As we explore social practices that challenge the dominant model in architecture, we have come to recognize the significance of addressing issues related to identity, gender, race, and sexual orientation within the realm of spatial design. By considering these dimensions, we aim to highlight how the built environment can foster new ways of envisioning society and shaping our relationship with the world around us. To provide valuable insights, we have curated a bibliography that showcases the perspectives and experiences of individuals who defy the norms dictated by a universalizing approach. This collection of 20 books offers diverse narratives that invite us to perceive, imagine, and experience space through an LGBTQIA+ lens.
Designing for Diversity: Gender, Race, and Ethnicity in the Architectural Profession
Author: Kathryn H. Anthony
"Given the traditional mismatch between diverse consumers and predominantly white male producers of the built environment, plus the shifting population balance toward communities of color, Anthony contends that the architectural profession staves off true diversity at its own peril. Designing for Diversity argues convincingly that improving the climate for nontraditional architects will do much to strengthen architecture as a profession. Practicing architects, managers of firms, and educators will learn how to create conditions more welcoming to a diversity of users as well as designers of the built environment."
Dictionary of the Queer International
Edited by: Yevgeniy Fiks
"Dictionary of the Queer International proposes a vision of international, intersectional, and non-hierarchical queer culture via imaginary queer defense fusion-languages. The dictionary is a collection of words and phrases from local queer languages around the world. It considers the concept of a queer language of “internationalist universality” as opposed to “neoliberal globalization” — a vision of an international queer language of multi-locality and horizontality."
Gay Architects: Silent Biographies from 18th to 20th Century
Authors: Wolfgang Voigt, Uwe Bresan
"Homosexuality still is a taboo subject in architectural history. When historical architectural personalities have lived outside the heterosexual norm, their private lives are readily shrouded in mysterious obscurity. As long as penal laws endured, social existence was constantly threatened and hiding was a necessity. Defensive strategies were needed to protect themselves. To track down these outsiders of the past, historical sources must be read queerly. Wolfgang Voigt, until 2015 deputy director at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM) in Frankfurt/Main, and architectural historian Uwe Bresan set out on their search and present the results of their research in this book. It brings together 41 portraits from the 18th to the 20th century in North America, Europe and Palestine. The book reveals architects from the Baroque era to the modern age, surprising biographies, admirable houses and, not infrequently, intelligently designed refuges with which the protagonists protected their private lives."
Gay Bar: Why We Went Out
Author: Jeremy Atherton Lin
"Strobing lights and dark rooms; throbbing house and drag queens on counters; first kisses, last call: the gay bar has long been a place of solidarity and sexual expression—whatever your scene, whoever you’re seeking. But in urban centers around the world, they are closing, a cultural demolition that has Jeremy Atherton Lin wondering: What was the gay bar? How have they shaped him? And could this spell the end of gay identity as we know it? (...) The journey that emerges is a stylish and nuanced inquiry into the connection between place and identity—a tale of liberation, but one that invites us to go beyond the simplified Stonewall mythology and enter lesser-known battlefields in the struggle to carve out a territory. Elegiac, randy, and sparkling with wry wit, Gay Bar is at once a serious critical inquiry, a love story and an epic night out to remember." This book was named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, NPR, Vogue, Gay Times, Artforum.
Planning and LGBTQ Communities: The Need for Inclusive Queer Spaces
Edited by: Petra L. Doan
"A central theme of this book is that urban planners need to think 'beyond queer space' because LGBTQ populations are more diverse and dispersed than the white gay male populations that created many of the most visible gayborhoods. The authors provide practical guidance for cities and citizens seeking to strengthen neighborhoods that have an explicit LGBTQ focus as well as other areas that are LGBTQ-friendly. They also encourage broader awareness of the needs of this marginalized population and the need to establish more formal linkages between municipal government and a range of LGBTQ groups. Planning and LGBTQ Communities also adds useful material for graduate level courses in planning theory, urban and regional theory, planning for multicultural cities, urban geography, and geographies of gender and sexuality."
