Queering community : collective housing in Los Angeles

Abstract

What is queer architecture? What are the spatial implications of this identity, community, and history? And how can queerness in architecture generate new modes of living? Queer spaces are often marginal spaces: overlooked, under lit, and co-opted spaces. However, they were also the political, gender bending cabarets of Wiemar Germany, the Parisian salons of the early 1920s, the scenic highway stops of the 1950s, and the bathhouses of the 1970s. They are spaces that have been elaborately developed in literature and yet have rarely been built. Throughout the Twentieth Century, an enduring narrative of resistance has developed within queer identities, one with historical ties to socialism, feminism, prison abolition, environmentalism and anti-racism. Similarly, a queer identity has emerged that challenges gender and sex norms, as well as assimilative gay, lesbian and bi-sexual identities. This thesis identifies a typological history of queer space and proposes a design for collective housing in Los Angeles that embodies that history. This project operates on a definition of queer space as the the temporal appropriation of marginal spaces, bartering in a language of objectification, seclusion and the mapping of the body onto objects and the landscape. Here, it is conceptualized as a valuable mode of rupturing the normative through subverting forms, co-opting spaces, dissolving categorical assumptions, and exhibiting attitudes and behaviors that express new freedoms of identity.