Alistair Fair on supporting transformation

Abstract

Queer Spaces: An Atlas of LGBTQIA+ Places & Stories, edited by Adam Nathanial Furman and Joshua Mardell, is a landmark work in the history of architecture and the city. Bringing together some fifty contributors to discuss almost one hundred buildings and sites (and a few unbuilt projects), this global survey offers a much-needed and diverse overview of the ways in which, since the eighteenth century, queer people have created and appropriated spaces, buildings, and places, for a diverse range of uses from the intensely personal to the highly public. The book’s title is clearly deliberate. Although it has echoes of Aaron Betsky’s seminal Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire,1 the plural in the title of the current work – ‘spaces’ is key. Whereas Betsky’s title implied a singular ‘queer space’, Furman and Mardell are concerned to highlight a range of voices and perspectives, from around the globe. For the editors of this volume, queer spaces have a fundamental significance: they are ‘places where you can express yourself without fear or shame.’2 Olivia Laing’s foreword quotes the lyrics to the Pet Shop Boys’ song ‘Being Boring’ in support of this idea: ‘I never dreamt that I would get to be / the creature that I meant to be’, representing what Laing calls ‘the idea of a hidden self, a mysterious creature that can emerge from its chrysalis, given the right conditions.’3 Queer spaces are thus the ‘ecosystem’ that supports this transformation, ranging from buildings designed to support particular ways of living, to subversive, perhaps transient appropriations and adaptations of the built environment. Discussions of queer architecture and urbanism have emerged in print since the 1990s but, though ground-breaking and essential, have often been narrowly focused in terms of place, ethnicity, and gender.4 In contrast, Queer ‘...how, since the eighteenth century, queer people have created and appropriated spaces, buildings, and places ...’