Policing Public Sex: Queer Politics and the Future of AIDS Activism
Edited by: Dangerous Bedfellows
"The AIDS epidemic has had a myriad of social and political consequences, not the least of which has been a radical social rethinking about sexuality. While AIDS has encouraged a more open discussion of sexual activity, it has also brought a backlash. Policing Public Sex, a collection of 25 essays by educators, activists, sociologists, and community spokespersons, is enormously smart. This volume helps us consider and contend with the political and social campaigns that seek to control or monitor manifestations of sexuality considered "public"--from safe-sex education to sex clubs. Well written, this book is on the cutting edge of social change and AIDS education."
Queer City, a Reader
Edited by: Júlia Ayerbe
"A collection of essays, artistic contributions, and two inserted zines, Queer City, A Reader was developed as part of an 18-month inquiry in São Paulo. Initiated by Lanchonete.org and ArtsEverywhere/Musagetes, the Queer City program was a broad collective inquiry into how can we understand the contemporary city through a queer, intersectional, non-normative lens. The program included a series of encounters, dinners, residencies and performances, and Queer City, A Reader reconfigures these moments into a new form, extending the inquiry trans-nationally."
Queer Constellations: Subcultural Space In The Wake Of The City
Author: Dianne Chisholm
"Chisholm examines recent experiments in queer city writing through Walter Benjamin's dialectical optics on metropolitan culture. She discusses the dialectics of seeing in the wake of the gay bathhouse, the city of collective memory, queer passages in Gai Paris, and the lesbian boh me."
Queer Exhibition Histories
Edited by: Bas Hendrikx
"Queer Exhibition Histories comprises case studies highlighting the countless efforts, both large and small, of LGBTQIA+ artists and curators, centring on queer art exhibitions and their modes of documentation and archiving. Often, the legacy of these projects largely depends on personal archives, memories, and paraphernalia, with the overriding notion, or need, for public display. In these contexts, ‘public’ is relative in events that were either short-lived, held under the veil of domestic spaces, or kept exclusive for those ‘in the know’. Therefore, they were not exclusively artistic, but could equally be discursive, activist, educational, or serve as a tool for community building. At the intersection of queerness and contemporary art, this volume considers how the efforts of LGBTQIA+ artists have advanced their public presence in museums and society alike."
Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others
Author: Sara Ahmed
"In this groundbreaking work, Sara Ahmed demonstrates how queer studies can put phenomenology to productive use. Focusing on the “orientation” aspect of “sexual orientation” and the “orient” in “orientalism,” Ahmed examines what it means for bodies to be situated in space and time. Bodies take shape as they move through the world directing themselves toward or away from objects and others. Being “orientated” means feeling at home, knowing where one stands, or having certain objects within reach. Orientations affect what is proximate to the body or what can be reached. A queer phenomenology, Ahmed contends, reveals how social relations are arranged spatially, how queerness disrupts and reorders these relations by not following the accepted paths, and how a politics of disorientation puts other objects within reach, those that might, at first glance, seem awry."
Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire
Author: Aaron Betsky
"Betsky asserts that gay men and women have always been at the forefront of architectural innovation - reclaiming abandoned neighborhoods, redefining urban spaces, and creating liberating interiors out of hostile environments. These "queer spaces" reflect the experiences of homosexuals in a straight culture. Often forced to hide their true nature, gay men and women have turned inward, playing with the norms of interior space and creating environments of stagecraft and celebration where they can define themselves without fear. Their experiments point the way to an architecture that can free us all from the imprisoning structures and spaces of the modern city."
Queer Spaces: An Atlas of LGBTQIA+ Places and Stories
Edited by: Adam Nathaniel Furman and Joshua Mardell
"Celebrated designer Adam Nathaniel Furman and architectural historian Joshua Mardell have reverently brought together a community of contributors to share stories of spaces that range from the educational to the institutional to the re-appropriated, and many more besides. This brand new 'atlas' of queer spaces is lavishly illustrated with over 400 full-colour images." You can check out the interview we did with Furman about the book here.
Queering Architecture: Methods, Practices, Spaces, Pedagogies
Edited by: Marko Jobst, Naomi Stead
"Featuring contributions from a range of significant voices in the field, this volume renews the conversation around what it means to speak of the 'queer' in the context of architecture, and offers a fresh take on the methodological and epistemological challenges this poses to the discipline of architectural theory."
