The International Journal of Architectonic, Spatial, and Environmental Design

ISSN: 2325-1662 (Print), ISSN: 2325-1670 (Online)

Volume 17, Issue 2, 2023
https://doi.org/10.18848/2325-1662/CGP/v17i02/151-167

Blurring Binaries: A Queer Approach to Architecture

through Embodied Connection
Andrew Caldwell, Jerram Tocker Barron Architects, New Zealand
Jan Smitheram, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

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Received: 4/25/2022; Accepted: 8/4/2022

Abstract: Architecture is often cast as being material, mute, and prosaic; yet architecture, home, and the very
notion of “walls” is generative of, and intersected with, notions of our identities, both individual and collective.
This article follows the development of a project through a queer approach to design, questioning, and
blurring architectural binaries, where the method of exploration is design itself. A process of questioning,
designing, and reflecting—in a nonlinear, iterative, design-led research approach—establishes itself through
three projects, each increasing in scale and complexity. For the purpose of clarity, the article is structured in a
linear fashion to explore at three scales—installation (breaking binaries), domestic (blending binaries), and
public (blurring binaries) how design can be used to question spatial binaries. The design interventions work
as a helpful way—as a strategy—to navigate current trends in reimaging society and the expectations around
space and orientation, thus suggesting ways of making spaces that support the out-of-place, the unsettled,
and the oblique.

Keywords: Blurring Binaries, Queer, Queer Space, Embodied Connection

Introduction

Architecture is often cast as being material, mute, and prosaic; yet architecture and the very
notion of “walls” are generative of, and intersected with, notions of our identities, both
individual and collective. If we consider the imagery of architecture, in magazines and books,
we find that the focus is often concerned with the form of architecture absent of people. In
this imagery, architectural walls operate surreptitiously to control and orientate our bodies,
to support boundaries and boundary-making between “us” and “them”—a technology that
divides people up. In this sense, architecture is the political ally, demarcating who belongs,
who is authentic, and who should stay. Architectonics: the boundaries and the walls of
architecture, works socially and spatially to include, but also to exclude (Duyvendak 2011).
The concept of architecture also operates here as a multiscaler concept: it operates not solely
at the boundary between ourselves and others but also as the grounds for the historical roots
of nationality, citizenship, individualism, belonging, retreat, and the naturalizations of these
terms (Duyvendak 2011). Architecture is not just the object-other; it is also tied to the very
matter that positions the relations taking place, to create a scenography of relations that
locates subjects and objects in terms of nearness and farness, where spatial props organize and
maintain the system (Irigaray 1985). Architecture is not alone in this performance but is one
actant in the division between subject and object, which constitutes a world in which an
acting human is contrasted with architecture through separation.
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Looking through a queer lens, this raises questions of how walls can be built and designed
so as not to block out or shut in; to connect rather than separate, to make secure without
imposing securitization—holding onto and closing down (Brown 2010). The picture we are
trying to create here is of a complexity in our material world that is often absent from
discussions of identities—particularly of queer identities. By thinking critically through (or
reimagining) architectural space through a queer lens, we can start to look at how identities are
contained or, potentially, orientated otherwise to understand the design of architecture. To

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address architecture through a queer lens, this article is structured as follows. After introducing
the method and theoretical background of this article, the second part is structured around
three scales of a design project. The first encounter, an installation, sought to challenge the
dichotomy between the body and the built through touch. The malleable installation invited
interaction as people fashioned and pushed and prodded the design, turning the body and
matter into active agents in the construction of space. The domestic-scaled second encounter
explored the tension between the historically defined feminine boudoir and masculine study.
The sensorial pleasure of a blended space was explored to understand how it could be read as a
queer space. The third encounter, at the public scale, aimed to challenge the dichotomy
between private and public through a spectrum of spatial relations—to explore a space of civic
intimacy and civic conviviality. The interior landscape of the public pavilions was divided by
curtains and fuzzy boundaries where architectural elements and spaces could be changed up
with different possibilities when people mark out their own journey in and through the
architecture. Rather than naming it queer space, queer appears in these performances. These
three scaled encounters weave together images in text to explore the tension between
orientations and identity politics—which, we argue, questions the will to “binarize.”

