Author: Mackenzie Mclean

QUEER(ING) SPACE: Potentials of the In-between

Studio: MArch Thesis

Advisors: Yvan Cazabon and Roger Connah

Year: 2019-2020

Project Description

While early studies of queer space are significant and lasting, their focus has tended towards the notion of a ‘queer space’, one created by, or occupied by, individuals or groups of a non-heterosexual identity. Rather than defining a singular space and how it might be queer by description, this thesis instead proposes queerness as a strategy, an attitude of questioning. The project challenges architecture to be queer, and asks how we can think and imagine spaces beyond an inside and outside, beyond oppositions and binaries, beyond limiting biases and significations.

The study and emerging work remains speculative, as this is not something that can be easily answered – and answers, in their finality, tend to become new limits and rules that prescribe behaviour and procedure, for creativity, and for architecture. For this reason, the question is never fully answered or resolved, but continually posed and speculated on – raised and investigated in such a way that intends to reveal, understand, and challenge accepted terms and boundaries within spatial relations. In short, a queering here, is not yet here – it is the recognition of something beyond the constraints of the present condition, representing a potential of becoming, of transformation, and of multiplicity.