Step into my Queerhouse

Step into my Queerhouse - M.Arch Thesis Project

You unlock this threshold with the key of speculation. Beyond it is another dimension—a dimension not only of disorientation and transformation, but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. You’ve just stepped into the queerhouse.

This thesis uses speculative fiction as a queer tactic to disorient and deconstruct the norm in architecture and therefore (re)construct queer architecture. New contour lines of deviation are created and pure lines of mutation emerge from the straight path (Ahmed, 161). This deviation of a lesser line offers a place/space of existence for those of disorientation. The built environment reflects the major architecture of the dominant society, which is “territorial, apolitical, conservative of the status quo, and above all - normative (Ockman,123).” This architecture of the everyday, of the celebrated, of the centered, claiming to be “neutral” and therefore representative of all bodies and ideas, in reality, represses the multiplicity of ways of being and becoming. What would the world look like if everyone had the agency, the space, and the empowerment to create their own architecture - redefining and reorienting their bodies and identities? How do these new bodies and identities rewrite the relationship with the built world?

Particularly in this thesis, the domestic home is investigated at different scales for deconstruction and (re)construction. Architecture of the surrounding world acts as layers to the body, with the home becoming the most intimate. It is like a second skin (Ahmed, 9). So then, what happens when someone doesn’t feel “at home” in any of these layers? In their city, in their neighborhood, in their own home (and even in their own body?) (Sullivan, 127-140).

To arrive at an understanding of the depth of these questions, a methodology develops in the wake of dismantling heteronormative architecture. Deconstructing the norm happens through a series of act(ion)s, such as planned assaults, reorientations, splits and cuts, exaggerations and inversions of the norm. Hidden within these new extents, minor architecture (and eventually queer architecture) create space. But to construct a new architecture, one that may be inherently queer, speculative fiction becomes the tactic of world building, free from the constraints and the framework of the normative. The final act(ion) of imagining, and therefore queering, creates the new world.

So then, what does speculative fiction accomplish?

Defamiliarization, The Uncanny (Vidler, 18)

Disorientation (Ahmed, 157).

How is this accomplished?

A cognitive estrangement (Suvin, 372-382).

Finally, I am now the one asking, why is this important? Speculative fiction allows for a multiplicity of imagined futures and therefore realities. The best future can be and should be imagined by all subjective bodies. Once this future is thought of, the current normative and hierarchical culture can be transcended to get to this better future, one in which everyone makes it. Here enters architecture as a form of worldbuilding and production of future narratives to include new social norms and intersectional identities, inclusive and fantastical desires, and re-examined and reclaimed past narratives.

This thesis was featured as part of Archinect’s Thesis Review 2020.

You can read the full version of this thesis here.

Bibliography

Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology. Duke University Press, 2006.

Ockman, Joan. “Toward a Theory of Normative Architecture.” Architecture of the Everyday, edited by Steven Harris and Deborah Berke, Princeton Architectural Press, 1997, pp. 122-152.

Sullivan, Nikki. “‘BIID’? Queer (Dis)Orientations and the Phenomenology of ‘Home.’” Queer Feminist Science Studies, edited by Cyd Cipolla et al., University of Washington Press, 2017, pp. 127–140.

Suvin, Darko. “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre.” College English, vol. 34, Dec. 1972, pp. 372–382.

Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny. MIT Press, 1994.