Design as Research

Our approach in this article is to critically examine architectural designs to speculate on queer
space, rather than through a more traditional literary approach. This means we do not
approach this project by codifying queer design through socio-spatial and historical data, to
provide an analytical framework of investigation. Case studies were analyzed, but the primary
approach taken in this thesis was to focus on design as a process of queer architecture not as
a “thing” but as a line of development. This approach of research through design follows the
work of Downton (2003), Fraser (2013, 2019), Rendell (2013), and Moloney, Smitheram, and
Twose (2015), where a research question is resolved through design. Following a “design-as-
research” methodology, the designs act like a question—a supposal or a hypothesis—about
how we might live in architectural space. Using design speculatively means that architecture
can examine the fantastical, the improbable, and the unbuildable. However, a limitation of
this method, owing to the nature of design as a “wicked problem,” is that it is difficult to
arrive at one definite solution (Downton 2003, 43). Underlying this article is a structure of
design around three scales, all of which intersect in a manner that speaks to a practical
viability as well as being future-orientated and filled with spatial possibilities. This structure,

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moving from an installation through to the public scale, reflects the parameters and the limits
set by the Speculative Design Research Stream at the Wellington School of Architecture,
which this project was part of. The stream is structured this way because scale is used to
support creative possibilities where the design exploration is seen as transferable. Scale is
understood to have an intensity and can promote affective possibilities in architecture when
small and large scales actively inflect one another in the design process (Figure 1).

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Figure 1: Diagram of Design-as-Research Process

The speculative architectural projects, which underscore this article, began with a clear
intent: to celebrate queer pride and identity in architectural space. The term queer, we argue,
while critical to questioning normative conceptions of sex, gender, and sexuality, also
questions norms, which bind identity to particular conceptions of space. This design project
reflects the diversity of the term “queerness,” where queerness encompasses a spectrum from
queer pride through to understanding queer as action and reaction against a status quo.
Drawn into the context of architecture, the term queer is an important lens through which
to question spatial conventions, norms, and ways of living and to consider how architecture
can be repurposed to become nonbinary and to direct our actions and our orientations in
different ways (Herring 2011; Moore and Casticum 2020). A starting point for this project
was the queer theorization of Katarina Bonnevier. Bonnevier is part of a growing body of
work on LGBTQ in architecture that looks at uncovering lived realties of sexual minorities,
more inclusive approaches to the way we understand how people inhabit space, empowering
nonconformist ways of occupying space, exploring how subjects actively queer space, and
questioning oppressive heteronormative imaginaries that are firmly entrenched in
architecture (Campkin and Pilkey 2020; Bonfanti 2020). Bonnevier, specifically, looks at how
the term queer can be used not only to “destabilise divisive regimes based on binaristic

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thinking and perception; the thinking that constructs male and female as hierarchical
oppositions, masculine and feminine, heterosexual and homosexual” but also to destabilize a
“simplistic architecture of oppositions” (2005, 170, 179). Bonnevier’s approach differs from
the historical approach in the discipline, such as in Aaron Betsky’s seminal work on queer
architecture, where Betsky outlined a queer space that was confined to the interior—to the
closet—to the invisible and the taboo (1997). Betsky’s Queer Space is problematically driven,
we suggest, by its white, gay, male-centric view. As Brent Pilkey elaborates, Betsky’s personal
reading “applies stereotyped gay traits including the obsession with sex as well as individual

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vanity to canonical architecture” (2013, 23). Queerness, in Betsky’s framework, takes on the
opposition role to the meanings of home and family. It also provides limited understanding
of how we encounter and engage with architectural space. Moreover, to consider the
relationship of queer space in terms of power relations—ideologically, symbolically, and in
terms of subject positions—with respect to queerness tends to replicate the binaries that this
article, and the design underscoring it, tries to unpack.
To describe these performances, to reflect on what is, but also to explore the capacity of
what is yet to be, we turn to Sarah Ahmed. Ahmed’s writing provides a useful frame for the
project and to think through the possibilities of queer or queering space. This is because her
work resonates with architecture through her use of objects and space to explain queer
orientation and disorientation. Ahmed, through a queer phenomenology, asks us what it means
to be orientated toward the world in terms of how we occupy and share space and how we
direct our bodies, attention, and energy (2010). In Ahmed’s framework, these “affective forms
of (re) orientation” help us to consider the affecting relations of proximity and distance between
objects and others and how we tend toward certain objects and spaces to feel “out of place”
(2006, 543). Objects come alive through how we orientate toward them and how objects
arrange us, which impacts on our habits and daily practices. Queer here concerns “the place of
the object in sexual desire; by attending to how the bodily direction ‘toward’ such objects affects
how bodies inhabit spaces and how spaces inhabit bodies” (2006, 543).
Ahmed’s writing is attuned to understanding and unpacking relations of what is. But
when we design, we also consider the orientations of bodies, and how architecture may
provide particular affordances where bodies come to affect other bodies, and how they
become affected in turn (Ahmed 2010). By considering a design problem, we put Ahmed in
conversation with queer political imaginings concerning architecture and design itself (Boys
2016). What is “often overlooked [is the] social and cultural life of designed objects and
spaces, which frame, impact, enhance, compel, assist, and help shape our experiences of being
in the material world, meaning-making and identity formation” (Potvin 2019, 326–327).
Therefore, we start to explore questions of how design can serve as a critical force for
considering queer spatial politics—can we create a space where we can create a sense of
community through shared attachments and orientations? We ask how architecture is
composed to forge attachment between bodies—individual, collective, human, and
nonhuman—in order to move toward conviviality and solidarity (Gatens and Lloyd 1999;

