Queer Spaces
Sexuality and architecture
“A defining characteristic of queer space is its deformation, subversion and appropriation of space. In a world hostile both socially and spatially to those who defied norms, adapting existing buildings and interiors (sometimes permanently, more often fleetingly) was a quintessential activity.” — Adam Nathaniel Furman
Architectural Digest recently ran a feature with the heading, “BoND infused [this] 1920s NYC rental with queer cheer”, in relation to consultant and entrepreneur James Lima’s request that Daniel Rauchwerger and Noam Dvir, founders and principal architects of New York-based architecture firm BoND, help him “create a living space that is comfortable, serene, luminous — and queer.” This was apparently achieved by using colours and materials that “riffed on masculinity”, namely black, green, beige and light oak, and hanging works by queer artists such as Stephen Kuzma (b. 1933), Richard Haines (b. 1952), and Lisa Kereszi (b. 1973). “I believe it was important for [Lima] to involve us as an emerging design office that has a queer identity and agenda,” Rauchwerger said of the project. This leads one to question what constitutes “queerness” in terms of architecture, art and design, and whether it means something more than merely an editorially eye-catching Chelsea studio, with mid-century accents and an array of artfully curated objet d’art. It was just over fifty years ago, on Saturday 1 July 1972 that a group of two-thousand people took to the streets of London, holding up banners emblazoned with slogans like “Gay but not ashamed”, “Glad to be me: Glad to be gay” and “We demand the right to show affection in public!” That specific date had been chosen to mark the Stonewall Riots that had erupted three years earlier when police officers raided the Stonewall Inn, a known LGBTQIA+ haunt in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. This was nothing new as the so-called “Public Morals Division” of the New York City Vice Squad frequently arrested, intimidated and brutalised its patrons; but on this particular night, urban legend has it that black trans activist Marsha P Johnson (1945-1992) yelled “I got my civil rights”, before throwing a shot glass into a mirror, triggering riots that lasted for six days. Robin Souza, one of the founders of the Gay Activists Alliance, called it “the shot glass that was heard around the world”. Yet, despite David Carter (1952-2020), in his award-winning account, Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution (2014), naming Johnson as one of the “three individuals known to have been in the vanguard” of the uprising, by her own recollection, Johnson arrived at Stonewall well after the riots had already started. Essentially, what we’ve come to believe is something of a whitewashed reading; historically speaking, in terms of queer history trans people of colour are sidelined and by shaping the narrative in this manner, it transforms the Stonewall riots into a more inclusive tale of triumph (though also, in part, the mythology surrounding Johnson is symptomatic of the deep impact she had — both within the Village community and LGBTQIA+ culture ever since). “There’s a fetishisation of leadership,” explains writer Jason Okundaye (b. 1997). “We want to imagine that it was sex workers and trans women ‘leading’ movements because we want to pay dues to those who have often been erased by mainstream narratives.” Of course, Stonewall didn’t give birth to gay politics, it was a manifestation of it, and as such, it’s important to see the riots within the larger context of racial and women’s rights in the late sixties and early seventies, when there was a prevailing radical ethos. There’s a prevalent media-controlled idea of what queer culture entails, but putting queer people under one umbrella runs the risk of overlooking and ignoring differences and fails to consider the power structures that divide LGBTQIA+ people — including gender, poverty, authoritarianism, hunger, etc. Reducing queer histories to one singular, overly simplistic narrative is dangerous, in that it can result in flattening and mythologising icons and stories, while entirely glossing over forms of difference. The only way we can understand what went before us is to accept events in their totality, the good, the bad and the ugly, thereby fostering a greater understanding of the way in which marginalised groups form part of our shared experience. “We like our history neat – an easy-to-follow, self-contained narrative with dates, characters and landmarks with which we can weave together otherwise unrelated events into one apparently seamless length of fabric held together by sequence and consequence,” explains journalist and academic Gary Younge. “Complexity, with all its nuances and shaded realities, is a messy business. So, we choose the facts to fit the narrative we want to hear.”
