Topics cover contemporary and historical issues in architectural design theory and criticism. For current offerings, see department website.

This course examines the relationship between queer space, power and identity. Our embodied identities shape how we create, occupy and use cities, landscapes and built environments; these spaces also shape us and our understandings of the world, and our place within it. Design education typically assumes a universal, transparent, ungendered body as the “occupant” or “user” of built form. This course will challenge such assumptions, by reflecting on the relationship between the physical and imagined spaces and how diverse forms of queer and transgender identity are enacted within, and transformed by them. Course readings and discussions will move readings that discuss queer theory as of thinking, case studies of queer theory in action. We will examine a sequence of differently scaled spaces, exploring layers of interdependence as the course proceeds. Sites of analysis and creative practice range from (un)gendered bathrooms, domestic spaces, and neighborhoods to those of urban/rural landscapes and transnational territories. These will be explored through the following sequence of intersectional themes: 1) Transections: Transgender and spaces of queer theory; 2) Disembodiments: Queering architecture and disability; 3) Queer possessions: gentrification, commification and spaces of queer consumption Queer Ecologies and climate collapse 5) Queer necropolitics and the carceral state 6) The architectural futurity of queer communities.

Repeat Rules