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Hemmings 2012; Chamberlain 2017; Piazzoni, Poe, and Santi 2022). This means exploring a
design that considers tendencies, orientations, and affect—to create a space that resonates, for
people to take up space, to feel at ease, to compose our relations with others. But how we
design for this requires us to shift the notion of orientation—from an anthropocentric
conception of how we reside—to include architectural space as an active agent within our
understanding of orientation, which we explore first at the installation scale.

Installation Scale

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The installation aimed to challenge the binary between the body and the built—to explore a
kinship with space through touch. At this scale, it offers a way to question the spatial dichotomies
between the body/nonbody and the private/public and gives a more direct way to explore our
orientation with space compared with other means within the discipline to speculate about a
design (such as a drawing or render). Similarly, and following Scott Carey, the very physicality
and materiality of the installation offers a way to queer spatial norms and dichotomies:

The installation space can be an in-between space that negotiates the dichotomy
between the inside of the body and the outside of the body, between private and
public realms, between the historical past and the now, between the periphery and
center of the many contested intersecting terrains of identity. (2007, 2)

To explore the installation as an in-between space, as the designer, the design process focused
on how to link surface to occupation and orientation. The installation surface-space evolved
from the input of many parallel investigations. This included research-for-design: looking at
the works of Bonnevier, as alluded to in the theory section, whose writing provided support
to look at a “material queerness…situated in the surface—that is, in the interrelation between
built matter and the active subject” (2007, 56). It also involved material tests, which evolved
through the design of various interactive surfaces. The installation comprised of multiple
different interactive textures with semi-ordered flexibility—all in a limited material palette
and using simple processes such as cut, layer, and fold. Through these material tests the
installation explored how a wall can be pushed, prodded, taken apart, worn like clothing, all
in order to queer and question spatial norms that we are used to. This started to shape the
design exploration of putting bodily senses into a queered relationship with surface to
question spatial orientation (Wagner 2007). Members of UniQ Victoria were asked to engage
with the installation surfaces. The final approach was intended to ascertain where there were
themes or commonalities, but also differences, in the responses and interactions between
bodies and the designed surfaces: whether there is collaboration, interactivity, or interference
(Bennett 2010) (Figure 2).

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Figure 2: Interactive Geometric Surfaces for the Installation

Across these various lines of exploration, the finding was that the malleable installation
invited interaction—where people fashioned the interior “wall,” pushed and prodded the
surfaces, and engaged with the sensual qualities of architecture. People in the group would re-
orientate the material as a way to understand the surfaces. The body and matter were active
agents in the construction of space, where human and nonhuman materials were drawn into
different proximal, mutual, and sensual relationships. The first design project offered a way to
consider a non-normative, or queer, orientation to surface and how people were orientated
toward others. The fact that people became more engaged with surfaces in a closer proximal
relationship instead of in a fixed installation piece highlighted how play and interaction
underlie the way meaning is created in the process of making and interacting (Bonnevier 2005).
However, the responses of many people to the surfaces included disorientation or a lack of
response. Orientation was important here but not in the way that was expected: because the
bodies struggled to find an orientation without the normal parameters of spatial guidance.
The issue, as an embodied question, is that people find it hard to “do things” with a wall
that is removed from its normal characteristics of being a wall, which was a limitation to the
project. As Bader explains, getting people to interact with architecture itself is difficult
because most people are used to ignoring the given setting. “Architecture’s daily impact on
its users is the result of neither concentration nor focused attention. Preoccupied with
everyday tasks, most people do not stop to observe the architectural object as a work of art”
(2015, 267). Therefore, a tendency exists for us to enact, through our movements and
repetitions (or, in this case, inaction), architecture as matter, mute and a background for our
own action. This is particularly apparent if architecture is spaced from us, rather than ready
to hand. However, with architecture, there is always an exploring—a feeling that we do not
know what will happen next. We might stand back; alternatively, we might just be still.
Alternatively, when up close, we might make meaning through how we touch an object.
There is a queering happening here: rather than a tendency toward, in the non-confirmative
way, we are merely in a state of not knowing, of being indifferent and nonaligned (Ahmed
2006). One could suggest that the varied disorientations, orientations, and inaction, in a small
way, disturb the order of things, making them queer (Ahmed 2006).

