pavilion, 53rd Venice Art Biennale. Credit: photo by Anders Sune Berg/The Danish & Nordic Pavilions and Elmgreen & Dragset; works by Tom of Finland Foundation 96

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4.13 Elmgreen & Dragset with script by Trevor Stuart. Real Estate Agents, 2009, Danish Pavilion, 53rd Venice Art Biennale. Credit: Screenshots from How Are You, directed by Jannik Splidsboel, 2011 97 4.14 Elmgreen & Dragset. The Collectors, 2009, Danish Pavilion, 53rd Venice Art Biennale. Credit: Anders Sune Berg/The Danish & Nordic Pavilions and the artists 98 4.15 Elmgreen & Dragset. “Death of a Collector,” from The Collectors, 2009, Nordic Pavilion, 53rd Venice Art Biennale. Photo: Boje Lomholdt 99 4.16 Elmgreen & Dragset. The Collectors, 2009 (with Simon Fujiwara. Desk Job, 2009, and Nina Saunders. Payload, 2009), Nordic Pavilion, 53rd Venice Art Biennale. Credit: Anders Sune Berg/The Danish & Nordic Pavilions and the artists 102–3 4.17 Floor map of Level 3, Victoria & Albert Museum. Credit: Victoria & Albert Museum 106 4.18 Elmgreen & Dragset. Tomorrow, 2013, Victoria & Albert Museum. Credit: Olivier Vallerand/the artists and Victoria Miro, London 106 4.19 Elmgreen & Dragset. Tomorrow, plan, 2013, Victoria & Albert Museum. Credit: the artists and Victoria Miro, London 107 4.20 Elmgreen & Dragset. Tomorrow, 2013 (with Omnes une manet nox (The Same Night Awaits Us All), bed for Louis Vuitton, 2012), Victoria & Albert Museum. Credit: Anders Sune Berg/the artists and Victoria Miro, London 108 4.21 Elmgreen & Dragset. Tomorrow, 2013 (with Table for Bergman, 2009), Victoria & Albert Museum. Credit: Anders Sune Berg/the artists and Victoria Miro, London 108 4.22 Elmgreen & Dragset. Tomorrow, 2013 (with model for Powerless Structures, Fig. 101, 2012, and found objects with High Expectations, 2010), Victoria & Albert Museum. Credit: Anders Sune Berg/the artists and Victoria Miro, London 110 4.23 Elmgreen & Dragset. Tomorrow, 2013, Victoria & Albert Museum. Credit: Anders Sune Berg/the artists and Victoria Miro, London 111 4.24 Nils Wenk and Jan Wiese. Pumpwerk Neukölln, plans, 2007–08, Berlin 116–18 4.25 Nils Wenk and Jan Wiese. Pumpwerk Neukölln, section, 2007–08, Berlin. Credit: Nils Wenk 120 4.26 Nils Wenk and Jan Wiese. Pumpwerk Neukölln, attic lounge, 2007–08, Berlin. Credit: Udo Meinel 121 4.27 Pumpwerk Neukölln interior with Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, Berlin, 2009. Credit: Elmar Vestner 122 4.28 Elmgreen & Dragset. Image from Gayhouse, 2011. Credit: Elmgreen & Dragset 123 5.1 Joel Sanders Architect. The Commons site plan, boom Community, completion on hold, Palm Springs. Credit: Joel Sanders Architect 133 5.2 Joel Sanders Architect. The Commons, exterior view of shared areas, boom Community, completion on hold, Palm Springs. Credit: Joel Sanders Architect 134

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5.3 Joel Sanders Architect. The Commons, “Birdcage” and “Golden Girls” dwellings plans, boom Community, completion on hold, Palm Springs. Credit: Joel Sanders Architect 135 5.4 Mayer H. Puzzle.Buzz, boom Community, interior view of residences, completion on hold, Palm Springs. Credit: J Mayer H 136 5.5 Diller Scofidio + Renfro. The Waves, boom Community, townhouses, completion on hold, Palm Springs. Credit: Diller Scofidio + Renfro 137 5.6 Gensler Architects. Plans for The Center on Halsted’s Town Hall Apartments, 2014, Chicago. Credit: Gensler Architects 139 5.7 mycket with Maja Gunn and the New Beauty Council. The Club Scene of Gothenburg 1980–2013, “Exclude Me In,” gibca 2013. Credit: mycket with Maja Gunn and the New Beauty Council 147 5.8 mycket with Maja Gunn and the New Beauty Council. Carnival from “Exclude Me In,” gibca, 2013. Photo: Maja Gunn 147 5.9 Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation. IKEA Disobedients. Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Architecture & Design Purchase Fund (2012) 151 5.10 Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation. IKEA Disobedients. Credit: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Architecture & Design Purchase Fund (2012) 152–3 5.11 Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation. Intimate Strangers. Fear and Love: Reactions to a Complex World exhibition, Design Museum, London, 2016. Credit: Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation 156 5.12 Joel Sanders Architect. Stalled! Airport Prototype, 2017. Credit: Joel Sanders Architect 159 5.13 qspace. Coded Plumbing, New York, 2016. Credit: qspace 160

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Notes

Introduction

1 Preciado, “Architecture as a Practice,” 121. Since 2015, Preciado uses Paul B. Preciado as his name. 2 Queer Nation, Queers Read This. 3 Stryker, “Queer Nation.” 4 de Lauretis, “Queer Theory: An Introduction,” For a deeper introduction to queer theory refer to Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction. 5 Butler, Gender Trouble; Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet; Halperin, Saint Foucault. 6 For a discussion of the relation between identity, identification, and visual culture, see Jones, Seeing Differently. 7 This focus appeared despite Jencks’s discussion of the social impacts of modernism and postmodernism in The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. 8 For more on the potential of queer formalisms, see Doyle and Getsy, “Queer Formalisms.” 9 See for example Friedman, Women and the Modern House or Bonnevier, “A Queer Analysis of Eileen Gray’s.” 10 Duncan, “Renegotiating Gender and Sexuality,” 128. 11 Thinkers associated with feminist and queer theory (outside of the architectural discipline) such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Elizabeth Grosz, or Diana Fuss have also participated in exhibitions and collections of texts. See for example Colomina et al., Queer Space; Moon et al., “Queers in (Single-Family) Space”; Grosz, “Bodies-Cities”; Fuss and Sanders, “Berggasse 19: Inside Freud’s Office.” Sanders also noted that discussions with Diana Fuss helped him develop the thinking about gender and space that led to Stud, among other things. (Joel Sanders, phone interview with author, 26 Feb 2014.)

Chapter One

1 Ahmed, “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology,” 543. Ahmed has also developed the argument made in this shorter article in a book: Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology. 2 See for example Anthony, Designing for Diversity; Berkeley and McQuaid, Architecture: A Place for Women; Brown, “Room at the Top?”; Vytlacil, “The Studio Experience”; Grant, “Accommodation and Resistance”; Travis, African American Architects; Ahrentzen, “The F Word in Architecture”; Booth, “Breaking Down Barriers”; or Adams and Tancred, Designing Women for a more detailed account of women architects’ experience in Canada. Further research has been done on the under-representation of gender and race in architectural history and education, for example in the Journal of Architectural Education September 1993 special issue on gender and multiculturalism in architectural education: Groat, “Architecture’s Resistance to Diversity”; Ahrentzen and Anthony, “Sex, Stars, and Studios”; Mark Paul Frederickson, “Gender and Racial Bias in Design Juries.” See also Groat and Ahrentzen, “Reconceptualizing Architectural Education for a More Diverse Future”; Gürel and Anthony, “The Canon and the Void”; Bell, “The Background on Architecture Education.” 3 Beecher and Stowe, The American Woman’s Home. 4 See, for example, Hayden, “What Would a Non-Sexist City Be Like?”; Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution; Weisman and Birkby, “The Women’s School of Planning and Architecture”; Matrix, Making Space; Matrix, A Job Designing Buildings; Grote, “Matrix: A Radical Approach to Architecture”; Coleman, Danze, and Henderson, eds, Architecture and Feminism; Ahrentzen, “F Word”; Shonfield et al., This Is What We Do; Ahrentzen, “Space between the Studs”; Petrescu, Altering Practices; Stratigakos, A Women’s Berlin; Brown, ed., Feminist Practices: Interdisciplinary Approaches; Cahn, “Project Space(s) in the Design Professions”; Stratigakos, Where Are the Women Architects?; Dwyer and Thorne, “Evaluating Matrix”; Boys and Dwyer, “Revealing Work.” 5 Adams, “Sex and the Single Building” 82. 6 Ahrentzen, “Space between the Studs.” 7 For example, the Architectural Association Library’s 2005 selective bibliography on the digital lists already over 100 books and articles (Aileen Smith, New Media/Digital Architecture: A Selective Bibliography, Oct 2005, Bibliography, Architectural Association Library, London.). The large number of books devoted to digital works as well as their enthusiastic titles – see for example Jones, Unbuilt Masterworks of the 21st Century – underline the optimistic interest in the digital’s potential for architecture. For more on the relation between digital culture and architecture, see Picon, Digital Culture in Architecture.

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8 Somol and Whiting, “Notes around the Doppler Effect”; Baird, “‘Criticality’ and Its Discontents.” 9 Sanders, “Introduction,” 17. 10 Davidson and Hatcher, “Introduction,” 7. De Tocqueville’s De la démocratie en Amérique (Brussels: Méline, Cans & cie, 1835 [vol.1] and 1840 [vol.2]) is one of the only contemporaneous texts examining the situation of women in American society that was widely read in the early twentieth century. De Tocqueville’s description of women being “[circumscribed] within the narrow circle of domestic interests and duties and [forbidden] to step beyond it” (Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America [New York: Knopf, 1945]) resonated with feminist historians’ observations that notions of women’s sphere permeated the language of historical discourse. Davidson and Hatcher note that de Toqueville’s discourse “might have had special appeal in the post-World War II era … as an explanation for what was happening, ideologically, in the American 1950s as white, middle-class women … were being encouraged to return to their domestic roles as wives of returning gis” (“Introduction,” 9–10). Linda K. Kerber further points out that, following Friedan’s success at describing the situation of post-war women in The Feminine Mystique, feminist historians argued that American women’s history had to be understood through a prism of ideology congruent with a Marxist conceptualization of a dichotomy between public and private modes of life that envisioned the “world-historical defeat of the female sex” as a shift in control of space where “the man took command also,” household management losing its public character to become a private service. (Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place,” 30.) See also Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood”; Lerner, “The Lady and the Mill Girl”; Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 120; 37. 11 Davidson and Hatcher, “Introduction,” 10–12. 12 This chapter focuses on “separate spheres” theory’s influence on discussions of architecture and most particularly domestic spaces. An important literature exists, however, on the place of a private-public dichotomy in the understanding of women’s use of urban spaces in architecture, urban history, and social geography, underlining the exclusion from analyses of the city of women’s domestic labour and privatized consumption. See for example Stimpson, Women and the American City; McDowell, “Towards an Understanding,” 62; Ryan, Women in Public; Weisman, Discrimination by Design; Massey, Space, Place, and Gender; Drucker and Gumpert, eds, Voices in the Street; Bondi, “Gender, Class, and Urban Space”; Deutsch, Women and the City; Miranne and Young, Gendering the City; Bingaman, Sanders, and Zorach, Embodied Utopias. Susan Drucker and Gary Gumpert also underline the ambiguous state of new spaces such as shopping malls, often seen as women’s spaces and understood as a “semipublic/semiprivate space that functions in a different way than other sites of

