We are sick of universalizing, masculinist architectural theories that misappropriate scientific language to deny the specific material effects of an inequitable society. ︎ We are sick of the scarcity thinking, austerity, and cynicism of neoliberal design institutions. We refuse design pedagogies that dismiss questions of care, coalition-building, and political resistance as lacking rigor. We call instead for an aesthetics of abundance. We call for the abolition of prisons and policing and the architecture that enables them. We call for designers and theorists to practice refusal.1
We reject ideas of archetype, originality, purity, and nature that pervade the discourses of spatial design, and seek instead a lively ethos of improvisation, conditionality, tenderness, incompleteness, and humor. ︎ We don’t pathologize sadness or demand resolution. We embrace the dizzying queer and pleasant dangers of mirth and mischief, of transformation, of temporary constructions,2 of hedonism,3 of differences that can’t be assimilated,4 and of excesses that can’t be recuperated.5 We want to make history: we want to recover histories of space-making as individual and collective resistance, experimentation, and communal pleasure. Design can be an invitation to a party, and it can be an invitation to repair and care. ︎
(1) Tina Campt, “Black Visuality and the Practice of Refusal.” Women & Performance, February 25, 2019.
(2) Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, "Sex in Public." Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 547-566. . (3) Kate Soper. “Alternative Hedonism: Cultural Theory and the Role of Aesthetic Revisioning.” Cultural Studies 22, Issue 5 (2008): 567-587.
(4) Timothy Morton. “Queer Ecology.” PMLA Vol. 125, No. 2 (March 2010): 273-282. (5) John Champagne. “Gay Pornography and Nonproductive Expenditure.” The Ethics of Marginality: A New Approach to Gay Studies, University of Minnesota Press, 1995, pp. 28–56.