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However, the focus on the wall still speaks to the idea that architecture is about a thingness,
rather than focusing on architecture as a process. A more profound way of breaking binaries
would have occurred by thinking of the wall frame’s permeability as the primary found
condition and how it might complicate an inhabitant’s visual and corporeal experience. The
installation informed the next design stages in three ways. First, it primed us to question
architectural conventions. Second, it established the importance of the body and of interacting
with materials, which continued through the whole project at all scales. Third, the surface

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patterns explored through the installation were scaled up and down, multiplied, layered, and
collaged, which developed into a successful ideas generator for the larger scale projects.

Domestic Scale

The first space designed was the home. To design for orientation of the body requires us to
ask how we align body and space through architecture—how we support someone to feel at
home (Ahmed 2006). The home is a space associated with a history and socio-spatial norms
of heterosexual intimacy and as the space of the retreat for the family (Campkin and Pilkey
2020). This implicit socio-spatial knowledge we experience and inherit orientates us toward
the home, such that objects and people are “put in their place” (Ahmed 2006, 100–101). The
home can be a safe space where people can hide their identity—to be in the closet (Betsky
1997; Brown 2000). However, the home can also be a space where one cannot “take up
space”—to be at home when ones’ own family might not accept queer identities (Valentine,
Skelton, and Butler 2003; Gorman-Murray 2008). Moreover, how the body is orientated in
domestic space is significantly affected by society’s normative conceptions of home and the
family unit. As Alice Friedman succinctly reminds us “through screening, sight lines,
contrasts of scale, lighting, and other devices, architecture literally stages the value system of
a culture, foregrounding certain activities and persons and obscuring others” (1992, 43).
In this queer approach to the domestic scale, the four binary ideas of public/private,
ornamentation/structure, architecture/furniture through to female/male gendered space were
challenged in the design through a process of exploring what it means to blend binaries to
create multipurpose, ambiguous, and sensuous space. This approach draws from the design
work of Eileen Gray. As in the first project, there were various lines of investigation. The
domestic interior space developed by reference to wider research, but specifically to Eileen
Gray’s home E.1027, built in 1929. Research on Gray provided a strategy to question the
gender binaries in the home. She looked at the home through a lens of blending and through
its use, where the design of architecture is not just a noun but a verb. This requires us to
rethink every aspect of the home, such as the different ways that one can hang a coat on a
hook or by asking what a table might be if it is more than a static object on the ground. For
Gray “even the furnishings should lose their individuality by blending in with the
architectural ensemble” (1929 cited in Sisson 2019). She asked philosophical questions about
how we live and how we orientate ourselves through architecture.

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We explored her concept of “living room” as “a multifunctional space for all aspects of
life—pleasure, rest, studies, business meetings and parties” (Bonnevier 2007, 166). It enabled
the design experiments to counteract and avoid the simplicity of gendered dichotomies and
shift toward ambiguity, challenging societal and bodily orientations and the sense of home.
Elements of the historically gendered spaces of the feminine boudoir and the masculine study
were drawn from and blended in the design-led process. To determine how matter might be
assembled in different ways, we considered the design of gendered spaces in terms of how