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public interaction … There is ambiguity between the public and private nature of the mall” (Drucker and Gumpert, “Shopping, Women, and Public Space,” 127). Importantly, Liz Bondi presents a critique of feminist urban studies that emphasizes that gender divisions are socially constructed, arguing that they too often exclude sexuality and sexual practice (“Sexing the City,” 177–200). Fowler, “The Public and the Private in Architecture,” 449–50, discussing the use of Arendt, The Human Condition in Frampton, “Labour Work and Architecture”; Frampton, “That Status of Man.” Art historian Christopher Reed has further argued that “the home has been positioned as the antipode to high art,” with avant-garde modern artists and architects asserting their accomplishments through contrast with domesticity (“Introduction,” 7). However, Beatriz Colomina has contributed to a rethinking of this separation when analyzing the importance of publicity and mass media not only in the diffusion of modern domestic architectural works but also in their construction and design. She points out, among other things, how bodies (and especially women’s bodies) or their absence are framed in Adolf Loos’s and Le Corbusier’s representations of their works, manipulating the gaze to offer the house as public to underline the split between looking and seeing, between outside and inside (Colomina, Privacy and Publicity; Colomina, “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism”). Torre, Women in American Architecture; Hayden, Grand Domestic Revolution, discussed in Walker, “Home Making,” 823. Fowler, “Public and Private,” 451–3. See for example Heynen and Baydar, eds, Negotiating Domesticity as an example of how this has been developed since. Freedman, “Separatism as Strategy,” discussed in Kerber, “Separate Spheres,” 50–1. Architectural historians such as Annmarie Adams and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz have analysed more closely how public and semi-public buildings were not only gendered as social institutions but also in their design, transposing characters usually associated with the domestic, seen as feminine, to public spaces. Horowitz, Alma Mater; “Designing for the Genders”; Adams, “Rooms of Their Own.” See also the work of Lynne Walker, who proposes to add a new layer to the meaning of the gendered city by challenging common understandings of West End Victorian London as the masculine domain of public life. She suggests that independent middle-class women remapped this masculinized terrain with women’s building and places (Walker, “Home and Away,” 65–75). Wright, Moralism and the Model Home, 3; Wright, Building the Dream, 113. Hayden, Grand Domestic Revolution. Kerber, however, points out that, in the footsteps of Hayden, historians such as Ruth Schwartz Cowan have argued that changes to the definition of the home as women’s sphere were accompanied by changes in household technology with the result that the home became a place of leisure for

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men while it stayed a place of labour for women. Other historians, such as Faye E. Dudden, argued that domestic space was pervaded by class considerations, with the mistress staging the space of her servants in relation to her own space (Kerber, “Separate Spheres,” 51). Hayden, Grand Domestic Revolution, 164–7. Shannon Jackson more recently discussed how Hull House constructed a sort of queer domesticity through the presence of unmarried, nonbiological mothers in family politics and through the constant integration of living and working, and with them the spheres of privacy and publicity. Lines of Activity, 164–87. Matrix, Making Space; Matrix, Job Designing Buildings; Grote, “Matrix”; Merrett, “Radical Pedagogies”; Cahn, “Project Space(s).” Shonfield et al., muf Manual; Brown, Feminist Practices. See also the approach taken in their website http://www.muf.co.uk/ to present their collaborators and projects. Colomina, ed., Sexuality & Space. Lavin, Form Follows Libido. Haar and Reed, “Coming Home,” 270–1. Edwards and Hart, “The Victorian Interior,” 14. Betsky, Queer Space, 27–8. Betsky, Building Sex, 199–201. Haar and Reed, “Coming Home,” 270. I use a classification initially inspired by Borbridge, “Sexuality and the City” and developed in Vallerand, “Homonormative Architecture and Queer Space”; Vallerand, “Regards queers sur l’architecture.” Davis, “The Diversity of Queer Politics,” 293. Davis echoes here what many sociologists have argued: that the notion of community should not be used to define spatially bounded networks. See for example Wellman and Leighton, “Networks, Neighborhoods, and Communities”; Altman and Wandersman, Neighborhood and Community Environments; Fortin et al., Histoires de familles et de réseaux. Castells, The City and the Grassroots, 138–69; Collins, “Sexual Dissidence, Enterprise and Assimilation”; Ruting, “Economic Transformations of Gay Urban Spaces,” 264. Weightman, “Gay Bars as Private Places”; Wolfe, “Invisible Women in Invisible Places.” See for example Adams, “Single Building”; Rault, “Designing Sapphic Modernity”; Rault, Eileen Gray. Betsky, Queer Space. See for example Ward, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” Lieber, “Philip Johnson: Full Scale, False Scale.” He defines this aesthetics as displaying three characteristics: “camp, or an ironic, subversive point of view; drag, or dressing things up to get a theatrical effect or desired

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result; and bricolage, or the assemblage and appropriation of elements – real or referential – to build queer identity for one’s self or to identify one as queer to others.” Boorstein, “Queer Space,” 27 referenced in Anthony, Designing for Diversity, 73. Chauncey, Gay New York and Houlbrook, Queer London. An interesting discussion by Kevin J. Mumford on interracial relations in interaction with homosexuality complements Chauncey’s study in New York and adds turn-of-the-century Chicago: “Interracial Intersections.” See for examples chapters 6 to 9 of Whittle, ed., The Margins of the City and Kenney, Mapping Gay LA. While most accounts have traced the lineage of queer theory most importantly to Foucault’s work after the first volume of The History of Sexuality (Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité), recent scholarship has argued that the whole of Foucault’s career has inspired ideas fundamental to queer theory. See Huffer, Mad for Foucault. Ricco, The Logic of the Lure, 18. The argument was initially presented in Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” and then developed in Butler, Gender Trouble. Halperin, Saint Foucault, 63. Halperin’s definition has been widely repeated, for example in Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, 43, and in Adams, “Single Building,” 82. Ahmed, “Orientations,” 565. Ricco, Logic of the Lure, 141. Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz, “Introduction,” 2. Binnie, “Sexuality, the Erotic and Geography,” 34. Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins,” 1242. In a special issue of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society titled “New Feminist Theories of Visual Culture,” editors Jennifer Doyle and Amelia Jones grouped a series of essays that think about how gender in visual culture is “inextricably entwined (embodied, experienced, thought, and imagined) with other aspects of identity, including race and ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, and class” (Doyle and Jones, “Introduction,” 607). See for example Bell et al., “All Hyped up and No Place to Go”; Bell and Valentine, eds, Mapping Desire; Bell, Binnie, and Holliday, Pleasure Zones. For more recent developments in geography, see Browne, “Challenging Queer Geographies,” 891; Browne, Lim, and Brown, Geographies of Sexualities; Oswin, “Critical Geographies and the Uses of Sexuality”; Blidon, “Jalons pour une géographie des homosexualités.” See for example Urbach, “Spatial Rubbing: The Zone”; Ricco, “Coming Together”; Ricco, “Fag-O-Sites”; Urbach, “Dark Lights, Contagious Space”; Ricco, Logic of the Lure. “A Kind of Queer Geography,” 178–9. Reed, “Imminent Domain,” 64. Reed also connects this idea of “taking place” with

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queer space’s engagement with the past, linking it to the idea of camp. Unlike the analysis of Boorstein, however, Reed’s reading of camp in queer space signifies a broader reclamation “of what has been devalued in a way that exposes (often through exaggeration and incongruity) the structure of assumptions undergirding normative values.” Reed describes his understanding of camp as building on a “recent theorization of camp [that] supplants Susan Sontag’s 1964 ‘Notes on Camp’ with queerer formulations,” such as Andrew Ross, “Uses of Camp,” in No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989), 135–70; Bergman, Camp Grounds; Meyer, The Politics and Poetics of Camp. 55 Bonnevier, Behind Straight Curtains, 22. 56 See for example Oswin, “Deconstructing”; Oswin, “The Modern Model Family at Home in Singapore”; Oswin, “Towards Radical Geographies of Complicit Queer Futures”; Browne, “Challenging Queer Geographies”; Ingram, Bouthillette, and Retter, eds, Queers in Space. 57 Betsky’s case studies focus almost only on male subjects, starting from the Hellenistic gymnasium and Hadrian’s palace, moving in time towards Ludwig II, Oscar Wilde, C.R. Ashbee, Louis Sullivan, Philip Johnson, Charles Moore, or Frank Israel, to finish with an analysis of gay male cruising spaces, baths, and bars, with only passing remarks for women’s spaces or women designers such as Elsie de Wolfe and Julia Morgan. His prejudice is echoed in the existing architectural research on queer space that has been more extensively interested in a variety of gay male domestic spaces, among others Philip Johnson’s Glass House, Harwell Hamilton Harris’s Weston Havens House, du Pont’s Winterthur, Paul Rudolph’s New York apartment, the bachelor pad as typology, and other gay male interiors. Friedman, Women and the Making, 128–59; Adams, “Single Building”; Betsky, Queer Space; Rohan, “Public and Private Spectacles/Paul Rudolph”; Friedman, “Your Place or Mine?”; Wagner, “The Lair of the Bachelor”; Urbach, “Peeking at Gay Interiors.” Among the exceptions are extensive discussions of Eileen Gray’s E.1027 house or Elsie de Wolfe’s interior design work by queer space theorist Katarina Bonnevier and art historian Jasmine Rault (Bonnevier, Behind Straight Curtains; Bonnevier, “E.1027”; Rault, “Fashioning Spaces”; Rault, Eileen Gray). Betsky also briefly discusses De Wolfe in chapter 3 of his Queer Space. Bonnevier and Rault focus on Gray as a queer figure to counter the heteronormatively inclined and much more widely read discussions by Beatriz Colomina and Sylvia Lavin that focus more extensively on Le Corbusier’s relation to the house, presenting Gray as a victim figure more than an empowered designer (Colomina, “Battle Lines: E.1027,” 167–82; Lavin, “Colomina’s Web”) Architectural discussions of nondomestic queer spaces are even fewer and focus almost exclusively on gay male spaces (bars, sex clubs, bathhouses, cruising grounds): Ricco, “Coming Together”; Ricco, Logic of the Lure; Urbach, “Spatial Rubbing: The Zone”; Kapsenberg, “Erotic

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Manoeuvres”; Tattelman, “The Meaning at the Wall.” Some more recent work has, however, started to look at how other queer subjects experience space: Adams, “The Power of Pink”; Crawford, “Breaking Ground”; Crawford, Transgender Architectonics; Morton, “A Visit to Womenhouse,” 166–79; Preciado, “Biopolitical Disobedience.” Betsky, Queer Space, 26. Ibid., 6. Ingram, Bouthillette, and Retter, “Strategies for (Re)Constructing Queer Communities,” 447–56. While earlier studies often focused on police repression on bars, urban parks, spas, or public toilets used by queer people to meet in relative anonymity, more recent discussions have shifted to how control and conflict over who can use a space also come from within community-owned spaces. See for example the documentary by Wu Tsang, Wildness (usa, 2012). Stephanie Schroeder, “Flashback Feminism: Phyllis Birkby and Women’s Environmental Fantasies.” See for example Wright, “On the Fringe of the Profession”; McNeil, “Designing Women”; Adams and Tancred, Designing Women; Sparke, “Elsie De Wolfe and Her Female Clients, 1905–15,” 47–68. Rault, “Fashioning Spaces,” 189–90. Ibid., 191. Michel Foucault, Sexualité. Anthony, Designing for Diversity; Adams and Tancred, Designing Women; Stratigakos, Where Are the Women Architects? See also Booth, “Breaking Down Barriers”; McCorquodale, Ruedi, and Wigglesworth, “Desiring Practices,” 167–82; Hughes, The Architect: Reconstructing Her Practice; Durning and Wrigley, Gender and Architecture. Hayden, Grand Domestic Revolution. Friedman, Women and the Making, 130–1. Ibid., 129. Ibid., 16. Rault, “Fashioning Spaces,” 189. Sanders, “Curtain Wars,” 86–96. Matthews and Hill, “Gay until Proven Straight.” Ibid., 32. Potvin, “The Pink Elephant in the Room,” 6. Vallerand, “Where Are the Lesbian Architects?” Stead et al., “Parlour: The First Five Years.” Page, The Difference. The results cover lesbian, gay, and bisexual architects, conflating lesbian and bisexual women into a broader group. But as the late artist Barbara Hammer stated in 2017

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when establishing a grant exclusively dedicated to lesbian filmmaking, “lesbians have been disappeared once again into the word queer, as they were before with the word gay. It’s so important to acknowledge the multitude of different sexual identities and not collapse everything into one term. Lesbians need to be recognized” (“Barbara Hammer [1939–2019].”) The double discrimination (if not triple or quadruple in some cases) lesbian women experience, combined with the invisibility of sexual orientation, brings specific challenges that need to be recognized. But to do so, lesbian architects must first be acknowledged. 81 Ramchurn, “Is Architecture Really lgbt Friendly?” 82 Waite, “The aj’s lgbt+ Survey.” Chapter Two

1 Reiss, From Margin to Center; Rendell, Art and Architecture. Histories focused on readings of installations as an art form specifically (as opposed to discussions of their relation to architectural practices) have more readily investigated how they situated themselves within social and cultural contexts. See, for example, Suderburg, ed., Space, Site, Intervention. 2 Bonnemaison, Eisenbach, and Gonzalez, “Introduction,” 3–4. Their argument is further developed in Bonnemaison and Eisenbach, Installations by Architects. 3 Lévesque, À propos de l’inutile en architecture, 12. 4 The exhibition, curated following a call for projects, showed works by Jay Critchley, Michelle Fornabai, Rocco Giannetti, Benjamin Gianni, Blake Goble, Paul Halshofer, Gordon Brent Ingram, Martha Judge, Tom Kalin, Adam Kuby, Mao-Jung Lee, Paul Lewis, Jürgen Mayer, Brian McGrath, Mitchell Owen, Cindi Patton, Peter Pelsinski, Robert Ransick, Charles Renfro, repohistory, Mark Robbins, Maura Sheehan, Marc Tsurumaki, Greg Tuck, and Mark Watkins, as well as two panel discussions involving the organizing committee, artists, and architects participating in the exhibition and selected writers (Colomina et al., Queer Space). While the organizing committee is equally divided between men and women, the ratio of male artists and architects (twenty) to female participants (four, not including members of the repohistory collective) is greatly unbalanced. Some of the non-selected proposals were by female architects or artists, but the submissions were there again overwhelmingly from men (Queer Space folder, Storefront for Art and Architecture Archive). These numbers are, unfortunately, not surprising considering the largely masculine state of the architectural world at the time, and still today (Anthony, Designing for Diversity). Of the participants, there are fifteen architects or designers, five artists, one interior designer, one environmental planner and artist, one filmmaker, one social theorist, and one collective of artists and historians.

