Fighting for Queer Space
“The only permanent thing about a city and its queer spaces is its temporariness.”
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Queer Enough
Finally feeling at home in queer spaces
by Kate Wagner
It can be hard to find spaces in big American cities that aren’t that way. Radical queer community centers and autonomous spaces were decimated by the simultaneous knockout blows of the AIDS crisis, neoliberal economic policies that ruined the poor and working class, and a resurgent hyperconservative politics that took root around the globe at the end of the twentieth century. What remained were faceless liberal nonprofits, a corporatized pride, and gay bars and gay bookshops, whose existence was predicated on points of sale. Emancipatory spaces proved temporary and fragile because space itself was such in rapidly unaffordable urban centers. To paraphrase Holly Lewis in the chapter about homonormativity and homonationalism in her book The Politics of Everybody, confronted with austerity and attacks from all sides, queer people started to eat their own in a battle for recognition and more importantly limited and diminishing resources, leading to separatism, discursive policing, and intracommunity exclusion. These phenomena often occurred along the lines of race, gender, and ability, in addition to a more naked class conflict exposed by rising inequality that queerness, unifying as it may be, couldn’t patch up. These isolating dynamics played out in my own life, leading me to bear my crises alone and give up on understanding and coming to terms with my queerness. I was still bisexual, but I thought it didn’t matter, since there weren’t any queer spaces that I knew of that would be welcoming toward someone who gave up on being queer because it was hard—until I stumbled into Metelkova.
Read the full review of Queer Spaces here.
Big Names Back the Bartlett
Britain’s prominent architectural voices defend the status quo.
by Doug Spencer
The Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London (UCL) is among the highest ranked schools of architecture in the world. Its reputation has come into dispute of late, however, following the release of a report summarizing the results of an independent investigation into decades of alleged abuses of its students. In response to the report, architecture’s Big Names have come out swinging. Shortly after the report was made public, an open letter whose signatories include World Architecture Festival director Paul Finch, noted architectural historian Kenneth Frampton, famed British architect Piers Gough, New London Architecture curator-in-chief Peter Murray, Royal Academy architecture head Vicky Richardson, and the Royal College of Art’s Amin Taha, started circulating online. The letter reprimands UCL for prematurely making public the Howlett Brown report thereby leading to an outburst of public naming and shaming of individual tutors. The letter’s authors draw straight from the victim-shaming playbook.
Read more about the Bartlett shake-up here.
Full Marks
A new volume claims to present a representative slice of contemporary “progressive” architecture. But why this architecture now?
by Matthew Allen
To its great credit, Inscriptions seamlessly incorporates the supposed revolution of “the digital” into its narrative arc. In place of ruptures, the book presents an expanded field, complete with a Rosalind Krauss–inspired semiotic square mapping its cardinal directions. It is the depth and detail of this map that make Inscriptions such a rewarding read. Where else is architecture described as a negotiation between immanence, transcendence, encounter, and revelation on a terrain of “originals,” conjuring analytical categories like the creaturely, the primordial, and the informal? Inscription reveals not a discipline in thrall to big ideas; rather, it shows architects wrestling at a more visceral level with the deeply human urge to construct worlds by making marks.
Read more about architecture’s vibe shift here.
New York Review of Architecture is a team effort. Our Editor is Samuel Medina, our Deputy Editor is Marianela D’Aprile, and our Editors-at-Large are Carolyn Bailey, Phillip Denny, and Alex Klimoski. Our Publisher is Nicolas Kemper.
To pitch us an article or ask us a question, write to us at: editor@nyra.nyc. For their support, we would like to thank the Graham Foundation and our issue sponsors, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, and Thomas Phifer.
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