New Figurations in Architecture Theory: From Queer Performance to Becoming Trans

Authors

  • Robert Alexander Gorny Delft University of Technology
  • Dirk van den Heuvel Delft University of Technology

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7480/footprint.11.2.1897

Abstract

The editorial introduction to this Footprint issue maps some of the latest developments in the field of queer studies and the realm of architecture and urban design. The aim is for a productive exhange between the fields since queer theory can be instrumental in moving beyond the heteronormative dominance in architectural thinking, which is characterized by an essentialist approach based on binary notions, rather than an understanding of architecture as an interface in material processes of becoming and producing differences. After a brief discussion of the history of exchanges between queer studies and architectural history and theory, the authors propose to complement the notion of queering with the new developments in the field of trans studies, which propose to rethink architecture in terms of a materialist understanding of buildings as bodies which are in a constant flux of change and becoming instead of fixed and stable objects or identities.

Author Biographies

Robert Alexander Gorny, Delft University of Technology

Robert Alexander Gorny is currently a guest teacher and PhD candidate at the Chair of Methods and Analysis, Department of Architecture, TU Delft. He is founder of relationalthought, a nomadic architectural practice that operates at the very intersection of theory and practice. It aims at contributing to a new materialist understanding of historical formations and machinic approaches to the ecologies of architecture, which he puts forward in his doctoral studies on “a genealogy of apartments”. He joined the editorial board of Footprint in 2016. 

Dirk van den Heuvel, Delft University of Technology

Dirk van den Heuvel is associate professor with the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft, and he heads the Jaap Bakema Study Centre at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. Books he co-authored include Team 10: In Search of a Utopia of the Present 1953–1981 (2005) and Architecture and the Welfare State (2014). He is also an editor of the publication series DASH, Delft Architectural Studies in Housing and was an editor of the journal Oase (1993–1999). Van den Heuvel was curator of the Dutch national pavilion for the Venice architecture biennale in 2014. In 2017 he received a Richard Rogers Fellowship from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

References

Awan, Nishat, Tatjana Schneider and Jeremy Till. Spatial Agency. Other Ways of Doing Architecture. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011.

Ballentyne, Andrew. ‘Deleuze, Architecture and Social Fabrication’. In Deleuze and Architecture, edited by Hélène Frichot and Stephen Loo, 182–196. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2013.

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007.

Barlow, Care. Queer British Art 1861-1967. London: Tate, 2017.

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2009.

Betsky, Aaron, in interview with Jaffer Kolb. ‘The End of Queer Space?’, Log 41 (2017): 85–88.

Betsky, Aaron. Building Sex: Men, Women, Architecture and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: William Morrow, 1995.

Betsky, Aaron. Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire. New York: William Morrow & Company, 1997.

Bonnevier, Katarina. Behind Straight Curtains: Towards a Queer Feminist Theory of Architecture. Stockholm: Axl Books, 2007.

Braidotti, Rosi. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. New York: Wiley, 2013.

Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia UP, 1994

Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity, 2013.

Braidotti, Rosi. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge: Polity, 2006.

Butler, Judith Undoing Gender. New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2004.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Gender. New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 1990.

Chauncey, George. ‘Privacy Could Only Be Had in Public: Gay Uses of the Streets’, in Stud: Architecture of Masculinity, edited by Joel Sanders (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996).

Crawford, Lucas C. ‘Breaking ground on a theory of transgender architecture’. Seattle Journal for Social Justice 8, no.2 (2010): 515–39.

Crawford, Lucas C. Transgender Architectonics: The Shape of Change in Modernist Space. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015.

Doucet, Isabelle, and Kenny Cupers (eds.). ‘Agency in Architecture: Reframing Criticality in Theory and Practice’, Footprint 4 (2009).

Duff, Cameron. ‘The Ethological City’. In Deleuze and Architecture, edited by Hélène Frichot and Stephen Loo, 215–229. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2013

Frichot, Hélène, Catharina Gabrielsson, and Helen Runting (eds.). Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies, Economies, Technologies. Abingdon and New York, Routledge, 2017.

Frichot, Hélène, Catharina Gabrielsson, and Jonathan Metzger (eds.) ‘What a City Can Do’. Introduction to Deleuze and the City. Edinburgh: Edinburg UP, 2016.

Jencks, Charles. The Language of Post-modern Architecture London: Academy Editions, 1977.

Kolb, Jaffer. ‘Working Queer’, in Log 41 (2017): 63–66

Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve. Epistemology of the Closet. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1990

Kovar, Zuzana. Architecture in Abjection: Bodies, Spaces and their Relations. London and New York: Tauris, 2018.

Lambert, Léopold (ed.). ‘Queers, Feminists and Interiors’. The Funambulist no.13 (Sept-October 2017).

McLeod, Mary. ‘Everyday and “Other” Spaces’, in Architecture and Feminism, edited by Debra Coleman, Elizabeth Danze, and Carol Henderson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996: 1–37.

Preciado, Paul B. ‘Architecture as a Practice of Biopolitical Disobedience’. Log 25 (2012): 121–34.

Preciado, Paul B. ‘Pharmaco‐Pornographic Politics: Towards a New Gender Ecology’. Parallax 14, no. 1 (2008): 105–17.

Preciado, Paul B. Testo junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2013.

Radman Andrej, and Heidi Sohn (eds.). Critical and Clinical Cartographies: Architecture, Robotics, Medicine, Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburg UP, 2017.

Rault, Jasmine. Eileen Gray and the Design of Sapphic Modernity: Staying In. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011.

Sanders, Joel (ed.). Stud: Architectures of Masculinity. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996.

Sanders, Joel. ‘From Stud to Stalled!: Architecture in Transition’. Log 41 (2017): 145–54.

Urbach, Henry. ‘Closets, Clothes, disClosure’. In Assemblage 30 (Aug 1996): 62–73.

Downloads

Published

2017-12-22

Issue

Issue # 21 | Autumn / Winter 2017 | Trans-Bodies / Queering Spaces

Section

Editorial

License

  1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
  2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.