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5 One of the most celebrated architectural practices to have resisted traditional building and focused on installations and conceptual exhibitions for a large part of their career is Diller + Scofidio (now Diller Scofidio + Renfro), who have themselves strong links to feminist and queer space discourses through their interest in cyborgs and the body and through Elizabeth Diller’s writings. See for example Diller, Scofidio, and Teyssot, Flesh: Architectural Probes; Crawford, Transgender Architectonics. 6 For more on architectural installations and social discourses, see Rendell, Art and Architecture; Bonnemaison and Eisenbach, Installations by Architects. 7 Mays, “Diplomatically Speaking.” 8 Colomina et al., Queer Space Exhibition catalogue, n.p. 9 As Jenna Miller notes in her analysis of the exhibition, “the opening of Storefront’s Vito Acconci and Steven Holl-designed façade panels physically literalizes the blurring of interior and exterior, domestic and public, closeted and out space – perhaps in a manner that overly simplifies some of the subtle complexities at hand” (Miller, “[Gender]Queer Space,” 7). However, this analysis leaves aside the fact that the Storefront’s façade is opened for almost every exhibition. A similar formalist interpretation of what queering space means is visible in the exhibition design by Operatives (Paul Lewis, Peter Pelsinski, Marc Tsurumaki), who later became – without Pelsinki – Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis. Their furniture was designed to disrupt the spatial distinctions created by the gallery’s floor. “In this installation, three stools, a bookshelf, and a table were designed to tactically engage the presence of the basement … The basement slips to the gallery as the gallery leaks to the basement, undermining the binary of the public, clean gallery and the private, dirty basement produced by the floor. By suspending the conventional gallery furniture between these two adjacent spaces, the floor is rendered a site of exchange … Exchanges between the spaces rely on physical, tactile, and corporeal experiences rather than strictly visual ones” (Slip Space in Lewis, Tsurumaki, and Lewis, Situation Normal 58–63). 10 Beatriz Colomina, “Introduction,” in Colomina, Dollens, Sedgwick, et al., eds, Queer Space. 11 repohistory stands for “repossessing” history. For extensive discussions of the project, see repohistory Collective, Queer Spaces, 1994; Hertz, Eisenberg, and Knauer, “Queer Spaces in New York City”; “Queer Spaces,” (Website). 12 “Queer Spaces,” (Website). 13 Reed, “Imminent Domain,” 65–6. 14 The memorial is discussed in Preuss, “A Monument”; Hornstein, Losing Site: Architecture, Memory and Place, 25–59; Vallerand, “Un baiser en continu dans un parc”; Vallerand, “Endlessly Kissing in a Park”; Vallerand, “Endlessly,” and extensively presented in the documentary Splidsboel, “How Are You.”

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Queer Space folder, Storefront for Art and Architecture Archive. McGrath, “Scenes of Emancipatory Alliances,” 178–9. Colomina et al., Queer Space, n.p. “Queer Space Manifestos.” New York: Storefront for Art and Architecture, 1994. Cited in Miller, “[Gender]Queer Space,” 4–5. Pascucci’s project would have been based on his article “Mapping the St Patrick’s Day Parade.” In addition to the exhibited projects, some of the rejected proposals also focused on similar spaces, such as Tattelman’s The Arts Project at the St Marks Baths. Tattelman has further developed his thinking in Tattelman, “Meaning at the Wall”; Tattelman, “Speaking to the Gay Bathhouse.” The question of gender queerness is analyzed extensively in Jenna Miller’s study of Queer Space. For example, she notes the lack of discussion surrounding the place of bathrooms and public restrooms in genderqueer people’s lives: “Still, the issues addressed in Queer Space do not focus extensively on the trouble associated with gender in the queer community. Even though the public bathroom – the hotspot of debate surrounding spatialized transgender issues – is mentioned throughout the Queer Space catalogue, it is not because of debate over the binary exclusion of transgender and genderqueer folk. Rather, it is because of the prominence that public restrooms play in gay male sex culture. The bathroom, which allows for a sense of privacy and intimacy, represents a space coded as queer within the heteronormative public sphere (particularly for those men who had not yet come out). It does not, however, represent a space of security and privacy for genderqueer people. For this population, the seemingly banal public restroom is one of the most threatening spaces.” Miller also notes how the evolution in thinking and visibility surrounding questions of gender conformity in the years since the exhibitions mirrors transformations in the understanding of queer space: “If Queer Space were re-staged today, it would not just be the lags in technology that would show. The gaps in the discourse surrounding queerness with regard to gender are glaringly obvious today, but were not asynchronous with the exhibition’s original staging. Queer space has shifted, just as queer politics, from being based off concepts of Otherness – a notion that accepts the dichotomous presence of a dominant culture and its alternative – to occupying the liminal space, allowing it to shift anywhere within the spectrum.” Miller, “[Gender]Queer Space,” 12; 16–17. Colomina et al., Queer Space, n.p. I use throughout the book the names Jürgen Mayer, Jürgen Mayer H, or J Mayer H according to the name Mayer was using for his practice at the time of the projects discussed. When discussing him directly (in opposition to his practice), I use only Jürgen Mayer. Bibliographical references are made to the name used in the publication referenced.

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24 Robbins and Gianni, “Family Values (Honey, I’m Home).” The collection Architecture of the Everyday exemplifies the growing influence in the 1990s of French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre’s critique of everyday life and concept of the production of space. Critique de la vie quotidienne, vol. 1; Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne, vol. 2; Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne, vol. 3; Lefebvre, La production de l’espace; Stanek, Henri Lefebvre on Space. 25 Colomina et al., Queer Space, n.p. 26 Gianni and Robbins, “Proposal,” quoted in Miller, “[Gender]Queer Space,” 6. 27 Castiglia and Reed remark that Gianni and Robbins’s project celebrates a certain invisibility and assimilation that is also shared by Gianni and Scott Weir’s project for House Rules or Sanders’s House for a Bachelor, both discussed in the next sections. For Castiglia and Reed, such projects build from “an uncritical assumption that the look of queerness in the built environment of the neighborhood must be invisibility.” Castiglia and Reed, If Memory Serves. 28 As Miller notes, the installation of Ransick and Goble’s project includes a nod to domestic spaces with the presence of a bed in a darkened corner. Miller, “[Gender]Queer Space,” 7. 29 Sedgwick, “Wanted: Queer Space Manifestos/Proposals.” 30 Colomina et al., “Something about Space Is Queer.” 31 Ibid. 32 For more on the careers of some of the people involved in the exhibition, see conclusion, note 5. 33 It is also interesting to note that all of them have been associated more or less closely at some point in their career with American East Coast high-profile institutions. 34 Ricco, “Parasol, Setas, Parasite, Peasant.” 35 Mark Robbins, interview with author, Skype, 14 May 2012. 36 While the Storefront for Art and Architecture does not keep a press folder for the exhibition, I uncovered four reviews in general and specialized publication. The longest, Herbert Muschamp’s in the New York Times, spends a few words enumerating some of the projects presented before discussing at large issues of norms and diversity in architecture. Muschamp is particularly critical of what he sees as “evocation, rather than analysis, [forming] the substance of this show.” (“Designing a Framework for Diversity.”) A short and positive review in Architecture, the American Institute of Architects’ journal of record at the time, compares the exhibition with an international conference organized by the Organization of Lesbian and Gay Architects and Designers. Sullivan, “Design Community Celebrates Gay Rights.” See also Butler, “Queer Space”; Kotz, “Queer Spaces.” 37 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: pour une littérature mineure. Discussed in Ricco, Logic of the Lure, 6. In the theory-heavy 1990s, Ricco was not the only one to apply

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Deleuze and Guattari’s writings to an analysis of architecture. For example, Ricco acknowledges the earlier work of Jennifer Bloomer on the notion of “minor architecture” in “A Lay a Stone.” Architectural historian Joan Ockman has also underlined the potential of the minor’s use of a majority language as a seedbed of subversion and transformation in her “Toward a Theory of Normative Architecture,” 123, 52. She suggests that those who have long been excluded from the major territory of architecture (women, African-Americans) might better use an incremental, subtle, and persistent minor architecture instead of relying on a nostalgic reterritorialization (associated with postmodernism) or the shock tactics of a militant avant-garde. Jill Stoner similarly builds from Deleuze and Guattari to propose “a more politicized practice of architecture,” a resistive architecture that counteracts normative architecture’s oppression of the body. Stoner, Toward a Minor Architecture. Finally, Robert E. Somol also uses the concept to discuss the practice of John Hejduk in “One or Several Masters?” Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion, 135, quoted in Ricco, Logic of the Lure, 6. Ricco, “Coming Together.” Berlant and Warner, “Sex in Public,” 198, quoted in Ahmed, “Orientations,” 565. Ricco, Logic of the Lure, 7. For other discussions of such spaces, see for example Urbach, “Spatial Rubbing: The Zone”; Ricco, “Coming Together”; George Chauncey, “‘Privacy Could Only Be Had in Public’”; Tattelman, “Meaning at the Wall”; Tattelman, “Speaking”; Higgins, “Baths, Bushes, and Belonging”; Tattelman, “Staging Sex and Masculinity at the Mineshaft.” With works by Tom Burr, Jürgen Mayer, Derek Jarman, Mark Robbins, Bill Jacobson, Oliver Herring, and Simon Leung. Many of the works exhibited are discussed in Ricco’s Logic of the Lure. Echoing the focus of Ricco’s argument on gay male sex spaces, none of the works exhibited were by women. Ricco, Logic of the Lure, 51–2. I use throughout the book the names Jürgen Mayer, Jürgen Mayer H, or J Mayer H according to the name Mayer was using for his practice at the time of the projects discussed. When discussing him directly (in opposition to his practice), I use only Jürgen Mayer. Bibliographical references are made to the name used in the publication referenced. Burr, “Sleazy City.” Ricco, Logic of the Lure, 52–3. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 57. Mayer Hermann, “Data-Protection Pattern Family”; Mayer H. and Urbach, “Mind the Gap: A Transcript of the Symposium’s Talk.” Since 1994, Mayer has collected and

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archived over 400 different data security patterns motifs. Müller, “The Second Glance,” 63. Jürgen Mayer, interview in author, Berlin, 27 Jun 2011. Ricco, Logic of the Lure, 148. Ibid., 149. Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex,” 13, cited in Ricco, Logic of the Lure, 148. Ricco, Logic of the Lure, 148. In Ricco’s early career this often meant writing for queer zines and sex movement publications, but his current position as a university professor has meant that he is now more tied to the academic model he initially questioned. Ricco, “Coming Together”; Urbach, “Spatial Rubbing: The Zone.” Ricco, Logic of the Lure, 150. Binnie, “Sexuality, the Erotic and Geography,” 32. Michael Bronski, “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes: Notes on the Materialization of Sexual Fantasy,” in Leatherfolk: Radical Sex, People, Politics, and Practice, ed. Mark Thompson (Boston: Alyson, 1991), 64, cited in Binnie, “The Erotic Possibilities of the City,” 109. Regarding the fluidity of queer space, see also Henry Urbach’s idea of the “antecloset” in Urbach, “Closets, Clothes, Disclosure.” House Rules was the first architectural exhibition initiated by the Wexner Center, after the appointment of Mark Robbins as its first curator of architecture in 1993. (Muschamp, “Ten Little Houses and How They Grew”; Blackford, “Wexner Show Confronts Suburban Living,” 28.) The August 1994 24th issue of Assemblage serves as a catalogue for the exhibition and is devoted completely to the idea of analyzing the architecture of the house from specific point of views. For articles more specifically focused on queer analysis, see “On the House,” 6–7; Moon et al., “Queers in (Single-Family) Space”; Crary and Sanders, “Sight Specific,”; Urbach, Randolph, and Tomb, “In Medias Res.” The m oma show was published in Riley, The UnPrivate House. Haar and Reed, “Coming Home,” 271. Robbins invited the following teams of architects and theorists: Joan Copjec/ Michael Sorkin; Jonathan Crary/Joel Sanders; Margaret Crawford/adobe la; bell hooks/Koning Eizenberg Architecture; Silvia Kolbowski/Smith-Miller+Hawkinson Architects; Ellen Lupton/Jane Murphy; Heidi Nast/Mabel Wilson; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michael Moon/Benjamin Gianni, Scott Weir; Allucquere Rosanne Stone/Susan Selçuk, Steven Fong Architecture; and Henry Urbach/The Interim Office of Architecture (chosen from nearly fifty responses to a two-tiered selection process) (Blackford, “Suburban Living,” 28).