Derek Jarman at Prospect Cottage, 1990, photograph, © Howard Sooley and The Garden Museum, London
Ludwig II lived out his “queer fantasies” away from prying public eyes, flowing through the Venus Grotto at the Linderhof Palace in a golden boat, photograph Peter Widmann
In the introduction to Queer Spaces: an Atlas of LGBTQIA+ Places and Stories (2022) architect designer and artist Adam Nathaniel Furman (b. 1982) writes that when you’re “somehow different in a visible, unconcealable way, you seek out spaces where you can simply be yourself, unmediated and unfettered, spaces where you can act freely in a manner that is truly consonant with your inner self.” Queer Spaces, which adopts a tripartite structure, considers in turn “domestic”, “communal” and “public”, detailing more than ninety such spaces around the world where queer people could live authentically, access their shared heritage and build a sense of community. Amongst them, Christopher Street, in New York, where the Stonewall riots started. Fundamentally, for the authors, Furman and architectural historian Joshua Mardell, queer spaces are significant as “places where you can express yourself without fear or shame”. Olivia Laing’s (b. 1977) forward quotes lyrics to Pet Shop Boys’ Being Boring (1990) — “I never dreamt that I would get to be / the creature that I meant to be” — as a means of representing what Laing calls “the idea of a hidden self, a mysterious creature that can emerge from its chrysalis, given the right conditions”. The domestic section shows how queer individuals created “lasting and meaningful environments … where memories could be accumulated, milestones in life celebrated, and their value as humans to one another be affirmed and marked in physical form”. Somewhat expectedly, it includes Prospect Cottage, Kent, the final home of filmmaker and LGBTQIA+ activist Derek Jarman (1942-1994), but also a Dhaka rooftop that offers refuge to trans and gender nonconforming people as well as Hotel Gondolín, a collective home for trans women in Buenos Aires. One of the core ambitions of Queer Spaces is to reassess and reevaluate the canon of architectural history as traditionally understood. Neo-gothic Strawberry Hill House (1749-1776) in Twickenham, Southwest London, built by writer, art historian and man of letters Horace Walpole (1717–1797), can, to some large extent, be read as a “queer architectural rebellion” — or in the words of RIBA’s President’s Medal nominated queer architect Kleanthis Kyriakou, “a camp act of defiance against the status quo” — that enabled Walpole indirectly to express his sexuality. At a time when the classic Palladian style was still en vogue (whose popularity derived from Shaftesbury’s (1671-1713) Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), a theory of “politeness”, which set out not only the way in which a well-bred young gentleman should behave but also the style in which he should build, namely in the classical tradition of Ancient Greece and Rome), the castle-like Strawberry Hill — which Walpole referred to as his “little play-thing house … the prettiest bauble you ever saw” — was a stylistically subversive, if not pioneering space. Along with his self-proclaimed “Committee of Taste”, amateur architects John Chute (1701-1776) and Richard Bentley (1662-1742), Walpole created a sub-genre of architecture, at once anachronistic and timeless, amounting to a queer aesthetic understood as such in their homosocial inner circle. Its interiors, a whimsical dream in wood, plaster and papier-mâché, have been compared to a masque, a theatrical mixture of display and concealment, a place where Walpole could entertain a privileged same-sex circle. Historian Matthew M. Reeve in his book Gothic Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole (2020) shows Strawberry Hill House sparked a tradition of “queer Gothic” that can be detected in Walpole’s contemporaries and the styles they promoted, which, including chinoiserie, helped shape English modernity as we know it today.
