Queering Architecture: Methods, Practices, Spaces, Pedagogies

Description

Featuring contributions from a range of significant voices in the field, this volume renews the conversation around what it means to speak of the ‘queer’ in the context of architecture, and offers a fresh take on the methodological and epistemological challenges this poses to the discipline of architectural theory. Architecture as a discipline, a profession and an applied practice, is always subordinate to its own conceptual framework, which is one of orderliness. It refers to buildings, but also to infrastructures of thought and knowledge, to conventions and taxonomies, to structures of governance, hierarchies of power and systems of administration. How, then, can one look at queering architectural discourse when the very term ‘queer’, celebrated for its elusive, slippery nature, resists and attacks such order? Divided into four subsections, the essays in this anthology each purse a distinct line of inquiry - methods, practices, spaces, and pedagogies - in order to help particularize the proposed queering of architecture. They demonstrate the paradoxical nature of the endeavour from a diverse range of perspectives – from the questions of mapping queer theory in architecture; to the issues of queer architectural archives, or lack thereof; to the non-Western linguistic challenges to the very term queer alongside decolonial approaches to architecture via indigeneity and landscape. Queering Architecture not only provides a bold challenge to the normative methods employed in architectural discourse but addresses the paradoxical nature of establishing ‘queer’ methodologies in itself. Essential reading for architectural and queer theorists. Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Contents Figures Introduction Part I: Methods Chapter 1: On the uses of queer space thinking Chapter 2: Queer encounters in the archive: Misplaced love letters and autobiographical homes Chapter 3: Queering architectural history: Anomalous histories and historiographies of the Baroque Chapter 4: Notes from transient spaces, anachronic times*: An architextural exercise Part II: Practices Chapter 5: El Site: Queer approximations on fragments and writing Chapter 6: After the party with the lights on: A case study of queering architecture Chapter 7: Fabulous façades Chapter 8: From STUD to Stalled!: Embodied identity through a queer lens, 1996–2021 Part III: Spaces Chapter 9: Architectures of darkness in Derek Jarman and Mark Bradford Chapter 10: Queer space in a peripheral modernity Chapter 11: Music as a site of transing Chapter 12: Queer reading in queer lodgings Part IV: Pedagogies Chapter 13: [Spatial] pedagogic readings of queer theory: Experimental realism and opportunities for teaching and learning Chapter 14: Teacher/student: Queer practices to dismantle hierarchies in studio culture Chapter 15: Taking architecture from behind* Contributors Index