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65 Not commissioned specifically for the House Rules exhibition, other artworks by Dan Graham, Keller Easterling, James Casebere, Alan Wexler, Camilo Jose Vergara, Kate Ericson, and Mel Zeigler were also exhibited. Project representations differed between the exhibition and their publication in Assemblage. Jones, “House Rules,” 54. 66 Robbins, “Building Like America,” 9. 67 Hayden, Grand Domestic Revolution. 68 Haar and Reed, “Coming Home,” 273. 69 Robbins, “Building Like America,” 8–9. 70 hooks, Eizenberg, and Koning, “House, 20 June 1994”; Nast and Wilson, “Lawful Transgressions”; Moon et al., “Queers in (Single-Family) Space”; Crary and Sanders, “Sight Specific”; Stone, Fong, and Selçuk, “X + Y - Knots: Sideyardbungalow.” 71 hooks, Eizenberg, and Koning, “House, 20 June 1994.” 72 Moon et al., “Queers in (Single-Family) Space,” 30. 73 Ibid., 34. 74 Bonnevier, “E.1027,” 162. 75 Haar and Reed, “Coming Home,” 272. 76 Ibid., 272. 77 Bonnevier, “E.1027,” 167. 78 See for example Litt, “Reimagining the Single-Family House”; Jones, “House Rules.” 79 Muschamp, “Ten Little Houses.” Mark Robbins mentioned that fact to me in an interview (Skype, 14 May 2012). 80 Muschamp, “Ten Little Houses,” H40. 81 Blackford, “Suburban Living,” 28–9. 82 See also other projects by Sanders in Joel Sanders, Joel Sanders: Writings and Projects. Marc Tsurumaki, who worked with Sanders between 1991 and 1997 and was project architect on “Sight Specific,” later founded Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis. See Lewis, Tsurumaki, and Lewis, Situation Normal; Lewis, Tsurumaki, and Lewis, Lewis. Tsurumaki.Lewis: Opportunistic Architecture; Lewis, Tsurumaki, and Lewis, Lewis. Tsurumaki.Lewis: Intensities. At the same time as “Sight Specific” was developed, Tsurumaki was also part of Operatives, who designed the Queer Space exhibition plan and spatial interventions. 83 The Un-Private House toured after the initial run at the m oma and was exhibited at the mak-Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna (2 Feb–24 Apr 2000), at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (as part of The Home Show, 4 Jun–20 Aug 2000), and at the ucla Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (4 Oct 2000–7 Jan 2001). 84 Riley is also part of the same East Coast scene in which discussions of feminist and queer theory in architectural theory emerged in the mid-1990s. In the five years between House Rules and The Un-Private House, Riley and Robbins collaborated, along with Queer Space author Aaron Betsky, on the multi-venue exhibition Fabrications

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97 98 99 100 101 102 103

104

(1998), where twelve architects or teams elaborated full-scale architectural “inventions.” The m oma exhibition, The Tectonic Garden (curated by Riley), focused on materiality, construction, and context; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art exhibition, Bodybuildings (curated by Betsky), on constructions that engage the body in four specific states; and the Wexner one, Full Scale (curated by Robbins), on responses to perceived needs. See Betsky et al., Fabrications. Colomina, “The Exhibitionist House,” 158, quoted in Riley, The Un-Private House, 13. Colomina, Privacy and Publicity. Muschamp, “Ten Little Houses,” H40. Filler, “m oma Comes Home.” Filler probably refers to the celebrated exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, curated by Emilio Ambasz in 1972. Lavin, Kissing Architecture, 15. Riley, The Un-Private House, 9. Ibid., 9. Terence Riley interviewed in Ned Cramer, “Someone to Watch over Me,” Architecture, Jun 1999, 44. Filler, “m oma Comes Home,” 40. Bernstein, “Rave”; “The Un-Private House: Credits” (Web site). Riley, The Un-Private House, 11. One reviewer strongly criticized the obsession with the computer displayed by many of the exhibited architects: “The contemporary obsession with electronics may (I pray) prove ephemeral. Young architects seem wedded to the computer and may assume everyone else feels the same way. They do not and the more the line between real and virtual is blurred in the public realm, the more people are likely to retreat to a pixel-free zone.” Webb, “The Un-Private House,” 32. Riley, The Un-Private House, 14. Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” 67. Quoted in Riley, The Un-Private House, 15. Riley, The Un-Private House, 28–9. Andrew MacNair, “The Un-Private House,” Archis, Aug 1999, 61. Riley, The Un-Private House, 20. Ibid., quoting Sanders, “Re-‘viewing’ the Bachelor Pad,” unpublished project description, 1998. Sanders, Stud. Sanders’s links to both Riley and Robbins are also visible in his monograph Joel Sanders: Writings and Projects (2004). Riley provides the foreword, while Robbins’s Households project (see chapter 3) is used as visual accompaniment to Sanders’s essay “Curtain Wars: Architects, Decorators, and the Twentieth-Century Domestic Interior.” Sanders, Writings and Projects. Riley, The Un-Private House, 100.

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105 Raymund Ryan, “Seeing through the Modern Home.” 106 The close linking of modernism and bachelor culture in Sanders’s project also brings to mind Playboy’s use of modern architecture in the definition of a mid-century bachelor pad. See Osgerby, “The Bachelor Pad as Cultural Icon”; Preciado, “The Male Electronic Boudoir”; Wagner, “Lair.” 107 Similarly, House Rules, another project not discussed in this book, also dealt with sexuality from an exclusively male point of view. While the description by queer space theorist Henry Urbach of architects John Randolph and Bruce Tomb’s project at first seems to imply that the project was designed for a non-gender specific queer person, upon closer reading it reveals the use of only masculine pronouns. Urbach, Randolph, and Tomb, “In Medias Res.” 108 Joel Sanders quoted in Riley, The Un-Private House, 100. 109 Riley, The Un-Private House, 21. 110 Ibid. 111 Crary and Sanders, “Sight Specific,” 47. 112 Ibid., 40. 113 Riley, The Un-Private House, 26–7. 114 Ibid. 115 See for example “Introduction: Meeting the Myths” in Mary Virginia Lee Badgett, Money, Myths, and Change. 116 For some of the major reviews: Hubertus Adam, “‘The Un-Private House’ im m oma,” ARCH +, Oct 1999, 12–13; Borden, “No Place Like Home”; Akiko Busch, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”; Codrington, “Home Peep Show”; Deitz, “House Rules”; Eicher, “Das Ende der Privatheit”; Filler, “Moma Comes Home”; Gorlin, “The Un-Private House”; MacNair, “The Un-Private House”; Muschamp, “Peeking inside Other People’s Dream Houses”; Ryan, “Seeing”; Schulze, “Redesigning the Domestic”; Searing, “The ‘Un’-Private House”; Webb, “Un-Private House.” The Un-Private House was covered in many more reviews than House Rules. Furthermore, whereas House Rules was presented in Assemblage, a journal with a readership concentrated in academic and theory audiences, with only a few reviews in other periodicals, The Un-Private House was extensively reviewed in general public and professional architecture and design magazines. On Assemblage and its place in architectural discourse, see Schwarzer, “History and Theory in Architectural Periodicals.” 117 While almost all reviewers were impressed with the interactive table, not all of them appreciated the domestic décor: “The exhibition is a stage set with pseudo-domestic rooms. At the entrance to the gallery is a vestibule where a vase of fresh flowers sits on a table (maybe they should have been plastic); a living room grouping is visible in the distance, There, sofas and a coffee table face: the flat-screen tv tuned eternally to the UN Studio: Van Berkel & Bos Möbius House. From the sofas, you can wander

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118 119 120 121 122 123 124

into the dining area or proceed over to architectural models set atop the ‘mattresses’ of two beds. It’s all very campy.” Gorlin, “Un-Private House,” 11. MacNair, “The Un-Private House,” 60–1. Borden, “No Place Like Home,” 48. Doubilet, “A Preview of m oma’s Splashy Summer Show,” 44. Busch, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?,” 33. Ibid. Riley, The Un-Private House, 34. Ibid., 34–5. Chapter Three

1 Urbach, “Peeking at Gay Interiors,” 38. 2 Ibid., 40. 3 See, for example, the cover feature on furniture designer Jonathan Adler and fashion designer Simon Doonan’s residence in the March 2014 issue of the popular home architecture and design magazine Dwell. Rubinstein, “Top Grades.” Interestingly, the feature does not show their bedroom, only a guest room. Urbach had already noted in 1992 this reluctance to portray gay couples’ most “private” space. Urbach, “Peeking at Gay Interiors,” 40. 4 Gorman-Murray, “‘This Is a Disco-Wonderland!,’” 440. See also Pilkey, “Reading the Queer Domestic Aesthetic Discourse.” 5 See for example Osgerby, “Bachelor Pad.” 6 Rohlinger, “Eroticizing Men,” 65. See also Comeforo, “Mis(sed) Representations.” 7 From the publisher’s description for Robbins, Households, consulted on http://www. amazon.ca/Households-Mark-Robbins/dp/1580931642. 8 Mark Robbins, interview with author, Skype, 14 May 2012. 9 Bolton, Culture Wars. 10 Robbins, Angles of Incidence. 11 Robbins, interview with author, Skype, 14 May 2012. 12 Robbins, Angles of Incidence, 8. 13 Robbins, Angles of Incidence, 13–15, 21. 14 Colomina, Sexuality & Space. 15 Morton, “The Building That Looks Back,” 18, discussing Grosz, “Bodies-Cities.” 16 Robbins and Horrigan, “Fashion Plate”; Betsky et al., Fabrications. For the “House Rules” exhibition, see the special issue of Assemblage (“On the House”) and the reviews in architectural magazines (Davidsen, “‘House Rules’”; Jones, “House Rules”; Blackford, “Suburban Living”; Litt, “Reimagining the Single-Family House”) and

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17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28

29 30

31

32 33 34 35

newspapers (Muschamp, “Ten Little Houses,” and its reply by Benjamin Gianni in “Queering (Single Family) Space”). See also chapter 3, note 84. Robbins, “Import/Export”; Robbins, “Of Mies and Men”; Robbins, “Life in Quotes.” Robbins, Households. Households was also reviewed and discussed in architectural magazines (see for example van Schaik, “Home Body”). Colomina et al., Queer Space; Robbins and Gianni, “Family Values.” Robbins, “Model Homes,” 10–11. Horrigan, “Villas and Cottages,” 19. This interest grew out of Robbins’s observations while dating during a period when he was single (Mark Robbins, interview with author, Skype, 14 May 2012). Morton, “Looks Back,” 18. See for example Anderson, “On the Human Figure in Architectural Representation.” While Matthewson argues that later publications of Shulman’s photographic work have presented versions of these images without the “human accessories” to detach the projects from post-war sexist contexts, the prints with women models still circulate and are published in numerous books and articles on the Case Study House Program, for example the cover of Joseph Rosa’s study of Shulman’s work. Matthewson, “Breaking Clichés,” 79–81, 90; Rosa, Constructed View. Rosa, Constructed View, 54. Mark Robbins, interview with author, Skype, 14 May 2012. On gendered representation of human figures in architectural photography, see, for example, Simmins, “Gendered Space and Social Conformity,” on representations of Canadian modernist architecture, or Colomina, “Split Wall,” 102–7, 23, on Le Corbusier’s use of women subjects in representations of his works. For a sense of the context in which Hockney’s early work was being received, see Ofield, “Cruising the Archive.” Silver, “Master Bedrooms, Master Narratives,” 217–20. See also Cécile Whiting’s reading of Hockney’s 1960s depiction of (homosexual) male bodies in relation to the suburban built environment: Whiting, “The Erotics of the Built Environment.” See Donald Judd’s 1966 review of Oldenburg’s Bedroom Ensemble in Claes Oldenburg: Skulpturer och teckningar, 1963–1966, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, reprinted in “Reviews and Writings.” See also Whiting’s reading of Oldenburg’s piece in relation to gender and consumer culture/taste in A Taste for Pop, 78–9. Vincent Huguet, “Les hommes nus dans l’art sont-ils tous gay-érotiques?,” 73. Robbins, “Model Homes,” 10. Urbach, “Peeking at Gay Interiors,” 38. Jones, “House Rules,” 54.