Architect Alan Buchsbaum’s apartment in a former manufacturing building in New York City’s SoHo district, where he use of tiles represented the clandestine and hidden atmosphere of the bathhouse
The fantastical Fonthill Abbey (1793-1813), a cathedral-like palace erected in Wiltshire, England, by art collector and sugar plantation owner William Beckford (1760-1844) — known to his contemporaries as much as an infamous “bugger” as a writer, builder, and collector — is a perfect example of this queer “Gothick” of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Beckford was an exceptionally wealthy man whose career in public life ended when in 1784 the news broke that he was having an affair with the then sixteen-year-old William “Kitty” Courtenay (1768-1835) — sometimes referred to by his contemporaries as the most beautiful boy in England. For nearly a year Beckford braved the ensuing storm of abuse, before eventually choosing to exile himself on the continent. Upon his return, dismissing Strawberry Hill House as nothing more than “a Gothic mousetrap”, Beckford hired prominent English architect James Wyatt (1746-1813) to build him a fabulously grand medieval abbey. Sodomy was quite literally woven into the very lineage and fabric of Fonthill, which was meant, Beckford said, to commemorate Mervyn Tuchet (1593-1631), second Earl of Castlehaven, who in the seventeenth century was the first to build a manor house on the estate. In 1631, Tuchet was convicted of the rape of his wife and the “unnatural crime” of sodomy, committed with his page Laurence FitzPatrick, and subsequently executed — England’s best-known sodomy trial before that of Oscar Wilde for gross indecency in 1895.
Almost grotesquely vast, Fonthill was indisputably one of the great wonders of British architecture, a fantastical concoction of wild Gothic imagery, its centrepiece an immense and unprecedented tower, rising some 276 feet, so fantastically perpendicular that it collapsed several times, the first during construction, and the last in 1825, damaging the Western wing. Beckford had virtually no contact with the outside world, and Fonthill was conceived as a place of “waiting and suffering”, a refuge, which allowed him to escape from, and cocoon himself against society’s censure where, as Furman puts it, he longed “for a ‘beatific vision’ in which a beautiful angelic youth would come forth from the heavens to embrace him with love and understanding”. Beckford filled Fonthill with an extraordinary array of treasures, including some twenty thousand books; paintings by Titian (c. 1488/90-1576), Bronzino (1503-1572), Raphael (1483-1520), Velasquez (1599-1660), Rembrandt (1606-1669), Rubens (1640-1577) and Canaletto (1697-1768); a remarkable sixteenth-century Pietra Dura table top — removed from the Borghese Palace during Napoleon’s (1769-1821) Italian campaign in 1796 — whose centre consists of the largest onyx in the world (now at Charlecote Park, Avon); Jacobean coffers; Venetian glass; the most extensive collection of Japanese lacquer in the world (including the superb “Van Dieman” document box (1636-1639) that once belonging to Madame de Pompadour (1721-1764), chief mistress of King Louis XV, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London); and thousands of objects of porcelain, bronze, jewellery, silver, gold and agate.
Mansfield Duval Forbes’ “Finella”, used both as his home and a site where all those who shared his interest in the development of modern art, architecture and design could come together and meet
Furman and Mardell only partly deal with the topic of contemporary design — which speaks to the fact that very few projects have been conceived with queer use in mind. However, the “Light Coffin”, in Chiba, Japan (the original name of which, in Japanese, means “Dracula’s Den”), is one such example; designed in 1995 by architect Osamu Ishiyama (b. 1944) for a same-sex male couple, it radically questions the very foundations of domestic architecture. “By the nineties, it was obvious that the traditional form of family — an authoritarian father, an obedient mother and powerless children — was becoming obsolete,” explains Ishiyama. “New types of relationships started to emerge in the vacuum created by shrinking conventional family stereotypes.” A two-storey, steel box, closed to prying eyes from outside, the building is entirely top-lit (with no windows and doors in a conventional sense — the inhabitants using shutters for loading and unloading artworks as a doorway), its introversion in stark contrast to the fluid interior layout, which is essentially open plan, divided simply into two rows, one of which consists of a bathroom and a kitchen. This unconventional programmatic layout is a unique response to the needs of its queer users, who have no intention of raising children, thus defying ingrained heteronormative understandings of the spatiality of domestic life.
