Queer Spaces

An ‘atlas’ of queer spaces is due to be published in May this year. The authors explain why this is a guide for all designers.

Adam Nathaniel Furman

Queer Spaces

Adam Nathaniel Furman is an artist and designer who trained in architecture, and who works in spatial design and art of all scales from video and prints, to largescale public artworks, architecture, architecturally integrated ornament, as well as products, furniture, interiors, publishing and academia.

Joshua Mardell

Queer Spaces

Joshua Mardell is an architectural historian, and an Associate Lecturer at the Department of History of Art, University of York.

Queer Spaces is an image-rich book of stories that celebrates the plurality of queer life throughout time and place – stories enacted through spaces. While aimed at the queer community and general public as a whole, it hopes to be an essential reference point for designers. As a limpid and jargonfree book for practitioners who operate in a primarily visual way, it conspicuously fills a lacuna in the historiography and the market. The book is aimed to help designers find a recognisable queer pedigree through provision of an accessible history of queer themes past and present: concrete examples, simply explained.

We refer to the book as an “atlas” as it covers many parts of the world, but it is designed to be transnational and transgeographical: an opportunity to map unexpected connections and continuities across places and typologies. It hopes to tangibly unify seemingly disparate, even ostensibly incommensurate strands of the queer coalition. And furthermore, it seeks to cut across class boundaries to reclaim non-elite queer experiences; queer history itself has tended to prioritise upper and middle-class lives who have left more evidence on the landscape. The book, appropriately, is in itself informed by a queer approach. We have resolutely sought to move away from binaries to offer as broad a spectrum of queer stories as possible. Seemingly disparate built environment spheres, from landscape design, to interior design, to architecture, become unified. After all, stories of queer individuals living their lives and creating their own spaces necessarily cut across professional demarcations. As a means of maintaining such diversity and fluidity, we have broken the book down into a series of inclusive scales from ‘domestic’ to ‘communal’ to ‘public’, and in order to safeguard those singularities and specificities, we invited 45 extraordinary international authors to offer their own unique perspectives across almost 100 vignettes, and to let their own voices sing.

The book foregrounds and makes manifest the centrality of landscape to queer experience. For instance, the Swedish author Selma Lagerlöf (1858-1940), whose literature was so informed by local topography, created an almost fictive domestic landscape in Mårbacka, Värmland by building a household for a woman who loved women that subtly satirised the hegemonic masculinity traditionally built into the Swedish domestic environment at the time. A further case in point is the voyage of the architect Doron Von Beider through unexpected landscapes and sites in 1980s and ‘90s Israel, poignantly charted in the book, each of which became queered through action and experience. Aterro do Flamengo, built in 1965, with its thick vegetation and dimly-lit spaces, has long been an attractive safe space for Rio’s queer society (and other marginalised groups) to find belonging in. At a broader scale, the Mediterranean landscape itself, with its ancient architecture, is explored in the book as a setting of homoerotic fantasy and boyish beauty to generations of homosexual expatriates in nineteenth and twentieth-century Sicily. Our book ends with a beautiful concluding celebration of queer life: the Comparsa Drag collective of Buenos Aires, whose performative partying seeks to redistribute queer pleasure through the metropolitan landscape. In what follows, several Queer Spaces authors talk about four further vignettes from the book, in which landscape and queer identity are integrally intertwined.

Architectural historian Freya Gowrley describes A la Ronde, a distinctive sixteen-sided Georgian cottage orné, home to the cousins Jane and Mary Parminter (1750-1811, and 1767-1849, respectively), who appropriated the local landscape – from shells, to sand, to seaweed – to create an idiosyncratic decorative domesticity akin to a grotto.

Jane and Mary lived together at A la Ronde from around 1796 until Jane’s death in 1811 (after which Mary lived there alone). Utilising materials collected from the nature that surrounded them, they transformed the detritus of the beach and countryside, reformulating it to convey their close relationship with the landscape and locale of Devon. Mary’s will shows how the Parminters viewed their decoration and cultivation of the homosocial space of A la Ronde. It stipulates that only a female inheritor could claim ownership of the property. Entrance into marriage, making alterations, and failure to maintain the house and gardens could all cause disinheritance. The construction, decoration, and projected legacy of A la Ronde was therefore an essential aspect of the Parminters’ creation of an explicitly gendered space, a home where feminine accomplishment could flourish, sustained and protected throughout the succeeding centuries. The will invites us to consider the inheritance of the house as a form of distinctively female and queer heirlooming.

One of the diamond windows at A la Ronde, Devon

© National Trust Images/ James Dobson

Urbanist and LGBTQIA+ activist Ruhul Abdin examines queer desire as it unravels in the penumbra of anonymity created by Bokultola (Spanish cherry) trees in an unnamed park (XXX) in central Dhaka.

XXX offers the possibility of a queered public space right in the very heart of Dhaka, even one that exists precariously and always with the spectre of extreme risk to those who inhabit it. There are some spaces in the public realm in the city where queerness can flourish in the semi-dark, such as those areas occupied by sex workers, but most of them are now beginning to be lost. As the city’s hidden queer geography is changing, and shrinking, XXX stands as testament to the enduring capacity of alternative sexualities being able to coexist, and even thrive, in the most unexpected of urban situations.

Architect and sociologist Sergio Galaz Garcia examines an Arcadia for cruising: Caminito Verde, or the Little Green Road, in Mexico City.

A pedregal: a unique landscape of endemic vegetation and volcanic rocks chiselled by eruptions, temperate weather, and the pouring of summer rains, fills vast interstices in between the many buildings of the Ciudad Universitaria (CU). Inside this scenery is a garden of earthly delights. This is the Caminito Verde, an area enabled, provoked, and inspired by CU’s unique spatial quality, and used by both students and visitors to gaze at others, and if so preferred, engage in bodily intercourse with one another. It is as public as it is private. It is secluded, hidden from those for whom it should remain invisible, but also porous for those looking to enter it, accessible to those who know.

Finally, Jeroen van Dijk of the Bishopsgate Institute, London, describes the Homomonument: three triangles of radiant Rosa Porino granite that define a site of queer memorialisation on the bank of the Keizersgracht canal in central Amsterdam.

Homomonument on the Westermarkt, 2008

© City Archives Amsterdam

Flowers on the “triangle of remembrance” of the Homomonument on the Westermarkt, 1997

© City Archives Amsterdam

People have been bringing flowers to the Homomonument every day since it was erected in 1987. A tangible space for memory, it consists of three triangles, which together form a larger triangle, connected by granite lines cutting through the streets and pavement, making the monument a part of the city’s very fabric and identity. It memorialises homosexual victims who were persecuted during Nazi occupation because of their sexuality, making it the first queer memorial of its kind in the world. Each triangle symbolises a different aspect of queer memory. That extending over one of the city’s canals symbolises the present. The triangle on street level symbolises the oppression and homophobic violence queer people faced in the past. The triangle that rises from street level symbolises the future. It serves as a meeting place for people to come together.

Queer Spaces: An Atlas of LGBTQIA+ Places & Stories (RIBA Publishing) edited by Adam Nathaniel Furman and Joshua Mardell will be published on 1 May and is available to pre-order from the RIBA Bookshop: https://www.ribabooks.com/ Queer-Spaces-An-Atlas- of-LGBTQIA-Places-and- Stories_9781914124211#