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36 Urbach, “Peeking at Gay Interiors,” 38. 37 Although Robbins does not give surnames to his sitters and limits the descriptive presentations, I could identify at least two persons associated with queer theory and queer space writing: Heather Love, a leading queer theorist, photographed in her student apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2002 (Robbins, Households, 60–1), and Aaron Betsky, author of Queer Space, photographed while he was director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam in 2004 (Robbins, Households, 120–1). 38 Robbins, Households. 39 Urbach, “Peeking at Gay Interiors,” 38–9. The articles analyzed by Urbach include the houses of architects Ron Bentley and Sal LaRosa, button shop owners Millicent Safro and Diana Epstein, architects Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti, tennis player Martina Navratilova, architects Bill Ryall and Ted Porter, and interior designers Jed Johnson and Alan Wanzenberg. 40 Robbins, “Model Homes,” 10. 41 Mark Robbins, interview with author, Skype, 14 May 2012. 42 Robbins, “Model Homes.” 43 For theories of taste and how objects and homes relate to one’s self-identifications, see, for example, Bourdieu, La distinction: critique sociale du jugement; part II of Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, The Meaning of Things; chapters 3 and 5 of Marcus, House as a Mirror of Self; Riggins, “Fieldwork in the Living Room.” Chapter Four

1 See for example Kuzma and Osborne, eds, Art of Welfare; Elmgreen et al., Elmgreen & Dragset; Weibel and Beitin, eds, Trilogy; Iannacchione and Elmgreen & Dragset, eds, Elmgreen & Dragset Performances 1995–2011; Jackson, “Welfare Melancholia”; Splidsboel, “How Are You.” 2 Some of the publications in architectural magazines and books: Alemani, “The Elmgreen & Dragset Show”; Grdadolnik, “Welfare State”; Nicolin, “Ricostruzioni radicali”; Nicolin et al., “Monumento e delitto”; Sommariva, “The Collectors: Elmgreen & Dragset”; Ward, “Broken Homes”; Jodidio, Architecture Now! 5. 3 The duo explains that they met in a bar and discovered they lived in the same apartment building when they decided to go back to one of their apartments for the rest of the night. Interview with Elmgreen & Dragset in Elmgreen et al., Spaced Out. 4 Interview with Ingar Dragset in Hans-Ulrich Obrist, “Performative Constructions,” 27, cited and discussed in Jackson, “Elmgreen & Dragset’s Theatrical Turn,” 14.

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5 Bourriaud, Esthétique Relationnelle, as Shannon Jackson notes in Jackson, “Theatrical Turn,” 14–17. 6 See Foucault, “Des espaces autres”; Foucault and Miskowiec, “Of Other Spaces”; Foucault, Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison. 7 Interview with Ingar Dragset in Elmgreen et al., Spaced Out, 34–5. The apparently random and nonsequential numerical indexing of the series also appears to refer to Marcel Broodthaers’s Musée d’art moderne, Département des aigles (Scorzin, “Elmgreen & Dragset,” 5). 8 See Lefebvre, Vie quotidienne 1; Lefebvre, Vie quotidienne 2, Fondements d’une sociologie de la quotidienneté; Lefebvre, Production; Lefebvre, Vie quotidienne 3, De la modernité au modernisme; Lefebvre, “The Everyday and Everydayness”; McLeod, “Everyday and “Other” Spaces”; Stanek, Henri Lefebvre. 9 Von Hantelmann, “Production of Space,” 62–3. 10 Amelia Jones pointed out to me that the “powerless” doors designed by Elmgreen & Dragset recall Marcel Duchamp’s Porte, 11 rue Larrey, Paris (1927). The blog ioNoi also showed in their 50th and 51st posts that the doors could be linked to other works such as Alison Sky/site’s Door within a Door within a Door… (1986) or Monika Sosnowska’s Doors (2003). See http://www.ionoi.it/index.php?start=1060, accessed 16 Mar 2014. 11 O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube. 12 Interview with Michael Elmgreen in Elmgreen et al., Spaced Out, 34. 13 In the early 2010s, Elmgreen & Dragset proposed to reinstall the Cruising Pavilion at the Westerveld Rest Area along N34 in the Netherlands, in a similar context where cruising amongst men is present. The Scandinavian design references are also concordant with Dutch functionalism references. However, the proposal was never built (Cruising Pavilion presentation book, Elmgreen & Dragset Studio unpublished materials). 14 Elmgreen interviewed in Elmgreen et al., Spaced Out, 35 15 Von Hantelmann, “Production,” 62. 16 Reed similarly notes the queerness of both designed monuments like Amsterdam’s Homomonument and ad hoc vernacular installations like Chicago’s Lincoln Park gardens as ephemeral and not immediately recognizable (Reed, “Imminent Domain,” 65–6). 17 Dragset interviewed in Elmgreen, Dragset, Volz, Hoffmann, & Hantelmann, 2003, 35. Elmgreen & Dragset similarly referenced cruising activities in their later Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism (2008) in Berlin. See chapter 2, note 14. 18 Larsen, “Questioning the Social.” 19 See Elmgreen & Dragset, “The Welfare Show”; Grdadolnik, “Welfare State”; Peter

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20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34

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Osborne, “Elmgreen and Dragset’s The Welfare Show”; “Panel Discussion ed. Kuzma and Osborne; Bishop, “Live Installations and Constructed Situations”; Jackson, “Welfare Melancholia”; part 3 of Weibel and Beitin, Trilogy, 297–369. “Panel Discussion,” 121. Elmgreen & Dragset, “The Welfare Show.” Weibel and Beitin, Trilogy. Weibel and Beitin, “Introduction,” 7. See for example Please, keep quiet! (2003) or Queer Bar/Powerless Structures, Fig. 21 (1998) and Queer Bar/Powerless Structures, Fig. 121 (2005). Elmgreen and Dragset, The Incidental Self; Elmgreen et al., First Day. See for example the documentary about their work by Splidsboel, How Are You, or interviews such as Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, interview with author, London, 16 Oct 2013; Nedo, “We Never Wanted to Do a Normal Job: Elmgreen & Dragset”; Elmgreen et al., Spaced Out. Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, interview with author, London, 16 Oct 2013. Beitin, “The Appearance of Demiurges,” 55. The artists also subtly reference the project in the issue of the magazine Wallpaper they curated around the opening of the Tomorrow exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum. In addition to including a model of the apartment block in the exhibition as an example of the work of the fictional architect inhabiting the space, they note in the biographical article on the character that he is preparing “his long-awaited book, The Individual and the Collective.” Kieran Long, “Home Truths,” Wallpaper, Oct 2013, 234. Elmgreen & Dragset interviewed in Davies-Crook, “Elmgreen & Dragset: The One and the Many.” Anette Østerby, interview with author, Copenhagen, 6 Jun, 2012. Ibid. and Ingar Dragset, interview with author, Berlin, 8 Jun, 2012. For an overview of the transformation and design process, see Splidsboel, How Are You. Elmgreen & Dragset later reused the character Mr B in High Expectations (part of Celebrity – The One & the Many, 2010), where a mannequin of a young Mr B sits in a fireplace, in The Afterlife of the Mysterious Mr B (Galerie Perrotin, Paris, 2011), in which the artists “recreate” two scenes from the youth of Mr B alongside a morgue, in Amigos (Galeria Helga de Alvear, Madrid, 2011), where Mr B’s pool, including his cadaver, is part of a gay sauna, and in Tomorrow (see next section). Eichler, “Another Death in Venice.” The letter, written by the artist Dominic Eichler and originally included alongside a description of the family house by Jacob Fabricius in the calendar available in the Bagalogue distributed to Biennale visitors (a catalogue formatted as a bag of limited edition small artworks from the invited artists), is

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36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51

52

republished in Eichler, “Another Death in Venice,” 268–75. The text, although not written by Elmgreen & Dragset, was developed in collaboration with them and thus reflects some of the ideas the artists had in mind while staging the project. Ingar Dragset, interview with author, Berlin, 8 Jun 2012. Eichler, “Another Death in Venice,” 14. “Cocoloco Performance”; Dall, ‘The Collectors,’ the Danish & Nordic Pavilions, 2. The agents were only present for the first five days of the exhibition (Ingar Dragset, interview with author, Berlin, 8 Jun 2012), but their scripts were partially reprinted in Iannacchione and Dragset, Performances. Excerpts from the tour were filmed for Splidsboel, How Are You, and various art websites. Fabricius, “Hidden Secrets in Brick Houses.” Script excerpts by Trevor Stuart, as recorded in Splidsboel, How Are You. For other examples of references used by Elmgreen & Dragset in thinking about fictional domestic spaces, see Elmgreen & Dragset, “Halfway Houses.” Eichler, “Another Death in Venice,” 13. The letter, reproduced in the bagalogue’s calendar, is also visible in the exhibition on Mr B’s desk. Fabricius, “Hidden Secrets.” Eichler, “Another Death in Venice,” 13. Information on the exhibition background and planning comes from Louise Shannon, interview with author, Skype, 23 Jul 2013, and London, 14 Oct 2013. Michael Elmgreen, interviewed in Martin Herbert, “Tomorrow Is Here,” 55. Wilson and Halle, “Mining the Museum”; Sheehy, ed., Cabinet of Curiosities; Cummings and Lewandowska, “From Capital to Enthusiasm.” Iannacchione and Dragset, Performances, 106–7; “Untitled: Elmgreen and Dragset,” website. Louise Shannon, interview with author, London, 14 Oct 2013; Jennings, “A Deftly Curated ‘House.’” Herbert, “Tomorrow Is Here,” 49. The v&a also invited Cardboard Citizens, a theatre company working with displaced and homeless people, to stage an intervention on 11–12 Oct 2013, conceived independently from Elmgreen & Dragset’s script. The play, written by Adrian Jackson, uses like The Collectors the premise of a series of real estate agents’ viewings, highlighting the issues faced by homeless people. Smith, “Stylish & Spacious Apartment.” Elmgreen & Dragset, Tomorrow: Scenes from an Unrealised Film. The script was initially written to be acted in a specially commissioned televised show for a British channel. When those plans were cancelled, Elmgreen & Dragset decided that it would be even more interesting to have visitors play the script in their heads (Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, interview with author, London, 16 Oct 2013). Michael Elmgreen, interviewed in Herbert, “Tomorrow Is Here,” 49.

