In Search of Queer Space:

Queer Gestures in Architecture

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Type: Graduate Thesis, The Cooper Union

Year: 2020

Advisor: Steven Hillyer

Professors: Anthony Vidler, Nora Akawi

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Columns

Columns are not just a structure of architecture; they can be unique features in a space. Especially, their form can be expressed more dynamically. Here, resin columns mixed with acrylic varing drying time to make clear or blurred layers are carved into different forms. Like the LGBTQ+ community itself, having diverse colors and forms, columns reveal their importance in space. 

  

Partition

This project proposes a space with revolving walls. By rotating walls, using their hands, people enter this space and make it their own. People have the power to create and build an environment themselves. Therefore, the space becomes a “verb,” not a noun, an evolutionary process, quoting Buckminster Fuller. By pushing the walls, people can change the color of the outer facade of the space and its interior.

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Threshold

Gender has been socially constructed in architecture and still is. In architecture, an entrance is the first threshold into a space. It is an important transition moment from one world to another. In the past, lots of thresholds did not allow the queer community to come in. Commonly, buildings have one entrance or left-right binary system entrances. What is people had multiple choices of entrances to define their own journeys into a space? This project represents a deconstruction of the standard entrance.

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