Queer Spaces in Architecture: Visions of an Inclusive Built Environment

As a gay architect, I have long been fascinated by the intersection of queer identity and the built environment. Architecture is not merely a container for human activity, but actively shapes and is shaped by the social relations that unfold within and around it. Historically, architecture has often served to reinforce dominant power structures and norms, including heteronormativity and binary gender roles. However, there is also a rich tradition of queer appropriation of space, subverting and repurposing the built environment to carve out zones of queer expression, desire, and community.

This interplay between queerness and architecture has been a central concern of artists, theorists and architects working at the intersection of sexuality and space. The writings of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, José Esteban Muñoz and others have used the concept of queer space to challenge the naturalization of heterosexuality in the built environment and everyday life. Queer spaces are sites that foster non-heteronormative practices and modes of belonging. They encompass the clandestine zones of gay cruising and lesbian-feminist separatist enclaves, as well as the gay neighborhoods, bars and bathhouses that emerged in 20th century cities as visible queer counter publics.

Foucault's concept of "heterotopias" is particularly useful for analyzing such queer spaces. For Foucault, heterotopias are real spaces of otherness that invert or subvert the dominant spatial order. They are "counter-sites" embodying "a sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live." Classic examples of heterotopias include cemeteries, brothels, ships, and colonies. Queer spaces often function as a type of heterotopia, as marginal yet vital sites of difference within a heteronormative world.

The work of contemporary artist Tom Burr picks up on these themes, creating sculptural installations that allude to the coded history of gay public sex and cruising. In pieces like "Addict-Love" (2008) and "Circa" (2016), Burr reconstructs the physical structures and iconography of cruising grounds, truck stops, and tearoom stalls. His work reveals how queer practices can reterritorialize even the most banal or utilitarian spaces, investing them with layers of erotic and affective meaning invisible to the straight world. At the same time, Burr shows how such spaces are inherently ephemeral and subject to erasure, often located on the urban margins or in the indeterminate zones of parks, public restrooms, and transit hubs.

So what would a future queer architecture look like? Rather than simply representing or commemorating queer space, as Burr's work does, a fully realized queer architecture would need to produce spaces that actively generate and sustain queer life. This would mean moving beyond heteronormative assumptions and spatial hierarchies to create more fluid, plural and inclusive built environments.

One key principle would be deconstructing the public/private binary that organizes bourgeois domestic space and the ideology of the nuclear family. A queer approach questions the confinement of sexuality to the "private" domestic sphere, and the corresponding desexualization of "public" space. Cruising and public sex are the ultimate expression of this, defiantly claiming public space for queer desire and bodily pleasure. A queer architecture would blur the lines between public and private, creating porous, indeterminate spaces open to chance encounters, flirtations and experimentation.

Another crucial aspect would be breaking down gender binaries and making space for gender plurality and fluidity. Conventional architectural typologies from bathrooms to prisons rigidly segregate users according to an assumed male/female gender binary. By contrast, a queer architecture would provide gender neutral facilities and signage, and allow for a spectrum of gender identities and expressions. More radically, it would rethink the very organization of architectural program and circulation to avoid forcing users into normative gender roles and spatial patterns.

A queer approach would also foreground spaces of collectivity, community and mutual care rather than the atomized individual subject of modernist design. LGBTQ people have long created their own kinship networks and alternative domesticities in the face of familial rejection and social stigma. Queer space provides a material armature for these fragile social bonds, from the gay and lesbian bars that incubated political movements to the informal support systems of ball culture. A queer architecture would provide ample space for gathering, sociality and collective world-making, with fluid boundaries between "home" and "community".

Lastly, a queer architecture must be anti-racist and decolonial, rejecting the ways the built environment has historically spatialized racial capitalism and settler colonialism. All too often, mainstream LGBTQ spaces and politics have centered white, middle-class and cisgender subjects at the expense of queer and trans people of color. By contrast, a decolonial queer architecture would center the spatial practices, needs and desires of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) queer communities. This means supporting QTPOC-led place-making efforts, from the Indigenous kinship structures disrupted by colonization to the ballroom houses that provided shelter for queer and trans youth of color in 20th century cities.

So what might such a queer architecture look like in practice? Some inspiring examples are beginning to emerge. One exemplary project is the Audre Lorde Project's new community center in Brooklyn, which will provide a dedicated organizing hub for LGBTSTGNC people of color. Designed in close collaboration with community members, the center features gender neutral restrooms, an elders' lounge, meditation room, art space and ample informal gathering areas. The design aims to materialize the Audre Lorde Project's intersectional mission and provide a nurturing "home" for queer activists and artists of color.

On an urban scale, neighborhoods like San Francisco's Compton's Transgender Cultural District demonstrate the power of place-based activism to preserve queer space in the face of displacement. Anchored by the site of the 1966 Compton's Cafeteria Riot against police harassment, the district is the first officially recognized transgender neighborhood in the world. In addition to place-marking initiatives like murals, street signs, and historic landmarking, the district is developing a new affordable housing complex and community center for trans and gender-nonconforming people. By integrating historic preservation with equitable development, Compton's Transgender Cultural District resists the erasure of working-class queer of color communities and cultural memory.

In imagining a future queer architecture, it's important to acknowledge that not all queer spatial practices can or should be formalized into buildings. There is a vital power in queer space-making that remains ephemeral, improvised, even illicit – like the short-lived Queer Pier in New York that Burr's work recalls. Sometimes the point is not to create durable queer spaces, but to queer existing spaces through fleeting occupations and détournements. As theorist Aaron Betsky argues in Queer Space, the power of cruising is that it "takes space intended for other purposes and makes it queer through an act of will and desire."

Still, an expansive queer approach to the built environment has much to offer a world in crisis. In the face of pandemics, climate catastrophe, and fascist violence, we desperately need more fluid, caring and equitable ways of organizing social and ecological space. Here queerness is not just an identity, but an ethics and politics of world-making. A queer architecture would reject the failed spatial logics of extraction, enclosure and separation. Instead it would embrace porosity, plurality, interdependence – the recognition that no space is truly autonomous, but always shaped by multiple bodies, histories and relations.

Ultimately, the project of queer space is about expanding the conditions of livability for all. It means challenging the violent spatial hierarchies of gender, race, class, disability, nationality – the myriad ways bodies are sorted, policed and inscribed by regimes of the normal. It means reimagining the built environment as a space of mutuality, access and transformation. At its best, queer architecture conjures a horizon of collective flourishing in which no one is disposable or unhoused, in which everybody has room to become otherwise. In a time of escalating precarity and dispossession, this is a vision we urgently need.