Such entries are intensely personal, but others also serve to demonstrate the importance and use of networks in the LGBTQIA+ community. For example, between the wars, the sedate exterior of “Finella”, a Victorian villa in Cambridge, masked a riotous interior of yellow silk drapes, iridescent celluloid paint, a staircase clad in copper and fan-vaulted ceilings made of silvered glass — the latter of which a knowing nod to Walpole’s Neo-Gothic Strawberry Hill House. Finella’s owner, Mansfield Duval Forbes (1889-1936), an English don at Clare College Cambridge, created this dramatic interior with the help of his protégé, the modernist Australian architect Raymond McGrath (1903-1977), as a syncretic fusion of the archaic and the modern. Making use of novel materials, such as plywood, McGrath drew on the story of tenth-century semi-apocryphal Pictish queen Finella (understood as Forbes’ alter ego) as well as other moments in queer history. As historian Elizabeth Darling explains, Finella emerges as a profoundly queer space, a site where Forbes, as a gay man, “could find the freedom of expression” denied to him in interwar Britain. The building was subverted and transformed in innovative, unexpected and even camp ways — offering a counterpoint to the sobriety and austerity of other early modernist works, such Villa La Roche-Jeanneret (1923-25) by arch-misogynist Le Corbusier (1887-1965) or Robert Mallet-Stevens’ (1886-1945) Villa Noailles in Hyères (1923). Forbes had intended that the house be used both as his home and a site where all those who shared his interest in the development of modern art, architecture and design could come together and meet — laying foundations for key modernist networks of the nineteen thirties.
The Palladium nightclub in New York, designed by Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, with a monolithic mural by artist Keith Haring, a space where queer people could come together in an act of unified defiance
William Beckford’s fantastical Fonthill Abbey, conceived as a place of “waiting and suffering”, a refuge, which allowed him to escape from, and cocoon himself against society’s censure
Such veiled references continued in modernist design, as can be seen in the multi-purpose office/apartment American architect Alan Buchsbaum (1935-1987) designed for himself in a former manufacturing building in New York City’s SoHo district. Completely radical in its conception, Buchsbaum’s apartment, as well as those he designed for model Christie Brinkley (b. 1954) and art critic Rosalind Krauss (b. 1941) et al, came to define what we now understand as “loft style” living (even his Times obituary notes that his private memorial service was held “in one of the many downtown lofts he designed”). As early as 1901, tiles had been used in New York city’s subway stations, public restrooms and bathhouses. These spaces became known as areas for cruising and were essential for the configuration of the gay community that was taking shape at the beginning of the nineteen seventies. The central element of Buchsbaum’s renovation was the bathtub, at the very end of the ground floor — surrounded by a tropical garden — which was on view to anyone entering the building. The clandestine and hidden atmosphere of the bathhouse was mimicked by the serpentine glass block wall that divided Buchsbaum’s bed and bathroom from a service corridor leading to the office. The shadows of people on either side of the wall were highlighted by airport blue spots recessed into the floor — reminiscent of the fleeting views experienced in saunas — designed by nine other than Tony Award-winning lighting expert Paul Marantz, whose work included Studio 54, the Times Square Ball and the Barnes Foundation. As Buchsbaum once said: “Design is coming out of the closet if you like, or rather opening the closet door and revealing the contents.”
Others entries aim to show that “our history goes back a lot further”, explains Furman. Particularly moving, the Knockaloe Internment Camp near Peel on the Isle of Man. Used during the First World War and subsequently dismantled the camp accommodated some internees (assigned male at birth) who lived full-time as female, using female pronouns and wearing female-coded clothing. Whilst various possible motivations have been suggested by historians, there’s little direct evidence from which to draw. Writer, academic and activist Kit Heyam points to the need for a “queer approach, which seeks to make space for trans possibilities while refusing to definitively fix the internees in modern identity categories”. In terms of traditional historical analysis, he also notes the need for “personal testimony and/or certainty of motivation” is something that can lead to the erasure of histories, not least those of the LGBTQIA+ community, where such evidence is often lacking. Those examples cited in Queer Spaces offer a revised view of modernism in inter-war Britain which foregrounds its queer roots, and in turn, raises important questions about the connection between architectural innovation and queer identity.
