What is a queer space?

What is a queer space? The old English term “queer” is thought to come from the German “quer”, meaning oblique or diagonal, which enticingly hints that the idea of what we now call queerness has its roots in spatial concepts.

同性的欲望不具有友谊的侧面性质，也不具有异性吸引的反面性质。男女之间的欲望呈对角线方向。

Thinking about desire in space, about how people might be opposite, alongside or diagonal to others, is at least unconsciously part of every serious architect’s work. I can remember, early on in my career, a meeting with a hotel client. He was concerned with achieving the best spatial relationships in the hotel bar for the purposes of encouraging escorts to feel comfortable about working the space.

Personally, as an architect and designer, I would have preferred a more systematically compiled book

I was talking to a developer about furtive glances, safe spaces and forbidden desires. The bar had become a subtle, subversive and delicious challenge within what was otherwise a banal, wipe-clean, normative project. For me, that meeting suddenly felt a little queer.

中等价位商务酒店的鸡尾酒吧是一个奇怪的空间吗?Probably not, but I had hoped that architect-designer Adam Nathaniel Furman and architectural historian Joshua Mardell’s new book Queer Spaces might help me to answer the question.

I was surprised however that this anthology of gay, lesbian and trans interactions with buildings and places staunchly refuses to define the term.

The contents of the book can be divided into three main categories:

• A quirky potted history of rich queers using inherited money to build strange little buildings in isolated areas of natural beauty. This section could be titled “The weird kitsch of rich men’s queer children”. It is a compelling argument for 100% inheritance tax.
• 夜总会和社区中心的描述，其中一些听起来相当有趣。这部分也可以命名为“2004年在波哥大的夜总会去哪里”。这将是一个有用的导游，那些有机会获得时间旅行和瞬移设备。
• Architectural accounts that make a serious attempt to understand what might actually be queer about a space, beyond anecdotal accounts of what may or may not have happened there.

Personally, as an architect and designer, I would have preferred a more systematically compiled book that was limited to these latter entries. I was a little unsatisfied with the loose editing style that seems to take all-comers and has no explicit taxonomy of what is and is not a queer space.

为了得到一些答案，我采访了这本书的合著者兼编辑亚当·纳撒尼尔·弗曼。他是一位同时代的同事，我从未见过他本人，但我一直在远处欣赏他。

Queers pop up everywhere, a strange mushroom-like phenomenon, born in all social classes, that find their way to the light

His work plays with classical and futuristic references and he has developed a unique and distinctive colour palette that is a welcome break from the muted earth tones and millennial pastels that dominate my Instagram feed.

His designs are iconic, coherent, smart, instantly recognisable and tightly curated. I was therefore doubly surprised at the slack, roomy way in which the book is edited.

I asked Adam about the very personal and subjective nature of the book, and why he chose this approach.

Stephen MolloyWhat is queer aesthetics?

Adam Nathaniel FurmanThere aren’t any – they are contingent on place and time and group identities. Queer aesthetics are always in relation to mainstream taste cultures.

They are symbiotic, parasitic, antagonistic, manifested through exaggeration, mixing and ironic questioning. That relationship with the centre is always there. Queers pop up everywhere, a strange mushroom-like phenomenon, born in all social classes, that find their way to the light.

SMIs queer an identity or a behaviour pattern? Tribal identity or behavioural circumstance?

ANFI was born into so many gaps in multiple Venn diagrams. I am eminently comfortable in the gaseous, nebulous identity between worlds. It was really important for usnotto define queer in the book…

SMA few of the entries take the time to define queer – I spotted three definitions – all are robust and serviceable, but different from each other. It gives the book a roominess that can maybe even sometimes feel uncomfortably draughty.

ANFThere is plenty of writing about what a queer space is. I could have done that. It was a very deliberate decision not to lay claim to categories, not to make them very intellectually fixed. That’s death as far as I’m concerned.

我喜欢的是这种宽敞感，也就是你所看到的透风感。这种开放性存在于我的作品中，也存在于我被吸引的大部分事物中。The Linnean desire for taxonomy and category can be very strong: “Whatism是装饰艺术还是现代主义?-我不想那样。

SMI’m wondering if refusing to define and categorise is a sort of subtle power play that prevents people from reading this world from the outside. When all the categories are hidden, it can often exclude people.

Let’s use a parallel: in England, accent and class offer clear signposts to social hierarchy. In Germany, which has a more discreet class culture, these boundaries are less clearly signposted. An advantage of the English way is that at least you know where you stand most of the time.

ANFI have been trapped in that my whole life, and I don’t find it easy to navigate! If I can extrapolate from what you say, in relation to the book, perhaps you are saying that removing the clear categories is removing agency from the readers.

SM这使得书中的世界对外人来说有些晦涩难懂。对于像我妈妈这样的人来说，读这本书时不知道结局是什么，或者有些人不知道自己是否是同性恋，不确定这是否是一个他们可以融入的世界，这就更困难了。这是一件好事，但也是有代价的。

ANFIt’s fair to say that I do have an absolute visceral terror of taxonomy. We were hoping for that transparency to be at the level of the individual texts. I’ve come across a lot of writing that is breaking down, clarifying, describing exactly what gender and space is. It tends to be very laden with academic prose - if I may say, jargon.

We worked quite hard to make all the texts as legible, succinct but not dumbed down as we could. There is no shortage of people in architectural writing who want to pin things down. I see this book as being an archaeology of easily accessible queer stories which can be used as source material to build upon. That would not be the case if me and Josh had set out our five types of queer space or whatever.

在与弗曼的谈话中，他对这本书所采取的谨慎和敏感的方法给我留下了深刻的印象。通过理解它是一种混合材料，其他玫瑰可能会从中生长，我对编辑的松散性质和隐藏的分类有了更多的理解。

声明一下，在我们长时间的交谈中，很明显，我的公司酒店酒吧永远不会被写进书里，因为缺乏真正的同性欲望，即使我个人从设计过程中获得了一种奇怪的氛围。

Furman’s definition of queer, on further examination, seems to exclude the categories of the effeminate heterosexual male, or log cabin Republican, two aesthetics that I personally feel might have been worth a closer look.

On balance I can say that I have been entertained and enriched by this tender, beautiful and sometimes flawed book. I would recommend it to anybody with an interest in non-traditional sex and gender roles, but it is not the must-read manual for thinking about spatialised queer desire that I had perhaps been yearning for.