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work and home collide today and considered, as an instrument of design, the different ways
the design experiments could play between what is familiar and what is strange.
Drawing from Gray and what was learned from the installation, we explored the binary
between architecture and furniture. Starting with small and interactive elements, primary
shapes from the installation were scaled and folded to become adjustable tray tables to prop
up on a bed. Consequently, problematically gendered states of living and being were
disrupted by creating a space in the living room in which a person can inhabit both the
masculine study (by working) and the feminine boudoir (by allowing the person to work
from the bed). For larger scale furniture, we interrogated the furniture for resting in the
boudoir (the bed) and for working in the study (the chair) and experimented to see how the
binaries between lying and sitting could be dissolved. Ergonomics and furniture design
standards helped with this stage, but they were problematic from a queer point of view as
they provided only a single “normal” recommendation for accommodating diversity of
experience (Imrie 2003, 47). Therefore, this changed the focus toward designing a spectrum
of potential comfort angles, or affording varying and shifting orientations, where the
changing shape allows users to find their optimum spot for comfort in their chosen activity.
Rather than designing an item of furniture or an interior space, the design for body
evolved through an exploration of surfaces. These surfaces for the body were then unfolded
into the interiors—establishing form by using strips to embrace the body and interior space,
relationally. The design exploration was iterative. And what was explored through drawing
was a series of strips, or sections, that defined the interior space that had different sensual
possibilities. The sections were then laser cut and lined up before thin colored thread
stretched and arced between to evoke a final domestic interior, where the interior space
pushed and prodded the overall 3D form. This is a space that was designed to try to encourage
encounter and orientations that are not singular or directional, one would be prompted to
extend their body in different ways into the space. The queer symbolism of the rainbow,
evoked by the colored threads that extend to, then cascade down the design’s exterior, both
uplifts passers-by of diverse identities and allows the intimacy of the home to connect with
public space. It is a home shaped by the “entanglement of genealogies of dispersion with
those of ‘staying put’ ” (Brah 1996 cited in Ahmed 2006, 133). Nonetheless, it also points
more explicitly to a political standpoint, where the rainbow provides a moment of “mutual
recognition and affective solidarity” (Hemmings 2012, 157) (Figure 3).

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Figure 3: A Party in the Multifunctional Living Room

The final interior spaces are not conventional. Rather, the design worked toward
orientations, or bodily orientations, by incorporating multipurpose furniture—where people
can choose their ergonomic comfort zone. There is also interaction in the space between
furniture and architecture, allowing people to inhabit space by exploring the architectural
capacities for bodily expansion and to reorientate the body in space. This approach resonates
with Olivier Vallerand, who considers the impact queering has on domestic space:

The potential of a theory of queer space is in rethinking how domestic spaces can be
designed to allow everyone to better manage how their self-identifications are
expressed through their living environments and who has access to them, to create a
stronger awareness of the blurring of private and public that can occur in any
domestic space. (2014, 10)

The final design, by reorientating bodies to find a place within the domestic that resonates
affectively, leaves open the question of the meanings we ascribe to domestic space and also
normative spaces generally. This occurs because of the way we flow with space, rather than
through attachments to historical bodily orientations toward particular understandings of
the home. However, the challenge becomes one of how to sustain a connection between what
the space means and what the space feels like, without succumbing to a proscriptive way of
thinking through design. Although different from the questions raised by the installation,
these are important questions when we think about design and how architecture shapes our
orientations. By asking how we shake up design habits, we find places where, architecturally,
we are comfortable and uncomfortable. The rainbow colors of the interior space spoke to
historical orientations of identity and to a pride that could be read to have meaning. This
highlights the complexity of the project when there is a desire to question meaning that is
embedded in space and at other times we shift to embed meaning into space, to be read,
noticed, and celebrated. However, this stage raised a number of questions about the design
process and outcome, where the installation stage extended the “design-as-research”
methodology through a collaborative activity (Sanders 2008), a reflection of the domestic
scale, and the approach meant that the project was once more narrowed down to a designed

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artifact removed from collaborative input (Julier 2008). Furthermore, the project still
gestured toward a single home, ownership, and propriety, rather than considering how spaces
might be shared more publicly—something that was unpacked through the next scale of
exploration. The blurring of private and public identity through sensual and meaningful
space orientates us toward experiencing a spectrum of knowing, which was furthered in the
next design of a public building intervention.