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53 Shumi Bose, “Golden Boys,” 156. 54 Bose, “Golden Boys,” 156–9. 55 Powerless Structures, Fig. 101 was Elmgreen & Dragset’s sculpture for Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth the previous year. 56 Martin Herbert notes, in an article published in V&A Magazine to coincide with the exhibition, that Swann is a Proustian name – further confusing the references. Herbert, “Tomorrow Is Here,” 49. 57 Louise Shannon quoted in Adams, “Monumental Cheek.” 58 Elmgreen interviewed in Kahn, “A Blueprint for Misery.” 59 Splidsboel, How Are You. 60 Rattenbur, “Architect Manqué.” 61 From visits to the exhibition on 5, 6, and 14 Oct 2013. See also “What the Butler Saw.” 62 Kahn, “Blueprint for Misery.” 63 Long, “Home Truths,” 234. 64 Elmgreen & Dragset, “Halfway Houses.” 65 Elmgreen interviewed in Compton, “Elmgreen & Dragset: Fictional Homes & Home Truths,” 224. 66 Bose, “Golden Boys,” 156. 67 Louise Shannon, interview with author, London, 14 Oct 2013. 68 Rattenbur, “Architect Manqué.” 69 Ingar Dragset, interview with author, Berlin, 8 Jun 2012. 70 For example in Diederichsen, “When Worlds Elide,” 245; Sangild, “Stærkt Dansk Bidrag Til International Kunstudstilling”; Røssaak, “Queer Space I Venezia”; Macritchie, “Melancholy Giardini.” 71 These views are also clearly expressed in interviews with the artists, for example in Michael Elmgreen’s discussion of same-sex marriage in Splidsboel, How Are You. 72 Eichler, “Another Death in Venice,” 14. 73 Ingar Dragset, interview with author, Berlin, 8 Jun 2012. 74 Herbert, “Tomorrow Is Here,” 51–2. The film script developed by Elmgreen & Dragset to complement the exhibition also contributes to this and is tellingly organized in relation to the different rooms of the apartment. Discussions between the characters are often related to the spaces and objects surrounding them, for example: norman: And which, unfortunately, I could never do. Your designs were, and always will be, the most hideous proof of your banality. Banality ingrained in your dna, your ancestral heritage, if you will. daniel: My ancestral heritage made that kitchen out there, don’t forget. norman: Yes, and what an appalling monstrosity it is, too. […]

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76 77 78 79 80

81 82

83 84 85 86

daniel: If you bothered, Norman, if you bothered. If you’d seen just one single feature on my work in the design magazines … norman: Design magazines?! Good God, Daniel, are you …?! Are you quite mad?! When should I have had time to read journals meant for designers?! daniel: Oh, that’s the attitude, Norman, yes. Same elitist gobbledygook, same old. (from Elmgreen & Dragset, Tomorrow, 48) Bourdieu, La distinction, and particularly the third part on “Goûts de classe et styles de vie” [class tastes and lifestyles]. Bourdieu did not explicitly theorized space in the way other thinkers like Foucault and Lefebvre have done, but his work on the habitus, on the theory of practice, and on the body has inspired numerous geographers and architects. For more on Bourdieu’s contribution to thinking about space, see Bridge, “Pierre Bourdieu.” Bourdieu, La distinction, 84. From Bourdieu, Distinction, 77. Quote in section title from Ingar Dragset, interviewed in Schaer, “On Location: Berlin.” Dragset interviewed in Schaer, “Berlin, with Few Walls.” Nils Wenk, interview with author, Berlin, 1 Jul 2011, and Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, interview with author, London, 16 Oct 2013. Elmgreen & Dragset do not want to disclose the price they paid for the building, but in an interview with the New York Times, Dragset stated that it was “ridiculously low compared to any other European capital … similar to a typical two-bedroom apartment in Oslo,” which, according to the newspaper’s reporter, is about $700,000. The reporter also notes that the renovations cost about the same as the purchase price. See for example Wenk und Wiese Architekten, “Pumpwerk Neukölln.” See for example Donald Judd’s 101 Spring Street home/studio/gallery in SoHo, New York. Sharp, “The House That Judd Built.” A recent restoration of the space has highlighted the challenges associated with preserving such spaces after the artist’s death. Allen, “101 Spring Street by Donald Judd”; Griffin, “Escape from New York”; Mehring et al., “Minimal Impact”; Pearson, “Soho Time Capsule”; Schwartz, “The Art of Gentrification”; Croft, “Conservative Measures.” Dragset interviewed in Schaer, “Berlin, with Few Walls.” Urbach, “Peeking at Gay Interiors.” Schaer, “Berlin, with Few Walls.” Elmgreen & Dragset, Gayhouse by Elmgreen & Dragset. The only image not from the Pumpwerk was a photograph of a naked model in The Collectors (similar to Figure 6.11), which is appropriate considering how Gayhouse, “a gay vaudeville starring young and sexy sneakers men, such as can be found while reading Butt or some other contemporary ‘gayzine,’ dealing with their couple issues,” is a continuation of

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Elmgreen & Dragset’s Venetian project, as the editors of Gayhouse note in “Elmgreen & Dragset’s Gayhouse.” Friedman, Women and the Making, 129. See chapter “People Who Live in Glass Houses” in Friedman, Women and the Making, 128–59. Adams, “Sex and the Single Building.” Colomina, “Battle Lines: E.1027”; Bonnevier, “A Queer Analysis of Eileen Gray’s E.1027”; Rault, Eileen Gray. Rohan, “Public and Private Spectacles,” 140. See also chapter 8, “Turning Inward,” of Rohan, The Architecture of Paul Rudolph. Ingar Dragset, interview with author, Berlin, 8 Jun 2012, and Nils Wenk, interview with author, Berlin, 1 Jul 2011. Ibid. Chapter Five

1 Vallerand, “Home Is the Place We All Share.” Articles in other architectural journals include Hepworth, “Beyond the Closet Door”; Baker, “The Space of the Stain”; Bonnemaison and Macy, “Queering the Grid”; Potvin, “Vapour and Steam”; Adams, “Single Building”; Adams, “Power of Pink”; Potvin, “Askesis as Aesthetic Home”; Vallerand, “Living Pictures”; Potvin, “Pink Elephant”; Vallerand, “Regards queers”; Vallerand, “Learning from …” Major architectural magazines don’t fare much better: Ofield, “Consuming Queerspace”; Ward, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”; Sokol, “Come Out, Join In, Get Off ”; Lepine, “Queer Gothic.” 2 Gürel and Anthony, “Canon and the Void.” 3 Massey, TenHoor, and Korsh, “Introduction: Black Lives Matter.” 4 See issue 5 (Design & Racism) and issue 12 (Racialized Incarceration) of Funambulist. 5 Pogrebin, “Partner without the Prize”; Pogrebin, “Pritzker Decision Stands”; Miranda, “Pritzker Architecture Prize Committee Refuses.” 6 Stratigakos, Where Are the Women Architects? 7 Besner, “#Metoo: The Architecture of Harassment”; Fujiki, “Architecture’s Crisis Is Deeper Than #Metoo”; Hagberg, “A Next Step in Architecture’s #Metoo Movement”; Lee, “Architecture Gives a Star a Free Pass: Why Doesn’t Architecture Care about Sexual Harassment?”; O’Neill, “Is the Industry a Hotbed of Sexism”; Surface, “‘Shitty Architecture Men’ List”; Tarmy, “#Metoo Claims Toppled Architect Richard Meier”; Zeiger, “Year in Review 2018.” 8 See for example the “Becoming a Feminist Architect” issue of Field: Reisinger and Schalk, “Becoming a Feminist Architect.”

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9 Frichot, How to Make Yourself; Frichot, Gabrielsson, and Runting, Architecture and Feminisms; Schalk, Kristiansson, and Maze, Feminist Futures of Spatial Practice. 10 See for example Brown, Merrett, Rafson, Washington, eds, “Now What?!” 11 Cavanagh, Queering Bathrooms; Schilt and Westbrook, “Bathroom Battlegrounds and Penis Panics”; Sanders and Stryker, “Stalled: Gender-Neutral Public Bathrooms”; Sanders, “From Stud to Stalled!” 12 Lewis and Naples, “Introduction” and the accompanying special issue; Jordan, “Un/Convention(al) Refugees”; Moitozo, “Life in an Ethiopian Refugee Camp Is Even Worse When You’re Gay.” 13 Pilkey, Scicluna, and Gorman-Murray, “Alternative Domesticities”; Gorny and van den Heuvel, “New Figurations in Architecture Theory”; Kolb, “Working Queer”; Gorman-Murray and Cook, eds, Queering the Interior; Pilkey et al., eds, Sexuality and Gender at Home; Pilkey, “Reading the Queer Domestic Aesthetic Discourse”; Friedman, “Hiding in Plain Sight”; Tunåker, “No Place Like Home?”; Scicluna, “Thinking through Domestic Pluralities”; Barrett, “Queering the Home”; Angelopoulou, “A Surgery Issue”; Gough, “Trans-Architecture”; Snyder, “Louis H. Sullivan: That Object He Became”; Kokoula, “Opening up Bodyspace”; Angelidakis, “Me as a Building”; Ripley, “Strategies for Living in Houses”; Sanders, “Stalled!: Transforming Public Restrooms”; Burroughs et al., “Between Delft and Stockholm”; Gieseking, “Constellating Queer Spaces”; Shockley, “Battlegrounds and Bachelor Flats”; Moore, “Making Space for Intervention”; Clark Smith and Telio-Bejar, “House Proud”; Esperdy, “Lavender Lining”; Weisz, “Off the Beaten Path”; Sanders, “Noncompliant Bodies, Accomodating Space”; Nñ, “See and Be Seen”; Goicolea, “Muted Monumentality”; Campkin, “Queer, New Urban Agendas.” An issue of Harvard Design Magazine devoted to “Family Planning” also included articles discussing queer sexualities: Pilkey, “Home Making”; Bronski, “Queer Communes: Living in Flux.” Examples of chapters in edited collections include Bonnevier, “E.1027”; Bonnevier, “Out of the Salon”; McNeil, “Crafting Queer Spaces”; Potvin, “The Aesthetics of Community”; Rault, “Fashioning Spaces.” 14 Bonnevier, Behind Straight Curtains; Rault, Eileen Gray; Cook, Queer Domesticities; Potvin, Bachelors of a Different Sort. 15 Lambert, “Queers, Feminists and Interiors.” See also some of the early participants in queer space theory discourses that have publicly restated their interest in the topic, exemplified by Joel Sanders’s Stalled! Project (Sanders, “Architecture in Transition”) or Aaron Betsky’s “Queer Space (Revisited)” lecture at the California College of Arts on 24 Feb 2014 and his interview in Log 41. 16 See for example Gorman-Murray, “Queering Home or Domesticating Deviance?”; Gorman-Murray, “Homeboys”; Felsenthal, “Creating the Queendom”; Doan, ed.,

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17

18

19

20

21

Planning and LGBTQ Communities; Pilkey, “Reading the Queer Domestic Aesthetic Discourse”; Pilkey et al., Sexuality and Gender at Home; Gorman-Murray and Cook, Queering the Interior. Preciado, “Biopolitical Disobedience”; Preciado, “Trashgender”; Preciado, “The Architecture of Sex”; Crawford, “Breaking Ground”; Crawford, Transgender Architectonics. Brotman et al., “The Impact of Coming Out on Health and Health Care Access”; Cahill and South, “Policy Issues”; Brotman, Ryan, and Cormier, “The Health and Social Service Needs”; Chamberland and Paquin, Vieillir en étant soi-même; Orel, “Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Elders”; Johnson et al., “Gay and Lesbian Perceptions of Discrimination”; Brotman et al., “Coming Out to Care”; Jackson, Johnson, and Roberts, “The Potential Impact of Discrimination Fears”; Haber, “Gay Aging”; Fredriksen-Goldsen and Muraco, “Aging and Sexual Orientation”; Neville and Henrickson, “Lavender Retirement”; Stein, Beckerman, and Sherman, “Lesbian and Gay Elders and Long-Term Care”; Hughes, Harold, and Boyer, “Awareness of lgbt Aging Issues”; National Research Council, “Later Adulthood”; Beauchamp, “Réalités et besoins des aînés gais et lesbiennes”; Hébert, Chamberland, and Enriquez, “Accueillir les personnes âgées transsexuelles et transgenres”; MetLife Mature Market Institute, Still Out, Still Aging; Clark Smith and Telio-Bejar, “House Proud.” The projects are officially named “boom Community.” However, per note 32 in chapter 1, the use of the term “community” to refer to a physical site is problematic. Its implication of homogeneity is particularly problematic here, as queer space theory seeks to question relations between space and (communitarian) identity. While I have used other more spatially defined terms to describe the projects, I have kept “community” when used in quotes from the boom designers and advertisers or from journalists. “New Aging,” accessed 16 Jan 2014, http://hwkn.com/NEW-AGING; Johnston, “Interview: Matthias Hollwich”; Zeiger, “Assume They Want to Have Fun”; Finn, “Meet the New ‘Old Age’”; Hollwich, New Aging. See previous chapters for discussions of Joel Sanders and Jürgen Mayer. Charles Renfro (partner at the internationally recognized architectural practice Diller Scofidio + Renfro) had a piece in the Storefront’s Queer Space exhibition. Before Renfro became a partner, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio were already working with gender and sexuality issues, for example in their His/Hers towels project. The firm also participated in 2018’s Cruising Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Nigel Coates has been working since the early 1980s on the relation between the body and space, initially with nato (Narrative Architecture Today), an architectural think tank he formed while teaching at the Architectural Association. His design work for nightclubs is also linked to his interest in gay clubbing lifestyles. Coates, “New Clubs at Large”;