In terms of urban fabric and city planning, in 2019 London unveiled its first permanent “rainbow crossing”, intended as a concrete symbolic gesture of a centralised politics of acceptance and celebration of the queer subject. According to a 2021 report by Arup and the University of Westminster “LGBTQIA+ people ‘switch’ or hide their identities in order to feel safe in the majority of public spaces”, and overt civic gestures such as rainbow crossings signal inclusion to LGBTQIA+ people and help “usualise” their presence; that is, specifically, to accept difference without erasure, as opposed to trying to impose some kind of “normativity” to which people either do or do not conform. The aim, essentially, is to encourage acceptance of diversity and to reduce the incidence of hate crimes. Yet, at the same time, such surface gestures — no pun intended — run in glaring dissonance with the material conditions of queer and trans life where even within the most tolerant national contexts, queer and trans people face physical and institutional violence, from the denial of housing and employment to police brutality and incarcerations (only this week, an interview with Khalid Salman, a Qatar World Cup ambassador, was cut short after he claimed homosexuality was “damage in the mind”). With such day-to-day realities, the version of inclusion offered by a painted street sign seems little consolation; especially when the price of such assimilation is essentially prefixed upon the condition that LGBTQIA+ people will not shake or undermine the conservative foundations upon which society is built.
In Wild Things: the Disorder of Desire (2020), Jack Halberstam, a transgender Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University, offers an alternative history of sexuality by tracing the ways in which “wildness” has been associated with queerness and queer bodies throughout the twentieth century. The term “queer” has a rather recent provenance, whereas “wild” has a much longer historical lineage, dating back as far as the medieval period, and as such, it carries with it numerous associations. Much like “barbaric”, it’s been used variously to describe anyone and everyone considered to be outside the civilised order of things. Halberstam investigates whether the term “wildness” could be repurposed, or for that matter, whether it already has. Understanding history is crucial, informing how we move forward together as a society, so as to avoid making the same mistakes as the past; but an oversimplified, one-size-fits-all approach risks erasing too much, simply for the sake of breaking things down into easily digestible “bite-size” chunks for the largest common denominator. “We need a way to register those bodies that congregate or disperse around the boundaries of a history of sexuality that has named names and made order out of chaos, and in so doing we will not simply be locating subjugated figures or celebrating a naughty and subversive set of nonconformists; rather, we will also be engaging disorderly forms of history, desires that lie beyond the consensus terms of their eras,” explains Halberstam. “While the arc of modern queer histories has bent toward legibility, recognition, maturity, and mutuality, wild bodies plot a different course through history and appear only at the very edge of definition, flickering in and out of meaning and sense and tending toward bewilderment.”
What’s clear is that whilst some members of the LGBTQ+ community want to be seen, others prefer to live hidden from indiscreet and judgmental eyes. In designing “Draculas Den” Ishiyama said that “the concept of ‘domestic floor plans’ that we learn and are taught as common-sense collapsed, just because a homosexual couple asked me for a house.” This is perhaps an important takeaway in a world where we’re starting to see the collapse of outdated boundaries and conceptions and a gradual move towards genuine inclusivity. For Furman and Mardell, queer spaces share a singular thread in that they “are all places where you can express yourself without fear or shame”. In the art world’s ivory tower it can sometimes seem as if greater moves have been made toward acceptance than really the case; for example, whilst Yves Saint Laurent (1936-2008) and his partner Pierre Bergé (1930-2017), were able to live openly as a gay couple, helping to “usualise” same-sex relationships in the eyes of the public, their level of social acceptance was largely due to wealth and influence. For varying reasons, historically speaking, designers’ sexualities have often been played down or glossed over as “irrelevant” to their work (e.g. Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx (1909-1994), whose homosexuality was actively hidden by architectural historians), and as Alan Powers noted in The Expression of Levity (2001), due to societal pressures, “gay modernist architects … felt compelled to remain silent about this important aspect of their creativity and social mission”. It’s not as simple as merely correcting omissions, and there needs to be a wholesale rethink of the way in which we approach architectural history, and a realization, that in terms of design, sexuality as an innate part of our being does “matter” when it comes to the way in which LGBTQ+ artists and designers react to and approach the world around them. Furman notes that “growing up queer means experiencing the de-stabilising absence of a broad and accessible queer history”, not least as far as art, design and architecture are concerned. Fundamentally, it’s not a matter of “rewriting” history, but moving away from a straight/white/Eurocentric telling, and presenting an accurate history, in the round, without leaving out those parts the bigoted might find unsavoury.