Learning from… (or “the need for queer pedagogies of space”)

Abstract

Despite its emergence in architectural discussions in the early 1990s, more than 25 years later, the idea of queerness has yet to fully transform the way we practice, teach or even experience spatial design. While obviously focused on how gender and sexuality play a role in the building of personal and collective identifications, queer theory becomes much more interesting when used to think more broadly about how different elements intersect in our experience and use of space. Unfortunately, despite most of the thinking about the relation between queerness and architecture taking place in the academic world, its impact on architectural pedagogy has been quite limited and very few designers have learned from queer theory’s insights. This essay develops different innovative teaching methods through interviews with educators across the world and focuses on how interiors education can become a vessel for queer and feminist ideas to impact architecture and design education at large. These strategies include embracing failure and disruption, supporting students, and becoming engaged activist educators. They focus on bridging a gap between different groups, on helping designers to acknowledge the limits of their designs and to maximize the possibilities offered by their design decisions. Queering design means building relations, offering layered opportunities, multiplying possible experiences. Queering design pedagogy in turn means multiplying points of views, opening the discipline to not only other disciplines, but to the everyday, and thinking about how our experiences as human beings, impact and transform our designs.

Keywords:

• Design education
• queer pedagogy
• feminist pedagogy
• gender
• sexuality
• student support

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Interviewees were chosen through an extensive literature review to identify a first series of educators that were then asked to suggest further names. Most interviewees, but not all of them, were native English speakers. Efforts were made to reach outside the Anglo-Saxon and Western spheres, but the cultural and political challenges linked to the visibility and repression of sexual diversity in many parts of the world have meant that the topic has been almost absent from architectural discussions in Non-Western contexts – and even in non-English-speaking contexts. For example, there is still almost no discussions of queer issues in French-speaking architectural theory and history.

2 For example, in the recent section “Working Queer” in Log 41, of the sixteen articles, four were written by authors associated or teaching at Princeton University, four at Columbia University, two at Yale University, two at the University of Michigan, and one each at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at Sci-Arc, at Pratt Institute, at Northeastern University and at Harvard University. Two of the educators interviewed for this research project were amongst the authors published in the Log special issue.

3 LGBT refers to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans people. LGBTQ will also be used in this article, adding the Q for queer to refer to people who self-identify as queer, as not fitting into binary sexual and gender categories.

4 For example, Aaron Betsky, author of Queer space: architecture and same-sex desire (1997) is since 2015 dean of Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture; Beatriz Colomina, editor of Sexuality & Space (1992) and co-curator of Queer Space at the Storefront for Art and Architecture is professor, director of graduate studies and director of the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University’s School of Architecture; Mark Robbins, who exhibited in the Queer Space show and curated House Rules at the Wexner Center for the Arts in 1994 was dean of the School of Architecture at Syracuse University from 2004 to 2012 and is currently president of the American Academy in Rome.

5 For more on the potential of queer formalisms, see Doyle & Getsy (2013).

6 Tschumi’s ideas have been discussed in relation to sexual minorities in Ingram, Bouthillette, & Retter (1997).

7 Grindr is a commercial smartphone app devoted mainly to facilitating sexual relations between men.

8 The project focuses on similar issues as 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.

9 Using the example of Graphic Standards, Lance Hosey (2001) shows how the architectural profession and education system ignores the diversity of bodies and, by doing so, silences its gendered and racialized bias.

10 Andres Jaque’s Intimate Strangers project shows, however, how some refugees have also used apps to navigate refugee camps.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture, under Grant [198091].

Notes on contributors

Olivier Vallerand

Olivier Vallerand is a community activist, architect, historian, and educator. An assistant professor at The Design School at Arizona State University, he has also taught at Berkeley, Laval, UQAM, and McGill. He designs and builds with 1x1x1 Creative Lab. His research focuses on queer approaches to spatial design and its pedagogy.