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22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29

30 31 32 33 34

35 36 37

Coates, Guide to Ecstacity; Tucker, Chapman, and Ostwald, “Homosexuality and the Star Hotel.” boom, “Design: Architecture,” http://boompalmsprings.com/design/#5. boom, “Design: Architecture/Arakawa + Gins,” http://boompalmsprings.com/ design/arakawagins/#4. boom, “It Is All about You!,” http://www.boomforlife.com/. Almendrala, “Boom! A Bold New Community in Palm Springs.” Matthew Hoffman, e-mail message to author, 26 Nov 2012. Joel Sanders, phone interview with author, 26 Feb 2014. About Ordos 100, a project in which 100 architects from twenty-seven countries were chosen to participate and each design a 1000 square metre villa under a master plan designed by artist Ai Weiwei, see Williams, “The Ghost Town Ai Weiwei Built”; Howarth, “Ordos: A Failed Utopia.” The project was widely publicized and the involvement of starchitects an important part of its marketing: “On January 25, 2008, the 100 architects gathered in Ordos for a first site visit. The film Ordos 100 documents the total of three site visits to Ordos, during which time the master plan and design of each villa was completed.” “Ordos 100,” 2008. Almendrala, “Boom!” “Lot-Ek/Boom,” accessed 7 Feb 2014, http://www.lot-ek.com/filter/residential/ BOOM; “L2 Tsionov-Vitkon Architects/Palm Springs Lgbt Retirement Community,” website. lot-ek, “Lot-Ek/Boom.” “Boom Costa Del Sol,” 2011, accessed 7 Feb 2014, http://nigelcoates.com/project/ boom_andalucia. “Boom, a Bold New Community,” 2011, accessed 7 Feb 2014, http://www.sadarvuga. com/news-archive/985-boom-a-bold-new-community. See Balmori and Sanders, Groundwork: Between Landscape and Architecture. Information on Joel Sanders’s project for boom, The Commons, comes from “Design: Architecture/Joel Sanders Architect,” accessed 13 Jul 2012, http://boompalmsprings. com/design/joelsandersarchitect/#3; “Joel Sanders Architect/the Commons,” accessed 30 Jan 2014, http://www.joelsandersarchitect.com/project/the-commons/; Joel Sanders, phone interview with author, 26 Feb 2014. boom, “Design: Architecture/J Mayer H,” accessed 13 Jul 2012, http://boompalmsprings.com/design/jmayerh/#5. boom, “Design: Architecture/Diller Scofidio + Renfro,” accessed 13 Jul 2012, http://boompalmsprings.com/design/dillerscofidiorenfro/#5. boom, “Design: Architecture/J Mayer H”; boom, “Design: Architecture/Rudin Donner,” accessed 13 Jul 2012, http://boompalmsprings.com/design/rudindonner/#3; boom, “Design: Architecture/Joel Sanders Architect.”

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38 Pilkey, “Reading the Queer Domestic Aesthetic Discourse,” 225–8. 39 Dirk Van den Heuvel, “Between Brutalists.” 40 “Heartland Alliance: Our History,” accessed 22 Nov 2017, https://www.heartland alliance.org/about/history/. 41 Heartland Alliance, “lgbtq-Friendly.” 42 Britta Larson, Center on Halsted’s Director of Senior Services, quoted in Bergren Miller, “For These lgbtq Seniors, Closets Are Just for Clothes.” 43 Heartland Alliance, “lgbtq-Friendly.” 44 Ibid. 45 Reed, “We’re from Oz”; Reed, “The Third Chicago School?,” 163–75. 46 Hanhardt, Safe Space. 47 Heartland Alliance, “lgbtq-Friendly.” 48 Bergren Miller, “Closets Are Just for Clothes.” 49 Hansman, “College Students Are Living Rent-Free”; Jansen, “The Nursing Home That’s Also a Dorm”; Harris, “Here’s Why Some Dutch University Students Are Living in Nursing Homes.” 50 Gensler, Town Hall Apartments, 7. 51 Bergren Miller, “Closets Are Just for Clothes.” 52 Stead and Prior, eds, Queer Space: Centres and Peripheries. 53 Bonnevier, Behind Straight Curtains. 54 fatale was initiated by Katarina Bonnevier, Brady Burroughs, Katja Grillner, Meike Schalk, and Lena Villner in order to “challenge the status quo of the discipline and profession of architecture” and “to put forward strategies for change within and beyond architectural practice and pedagogy,” Schalk and Reisinger, “Styles of Queer Feminist Practices and Objects,” 343. See also Schalk et al., “Fatale: Critical Studies in Architecture.” 55 Bonnevier, “The Revue of Styles,” 364. 56 Lupton, “Sheila Levrant De Bretteville,” discussed in Bonnevier, “Styles.” 57 Bonnevier, interview with author, Skype, 22 Mar 2018. 58 Bonnevier, “Styles,” 364. 59 Ibid., 356. 60 Ibid. 61 Bonnevier, “E.1027,” 165. 62 Bonnevier, “Styles,” 356. 63 Ibid., 358. 64 Schalk and Reisinger, “Queer Feminist Practices,” 344. 65 Ibid., 345. 66 Bonnevier, “Styles,” 360. 67 Ibid., 358.

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68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91

92 93 94 95 96 97 98

Ibid., 361–2. Ibid., 356. Bonnevier, Kristiansson, and Silva, “Artifacts Introduction Speech,” 458. mycket, “Clubscenen Act 4: Exclude Me In.” “Andrés Jaque Architects/Office for Political Innovation: About,” accessed 10 Sept 2017, http://andresjaque.net/whoweare.php. Columbia University, “Faculty: Andrés Jaque,” accessed 10 Sept 2017, https://www. arch.columbia.edu/faculty/164-andres-jaque. Wikipedia, “Andrés Jaque,” accessed 12 Sept 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Andrés_Jaque. Andrés Jaque, video interview with author, 7 Dec 2017. Applied Research Practices in Architecture, “Forensic.” Ibid. Excerpts from Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation, “ikea Disobedients.” Museum of Modern Art, “ikea Disobedients.” Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Applied Research Practices in Architecture, “Forensic.” Carlos Mínguez Carrasco, “ikea Disobedients at m oma ps1.” Applied Research Practices in Architecture, “Forensic.” Ibid. Ibid. Hosey, “Hidden Lines”; Carpentier, “The Measure(s) of Man.” Lavin, Kissing Architecture, 15. Gordon, “ikea Disobedients de Andrés Jaque Arquitectos.” Office for Political Innovation, “Pornified Homes [Exhibitions],” accessed 11 Mar 2019, https://officeforpoliticalinnovation.com/exhibition/pornified-homesexhibitions/. Jaque, “Intimate Strangers.” Venturi, Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas; Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure. See for example the work from Luca Lana and Virginia Mannering’s studio at Monash University: “Metamorphosis by Lesley Labonne.” “Stalled!,” accessed 10 Sept 2018, https://www.stalled.online/; Sanders and Stryker, “Stalled”; Sanders, “Architecture in Transition.” Luckel, “Architects and Designers Just Helped Win a Major Victory.” Sanders, “Architecture in Transition,” 145. Ibid., in reference to Edelman, “Men’s Room.”

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99 100 101 102 103 104

Sanders and Stryker, “Stalled”; Schilt and Westbrook, “Bathroom Battlegrounds.” Cavanagh, Queering Bathrooms; Preciado, “Trashgender.” Crawford, “Breaking Ground”; Crawford, Transgender Architectonics. QSpace, “Coded Plumbing.” Baker, Gutierrez, and Stegall, eds, Safe Space. Lauren Johnson and Ryan Day, phone interview with author, 16 Jun 2017. Conclusion

1 2 3 4

Fabricius, “Hidden Secrets,” 11. Riley, The Un-Private House, 16, 33. Friedman, Women and the Making, 130–1. The Venice iteration, at Spazio Punch (24 May–1 Jul 2018), was the first of three exhibitions, with the second at Ludlow 38 in New York (22 Feb–7 Apr 2019, co-curated with curator-in-residence Franziska Sophie Wildförster) and the third in the fall of 2019 at ArkDes in Stockholm. The Venice show included Alison Veit, Andreas Angelidakis, Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation, Atelier Aziz Alqatami, Carlos Reyes, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, dyke_on, Etienne Descloux, Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings, Henrik Olesen, Ian Wooldridge, s h u í (Jon Wang & Sean Roland), Lili Reynaud Dewar, Pascal Cribier & Louis Benech, Monica Bonvicini, Studio Karhard, Studio Odile Decq, Özgür Kar, Pol Esteve & Marc Navarro, Prem Sahib, Tom Burr, and Trevor Yeung. The New York show included Ann Krsul, Amy Cappellazzo, Alexis Roworth & Sarah Drake, Carlos Reyes, Charles Terrell, DeSe Escobar, Horace Gifford, John Lindell, Jürgen Mayer H., Kayode Ojo, Madelon Vriesendorp, Maud Escudié, Philipp Timischl, Robert Getso, Robert Yang, Shu Lea Cheang, Nguyen Tan Hoang, and Victoria Colmegna. See Mattioli, “Venice’s ‘Cruising Pavilion’”; Hruska, “Architecture Is a Sexual Practice”; Block, “Cruising Pavilion”; Dorris, “New York’s Iteration of the Cruising Pavilion”; Zeiba, “The Cruising Pavilion.” 5 For example, Mark Robbins has had a successful career as a curator, National Endowment for the Arts’ director of design (1999–2002), dean at Syracuse University’s School of Architecture (2004–12), executive director of the International Center for Photography (2012–13), and president of the American Academy in Rome (since 2013); Beatriz Colomina has written books and articles on privacy and publicity in modern architecture and founded a Media and Architecture program at Princeton University where she has taught since 1988; Mark Wigley was dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture and Planning from 2004 to 2014; Henry Urbach owned an innovative architecture gallery (1998–2005), before becoming curator of architecture at sfmoma (2006–11), and then director of Philip Johnson’s Glass

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6

7 8 9 10 11

House (2012–15); John Paul Ricco taught at various universities and is now a professor at the University of Toronto since 2006 (in contemporary art, media theory, and criticism). Vallerand, “Learning from …” For other experiments in how to use more inclusive architectural pedagogies, see also part 4 (Education) of Brown et al., eds, A Gendered Profession. Culzac, “Egypt’s Police Using Social Media.” Andrés Jaque’s Intimate Strangers project shows, however, how some refugees have also used apps to navigate refugee camps. Tauke, Smith, and Davis, eds, Diversity and Design. Ramchurn, “Is Architecture Really lgbt Friendly?” Waite, “The aj’s lgbt+ Survey.” Williams, Sex and Buildings, 178.

