Parlour is delighted to support the XYX Lab event Queering Architecture?, which will explore what it might mean to ‘queer’ architecture – as a workplace, a professional identity, a series of processes and practices, or the built places that emerge from them.
Studiobird’s Theodore Treehouse, 2016. Photo Peter Bennetts.
What does it mean to ‘queer’ architecture?
Perhaps it might mean making the architectural workplace more welcoming for those who identify as LGBTIQIA, such that the profession truly values difference and diversity and the unique contributions of all.
Perhaps it might mean making buildings for such people and their particular needs and desires, their tastes and predilections – safe spaces, symbolic spaces, domestic spaces, the space of the everyday.
Perhaps it could refer to architectural outcomes – buildings that are themselves somehow queer, resistant, non-conforming.
Or perhaps it could be a process, which unsettles customary architectural methods or outcomes, which attempts to work differently and for difference, or even which works to reject and rethink social conventions per se: to employ architecture towards a more general resistance or alternative to ‘normality’.
Queers think that normality is over-rated. Queer architecture might redesign normality, or design the path of resistance.
This event aims to open a preliminary and speculative conversation about what it might mean to queer architecture: for us, here and now, in our own social, political and cultural context.
When
3 pm – 6 pm, Sunday 26 March 2017
Where
Clemenger Auditorium, NGV International
180 St Kilda Road
Melbourne, VIC
Bookings
Convenors Naomi Stead and Niki Kalms have written a position piece to get the ball rolling – read it here – and will guest host Parlour Instagram in a couple of weeks. You’ll be able to join the conversation there even if you can’t make it to Melbourne for the event.