Public Building

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The next scale provides a further opportunity to queer normative understandings of the bodies
and simple binaries that operate within the architectural discipline. Queer has an interesting
and varied relationship with public space. Public space has been the most common place where
queer communities could interact and foster their own social and cultural networks by putting
normative spaces to queer purposes (Chauncey 1996). George Chauncey (1996) argues that
space has no natural meaning or character; rather, space is invested with meaning by its
designers and users through their own reading and experiences. Although the meaning
produced is often heteronormative, queer works to counteract that—first by calling it out, then
by playing with a spectrum of alternatives (Bell and Valentine 1995; Binnie 1997; Oswin 2008;
Moore and Castricum 2020). It is in the public sphere where heteronormative spaces and
binaries that divide public/private, inside/outside, and read/lived spaces are challenged.
Following a design-as-research methodology, the proposition was further refined at this
stage, as was the approach to queering space. Drawing from, and developing on, the idea of
blending dichotomies in the domestic scale, the aim of public scale design was how “all” sexual
and gender identities are on a spectrum, rather than having to fit within an oppositional model
(Motschenbacher 2010). An added underlying aim for this scale was to create an architecture
that amplified and stitched back together the lost queer spatial network of Wellington, New
Zealand. Continuing with a design-as-research methodological framework, the process for this
scale was iteratively orientated to explore a queer process and blurring scales and program.
First, we examined the design from the scale of the city. It was important to find out
about the networks of queer spaces available to Wellington’s queer community. These
networks have changed over time and affected the intensity to which Wellington has been
queered. There has been a loss of queer spaces in Wellington. Although one can consider that
this may indicate that public space has become more welcoming of differences, the anecdotal
evidence suggests otherwise. Although not explored in this project, one reason for this loss is
a shift to other ways of demarcating and inhabiting safe public spaces, such as through more
digital ways of socializing and occupying space.
Space Is Citizenship
The lack of queer space within the “public” sphere signifies an erasure not only of queer
representation and narrative but also of queer experiences and memories themselves (Wilson
2010). Amplifying the history of queer spaces is important to show the integral nature of

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queer culture and queer bodily experience in the city. To achieve this, the histories of
Wellington queer spaces were mapped, drawing out the networks as they changed over time.
This highlighted how much of the queer space network has been lost over time, particularly
as only two queer bars are left in the city. In order to amplify the queer history of these sites,
a new “Love Letter Network” of interactive canopy interventions was designed for each
historic site, drawing on the design research from the previous scales. These shelters would
make visible the queer cultural histories of these sites around Wellington, as well as providing

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mailboxes to send love letters. Each installation was designed to be moved, rearranged, and
charged with activity, allowing the body, the architecture, and the city to perform and
transform over time. These small-scale interventions that cover the city can be read in relation
to each other as a large public space because they engage users with queered meaning and
experience at multiple scales (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Love Letter Network—Queer City Installations

The next stage was the exploration of an interior public space to gather difference. This
is where bodies can engage and interact with the interiors as well as other bodies in the
space—to queer the spaces themselves. To create free and ephemeral “fuzzy boundary”
conditions, curtains were designed to occupy the overlap space between programs and
between public and less public spaces. These curtains were designed for interaction—with
the users, the environment, and the rest of the architecture. For the fuzzy boundary curtains,
referencing some of the interactive installation surfaces allowed for sampling and building
from their concepts. The folded furniture experiments and their digital processes from the
domestic project developed, flocked, and gained complexity. Thus, a nesting of scales is
created across boundaries of hand, body, room, building, and city. Curtains embody, in some
way, the tension and constructed divide between the disciplines of architecture and
interiors (Sanders 2002). This divide embodies binaries of masculine/feminine, science/art,
architecture/furniture, and structure/decoration (Sanders 2002). These gendered and
heteronormative notions were questioned and blurred through the curtain designs. Evident
through the design process was not treating scale in a linear way but rather exploring through
a “scale up” and “scale down” (Yaneva 2005, 870). Moreover, this project had a focus on
considering materiality and connectivity as a way to challenge the privileging of the large
over the small scale (Figure 5).