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Index

aesthetics, 4, 75–8, 115, 130; queer, 17, 137–8, 142–3, 145–8, 165, 167–8; relation with aesthetics, 11, 146, 161 aging, 113, 128–30, 137, 140–1. See also retirement housing/seniors housing Ahmed, Sara, 12, 18, 40 architectural journals, 126–8 autobiography, 87–8 bars. See night spaces Beecher, Catherine Esther, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, 12. See also feminist architecture practices: proto-modern Bell, David, 19, 33–4. See also queer space: in geography Betsky, Aaron, 9, 16, 169, 189n84, 194n37; Queer Space (book), 17, 21–2, 44 biopolitics, 160 Birkby, Noel Phyllis, 23 bodies, 65–78, 144–6, 153–5, 163, 167–8; trans, 158–9; unclothed, 57, 98–9; universal 144, 149. See also health and hygiene Bonnevier, Katarina, 20–1, 49–50, 127, 143–5. See also mycket boom communities, 128–38, 141–2, 165 Bourdieu, Pierre, 115, 194n43 Burr, Tom, 40–1 Butler, Judith, 5, 18, 42 Case Study Houses, 46 Center on Halsted’s Town Hall, 138–42

class, 76–7, 86, 166–7; affordability, 140–2; impact on representations, 67; middle-class, 51, 53; relation to feminism, 14; retirement housing, in, 129, 137–8; upper-class, wealth and privilege, 60–1, 72–4, 104–5, 115, 125. See also Bourdieu, Pierre; consumer culture; intersectionality; taste Coates, Nigel, 129, 131 Colomina, Beatriz, 9, 28, 38–9, 52, 167, 178n13; Sexuality & Space, 15, 66. See also Queer Space (exhibition) consumer culture, 64, 76. See also taste Corbusier, Le, 46, 124, 164, 178n13, 181n57, 193n28 Crary, Jonathan. See Sanders, Joel: “Sight Specific” Crawford, Lucas, 128, 159 Cruising Pavilion (exhibition), 163 Daan, Karin. See Homomonument de Bretteville, Sheila Levant, 143 decor, 68, 70–1, 73–4, 76–7, 145 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, 39 design magazines, 48, 70–1, 75, 77–8, 198n74; lgbt+ representations in, 64–5, 122 Design Museum. See Jaque, Andres; Office for Political Innovation: Intimate Strangers de Tocqueville, Alexis, 13–14 digital: architecture and practices, 8, 13, 126, 130, 148; media, 53–4, 61, 63, 130, 162; technologies and environments, 155–7

Diller Scofidio + Renfro, 184n5; Slow House, 53–4; The Waves (boom), 129–30, 134, 136 disability and crip theory, 3, 8 disappeared. See Ricco, John Paul education and pedagogy, 159–61, 167 Eisenman, Peter, 65, 164 Eizenberg, Julie, and Hank Koning, 46–8 Elmgreen & Dragset, 165–6; biography/career, 79–86; Celebrity – The One & the Many, 86, 89–91, 109, 114–15; The Collectors, 86, 91–104, 109–10, 114–15, 120; Cruising Pavilion/Powerless Structures, Fig. 55, 31, 82, 84–5; Gayhouse, 122–3; How Are You Today, 88–9; The Incidental Self, 87, 114, 121–2; Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under Nazism, 31, 195n17; Powerless Structures, 81–5; Pumpwerk Neukölln, Berlin, 8, 116–25, 165; This Is the First Day of My Life, 87, 90, 114, 121–2; Tomorrow, 104–16; The Welfare Show, 80, 85–6, 114 erotics, 41–4, 93, 114, 144 ethics: of design, 4, 9; queer, 138, 142–3, 165, 168; relation with aesthetics, 11, 146, 161 everyday: disruption from, 28, 86, 146; environments and spaces, 9, 75, 88, 168; life, 90; politics of, 150, 157, 160; representations of, 112, 115. See also Lefebvre, Henri feminist architecture practices, 12, 15, 127; material feminism, 14, 24, 46; protomodern, 12; queer feminism, 143. See also separate spheres theory formal experimentation, 6, 42, 130–1, 138, 142, 166 Foucault, Michel, 18, 42, 43, 81, 85 Friedman, Alice, 24–5, 124, 163 gender identity, 4–5 Gensler. See Center on Halsted’s Town Hall Gianni, Benjamin: “Queers in (Single-Family) Space”/“Playing It Straight,” 47–51; Who we are and how we live/Family Values (Honey I’m Home), 35–7, 51, 67 glass house, 134, 162 Gray, Eileen, 49–50, 124, 143, 145 Greenwood, Jane, 26 Grindr, 155–7

244

INDEX

Halberstam, Jack, 18, 157 Halperin, David, 5, 18 Harris, Harwell Hamilton, 124, 181n57 health and hygiene, 23–4, 46, 57 health and mental health, 26, 129–30, 149, 168 heteronormativity, 17–21, 50, 138, 145–6, 179n21, 181n57 heterosexuality, 19, 73 history: architecture and design, 6, 25, 52, 126, 157, 163; art history, 93; lgbt+, 17, 30, 34, 42, 44, 139–4, 144–50; women’s, 13–15 Hockney, David, 70 Hollwich, Matthias, 129–30, 137 homeless youth, 160 Homomonument, 31, 85n16 homosociality, 24–5 hooks, bell, 46–8 House Rules. See Robbins, Mark humour and irony, 68, 76, 89, 114 ikea, 149–50, 154 Disobedients. See Office for Political Innovation Ingram, Gordon Brent, 21, 31, 33 installations, 27–8, 43–4, 150, 165. See also Elmgreen & Dragset; mycket; Office for Political Innovation institutions, critique of, 27, 79, 85–6, 100, 154–5, 163. See also museums, critiques of interior design, 14–15, 23–6, 38, 71, 74, 91 International Plumbing Code, 158 intersectionality, 4, 18–19, 22, 76–7, 114, 164–5

IKEA

Jaque, Andres, 25. See also Office for Political Innovation Jarman, Derek, 40–1 Johnson, Philip, 3, 17, 25, 34, 61; Glass House, 124, 162–3, 168–9 Judge, Martha, 31 Kogan, Terry. See Stalled! Learning from Las Vegas, 157 Lee, Mao-Jung. See path Architecture Lefebvre, Henri, 81, 186n24 lesbian-oriented spaces, 35, 144–6 Lincoln Park (Chicago), 31, 195n16 lot-ek, 130–1

Maltzan, Michael, 60–1 masculinity, 19, 57, 132, 158. See also Sanders, Joel: Stud: Architectures of Masculinity Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative, 15. See also feminist architecture practices maximalism, 143, 146 Mayer H, Jürgen, 39; Guest Book, 40–1; Housewarming, 35–6, 40–1; Lie, 42; Puzzle.Buzz (boom), 129, 133–4, 136–7; security patterns (or data-protection patterns), 41–2 McGrath, Brian. See path Architecture media and advertisement, 44, 64, 70, 130, 154 minor architecture. See Ricco, John Paul Moon, Michael, 47–51 muf architecture/art, 15. See also feminist architecture practices multigenerational, 140–1 Muschamp, Herbert, 51, 186n36 Museum of Modern Art. See IKEA Disobedients; Un-Private House museums, critiques of, 104–5, 110–11 mycket, 142–8, 157, 166; The Club Scene, 144–8 national identity, 104, 115 night spaces, 144–6. See also sexualized spaces objects, 68–76, 89, 93, 100–11, 145–6, 150, 154– 5. See also Bourdieu, Pierre; consumer culture; taste O’Doherty, Brian, 82 Office for Political Innovation, 166; IKEA Disobedients, 148–55; Intimate Strangers, 155–7; Pornified Homes, 155; Sex and the So-Called City, 157 Operatives (later Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis), 184n9, 189n82. See also Queer Space (exhibition) Oslo Architecture Triennial. See Office for Political Innovation: Pornified Homes Parlour, 26 Pascucci, Ernest, 34 path Architecture, 33–5 performance, 5, 79–82, 96–8, 100, 104. See also mycket: The Club Scene; Office for Political Innovation: IKEA Disobedients performativity, 18–22, 42, 50, 82, 144–5, 165

photography, 35, 67–73, 75–7, 87–8 police, 139–40 politics, 85–6, 138, 167; engagement and democracy, 12, 15, 114–15, 144–50, 155, 163–4; queer, 3–4, 6, 29–30, 39, 43–5. See also queer: activism; queer: theory Preciado, Paul B., 3, 128 private and public: definitions, 7; experience, 144; meanings, 70–1, 101; merging, 79, 85, 88, 119–25, 145; politics of, 44; private house, 46, 48, 51–3, 55, 63, 124; privilege, 142; relation between, 131–4, 157, 162–4, 166–8; representation, 9, 75. See also separate spheres theory professional obstacles for women and minorities, 23–6, 127, 168 public restrooms, 45, 127, 158–61, 163, 167 qspace, 159–161 queer: activism, 4, 17; definitions, 4–5, 18–19; queer failure (See Halberstam, Jack); queer theory, 4–6, 9–10, 17–22, 113, 148, 157–8. See also queer sex space theory; queer space Queer Eye, 5 queer sex space theory. See Ricco, John Paul queer space, 6–7, 8–10, 16–22, 163–4, 166; in geography, 19, 21. See also queer sex space theory; Queer Space (exhibition) Queer Space (book). See Betsky, Aaron Queer Space (exhibition), 7, 13, 28–39, 67, 76 race and ethnicity, 14, 51, 60–1, 126, 129, 166– 7; and profession, 12. See also intersectionality Ransick, Robert, and Blake Goble, 34, 186n28 Reed, Christopher, 15–16, 20, 31, 49, 178n13 refugee camps, 127, 155–7 relational aesthetics, 81, 112 Renfro, Charles, 34. See also boom communities; Queer Space (exhibition) repohistory, 30–1 representation, 42, 44, 114, 166; of domesticity, 4, 9–11, 57, 64–6, 99–100; methods, 12; of self-identifications, 22; of women, 53, 72, 127, 129–30, 176n2. See also media and advertisement; photography research, 150–7 retirement housing/seniors housing, 128–42

INDEX

245

Ricco, John Paul: biography/career, 167; disappeared, 7, 28, 35, 39–45; minor architecture, 28, 39–40, 45; queer sex space theory, 42–4 Riley, Terence. See Un-Private House Robbins, Mark: biography/career, 65–7, 167; Households, 8, 65, 67–78, 87–8, 104; House Rules, 7, 45–51, 66, 71, 165–6, 191n107, 191n116; Who we are and how we live/Family Values (Honey I’m Home), 35–7, 51, 67 Rudolph, Paul, 3, 124, 181n57 safe(r) spaces, 10, 49, 138, 142, 146, 157–61, 164 Sanders, Joel, 8–9, 13, 25, 39; The Commons (boom), 129–30, 132–4, 137; House for a Bachelor, 51, 55–61; “Sight Specific,” 46–8, 60; Stud: Architectures of Masculinity, 55, 66, 132, 158. See also Stalled! scale figure, human as, 68–9 Schaefer, David and mit Media Lab, 53–4, 61 security patterns (or data-protection patterns). See Mayer H, Jürgen Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 5, 28, 37–8, 47–51 separate spheres theory, 13–16, 64 Sex and the City, 157 sexual acts and relations, 19, 31, 55, 157 sexualized spaces, 19, 36, 40, 74; bars and clubs, 19–20, 35; cruising grounds, saunas, and sex clubs, 9, 19–20, 31, 35, 40, 44–5. See also Cruising Pavilion (exhibition); Elmgreen & Dragset: Cruising Pavilion/Powerless Structures, Fig. 55 sexual orientation, 12, 14, 163–8; of architects and designers, 3, 21, 25–6; definition, 4–5; of users and clients, 3, 21, 35, 57, 64–5, 138 (See also Robbins, Mark: Households). See also queer; queer space single-family home. See private and public: private house

246

INDEX

single people, 55, 57 Smithson, Alison and Peter, 138 Stalled!, 142, 158–61 Stead, Naomi, 26, 146 Storefront for Art and Architecture. See Office for Political Innovation: Sex and the SoCalled City; Queer Space (exhibition) Stryker, Susan. See Stalled! suburbs, 47, 50, 60 taste, 5, 50, 76–7, 112, 115–16 Tom of Finland, 93, 96 trans and non-binary, 127–8, 137, 140, 144, 157–61, 167; movement, 3 Un-Private House, 45, 51–63, 137, 162 Urbach, Henry, 42–5, 64–5, 70–1, 74, 167. See also Queer Space (exhibition) van der Rohe, Mies, 57, 162–3 Venice Art Biennale, 163. See also Elmgreen & Dragset: The Collectors Victoria & Albert Museum. See Elmgreen & Dragset: Tomorrow Watkins, Mark. See path Architecture wealth and privilege. See class Weir, Scott, 47–51 Wenk, Nils, and Jan Wiese. See Elmgreen & Dragset: Pumpwerk Neukölln, Berlin white cube gallery. See O’Doherty, Brian women clients, 24 Women’s Design Service, 15. See also feminist architecture practices Women’s School of Planning and Architecture, 15. See also feminist architecture practices