Queers in Space: Communities, Public Places, Sites of Resistance
Edited by: Gordon Brent Ingram, Yolanda Retter, Anne-Marie Bouthillette
"Cultural Studies. Gay and Lesbian Studies. Urban Planning. Exploring the interactions between queer identity, experience, and activism and a range of communal and public spaces, this book opens up a new direction in gay and lesbian studies. From gay space in Mexico City to the now legendary baths of New York and San Francisco, Queers in Space travels to bars, parks, beaches, neighborhoods, and cities to follow the expansion and transformation of queer communities beyond the gay ghetto. By focusing on the geography of queer social relationships. The book raises critical and timely questions about the role of social space in shaping identities, the meaning of communal space for marginalized peoples, and the significance of public spaces for social visibility."
Sexuality & Space
Edited by: Beatriz Colomina
"Sexuality and Space's interdisciplinary essays address gender in relation to architectural discourse and critical theory, focusing on the relationships between sexuality and space hidden within everyday practices."
Stud: Architectures of Masculinity
Edited by: Joel Sanders
"Originally published in 1996, Stud: Architectures of Masculinity is an interdisciplinary exploration of the active role architecture plays in the construction of male identity. Architects, artists, and theorists investigate how sexuality is constituted through the organization of materials, objects, and human subjects in actual space. This collection of essays and visual projects critically analyzes the spaces that we habitually take for granted but that quietly participates in the manufacturing of 'maleness.' Employing a variety of critical perspectives (feminism, 'queer theory,' deconstruction, and psychoanalysis), Stud's contributors reveal how masculinity, always an unstable construct, is coded in our environment. Stud also addresses the relationship between architecture and gay male sexuality, illustrating the resourceful ways that gay men have appropriated and reordered everyday public domains, from streets to sex clubs, in the formation of gay social space."
Temporary Pleasure: Nightclub Architecture, Design and Culture from the 1960s to Today
Author: John Leo Gillen
"Opening with the psychedelic haunts of the 1960s New York pop art scene and closing more than half a century later with the rise of post-club happenings, Temporary Pleasure shows how nightlife spaces have evolved to meet the needs of their generation, and how each generation was seeking something a little different from the one before. Each chapter focuses on a distinct phase and location: Italy’s politically radical clubs of the ’60s; New York City’s disco scene; Detroit and Chicago’s techno and house paradises; Ibiza’s counterculture communal retreats; Britain’s rave culture; and Berlin’s techno scene. The clubs come to life in double-page spreads that feature specs and detailed profiles. Author John Leo Gillen offers his take on various important cultural, design, and architectural details, while numerous photographs offer their own vibey stories."
The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination
Author: Sarah Schulman
"In this gripping memoir of the AIDS years (1981–1996), Sarah Schulman recalls how much of the rebellious queer culture, cheap rents, and a vibrant downtown arts movement vanished almost overnight to be replaced by gay conservative spokespeople and mainstream consumerism. Schulman takes us back to her Lower East Side and brings it to life, filling these pages with vivid memories of her avant-garde queer friends and dramatically recreating the early years of the AIDS crisis as experienced by a political insider. Interweaving personal reminiscence with cogent analysis, Schulman details her experience as a witness to the loss of a generation’s imagination and the consequences of that loss."
The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity after World War II
Author: Stephen Vider
"From the Stonewall riots to the protests of ACT UP, histories of queer and trans politics have almost exclusively centered on public activism. In The Queerness of Home, Stephen Vider turns the focus inward, showing that the intimacy of domestic space has been equally crucial to the history of postwar LGBTQ life."
Transgender Architectonics: The Shape of Change in Modernist Space
Edited by: Lucas Crawford
"Combining transgender studies with the ’neomodernist’ architectures of the internationally renowned firm, Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) and with modernist writers (Samuel Beckett and Virginia Woolf) whose work anticipates that of transgender studies, this book challenges the implicit ’spatial models’ of popular narratives of transgender - interiority, ownership, sovereignty, structure, stability, and domesticity - to advance a novel theorization of transgender as a matter of exteriority, groundlessness, ornamentation, and movement. With case studies spanning the US and UK, Transgender Architectonics examines the ways in which modernist architecture can contribute to our understanding of how it is that humans are able to transform, shedding light on the manner in which architecture, space, and the spatial metaphors of gender can play significant - if often unrealized - potential roles in body and gender transformation."
This selection of books was made by the editors: Maria Deister, Nicolas Valencia, José Tomás Franco and Victor Delaqua.