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Figure 5: Sensual Curtain Space Model

The final series of interconnected interior spaces serves as a porous hub for the central
Wellington community. Included are a queer-focused archive and library, nightclub, cafe,
gallery, and open-use community space, along with their required support spaces. The
interior spaces also interact with a park and provide spontaneous meeting spaces,
performance spaces, seating, and amphitheaters. These spaces are activated through a nesting
of scales—where public spaces and programs are divided through interactive fuzzy
boundaries. The threshold nature of the fuzzy boundaries means that they are more
transitional than queer, establishing their own category of “in-between.” The curtains, which
occupy the threshold as other elements, can be changed and charged with different
possibilities—allowing people to find their own journey and identity in the space (Sanders
2002). One could be alone or part of a community within an intimate public setting,
challenging the restrictions on the body (in a pre–COVID-19 world). The building is about
providing a possible affective resonance, activation or amplification for people, or, more
precisely, a space of possibility through inclusiveness and unpredictability (Hemmings 2012;
Pilkey 2013). These spaces provide the possibility for encounter, where relations are
performed or moments are queered through collaboration between bodies, materials, and
forces, rather than providing and naming it queer space (Vallerand 2014).
Thus, the interior space is designed as a permeable membrane between different affective
pockets. These pockets, communicating through their affordances, invite us to move, to make
gestures, to engage the senses. By shifting scales and considering the small and the public
scales simultaneously, semipublic intimacy is put at the center of our consideration, rather
than re-instating a divide between private and public. This draws instead from the affective
potential of the space—which is designed to afford a civic conviviality—for people to enhance
their sense of well-being (Figure 6).

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Figure 6: Fuzzy Boundaries between Spatial Conditions and Programs

In creating this queer architecture, there is an interesting relationship between its queer
program and the “queered” interior resulting from the process. Multiple states of queerness
embody themselves in the final building through its people and the queer design approach.
The design process was about making a spectrum between binaries, whereas the queer
community program was used to test that proposition. At the public scale, it was critical how
intimacy was understood: drawing from previous work, the domestic and more intimate
scales inflect the design thinking to redirect elements so that civic and affective practices can
be cultivated. There were some limitations to the design, however; for example, the
disruption of the ground plane that was a feature of preliminary design investigations was
not carried through because the focus shifted to the adoption of the curtain and blurred
boundaries. This focus curtailed experimentation into how intimacy could be activated
through level changes within a space.

Conclusion

Architectural interventions are helpful to articulate a strategy to imagine or reimagine society,

in this case simple binaries that operate spatially. In addition, this project highlights the lack
of queer spatial visions or queer spatial visions that are shared beyond the discipline of
architecture. Architecture at the imaginary level—and we would argue at the level of
collective imagination—is isolated from the concerns of people yet is critical to orientate and
locate people both in an embodied and imaginary sense. This article adds to the collective
imagination through a speculative design project to question how we can create, or prompt,
different relations of proximity (Probyn 1996). The three encounters weave together different
ways of exploring a queered relationship between a sensual body, architecture, and identity
politics. The installation was focused on challenging the dichotomy between the body and
the built through touch. At the domestic scale, the historical binary of gendered space in the
home was blended by designing space for all aspects of life, reorienting bodies and
conceptions in space. Finally, the public scale was explored through a spectrum of relations

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between spaces, program, and interior conditions. By shifting scales and considering the
small and the public scale simultaneously, semipublic intimacy is put at the center of our
consideration, rather than reinstating a divide between private and public. Critically, drawing
from all three scales, the architecture is charged up and rearranged to undermine strict use-
values that are normally ascribed to public and private spaces, where the larger scale work is
charged up with the affective potential of the earlier design work at the smaller scale.
As a speculative project, it helps to add to the discussions on forms of world-making that are
obscured by social and spatial binaries, and as a way of questioning what is the “truth” of

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architecture—which typically closes down non-normative points of view. This project is just one
vision but has the goal of cultivating a broader range of visions in architecture and to raise
questions in other disciplines. Thus, the argument here is that speculative design is an important
crucible for contesting how space has been used to produce, but also support, exclusionary systems
of oppression. The speculative and visual nature of architecture allows an opportunity to make
spatial decisions by seeing what an alternative might be like. But, as a speculative design fiction,
the alternatives are no less real than forms of imagination created by architects, local governments,
and central governments around the world. In this respect, the design interventions may work as
a helpful means—as a strategy—of navigating current trends in reimaging society and the
expectations around space and orientation, thus, instead, suggesting ways of making spaces that
support the out-of-place, the unsettled, and the oblique (Ahmed 2006).

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.

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Andrew Caldwell: Architect, Jerram Tocker Barron Architects, Wellington, New

Zealand
Email: andrew@jtbarchitects.co.nz

Dr. Jan Smitheram: Senior Lecturer, Wellington School of Architecture, Victoria

University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
Corresponding Author’s Email: jan.smitheram@vuw.ac.nz

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