QUEERING THE HOME AS A CRITICAL SPATIAL PRACTICE
Designing Kinship, Objects, and Typologies Otherwise

Queering the Home investigates the home as a normative spatial construct and as a site of socio-political negotiation. Far from being a neutral container or backdrop of everyday life, the home has historically functioned as a powerful architectural device through which ideas of gender, kinship, sexuality, productivity, and care are organized, stabilized, and standardized. The contemporary western home educates us about domesticity, privacy, and property, while simultaneously operating as the material condition of a spatial regime of control (Preciado, 2013). Jack Halberstam describes architecture as an agent of normativity—one that not only shapes how we live, but also constructs normative bodies, sheltered and disciplined through spaces and forms of presentation (like diagrams, magazines and other forms of media). 

This studio identifies these norms, examines the spaces they produce, and asks how they might be critically challenged through architectural design. Students are invited to read domestic space “against the grain” and to examine how architecture actively participates in the regulation of bodies, relationships, and ways of living, while seeking multiperspective and multidimensional imaginaries of the home in pursuit of spatial justice. Therefore, we aim to bridge theory and practice by collectively designing alternative understandings of kinship, objects, and housing typologies. We examine what these spaces look like, how they are used, and who is in charge of shaping and maintaining them.

Drawing on queer-feminist theory and connected to critical spatial practices, the studio approaches queering as a method rather than an identity category. Queering is understood as a practice of unsettling heteronormative and patriarchal assumptions: questioning fixed functions, destabilizing binary spatial logics, and exposing the exclusions embedded in conventional housing typologies.  Queering design is centered on care and is inherently political. It holds space for queer joy and liberation while remaining trauma-informed. It is a desire-centered research practice that embraces lived and embodied experiences, as well as ambiguity, softness, messiness, belonging, and freedom.

The studio unfolds across four interrelated thematic frameworks and remains continuously connected to critical spatial practices, trying out different versions of designing otherwise: 

1)ECONOMY & CARE
How are dwelling and care organized and financed? Which economic and spatial models enable solidarity, collectivity, and shared responsibility? Can we navigate beyond the commodification of the home in a neoliberal context toward alternative forms of financing and caring?

2)KINSHIP & INTIMACY
Which bodies, relationships, and life cycles are assumed within dominant housing practices—and which are excluded or rendered invisible? Which living arrangements beyond the nuclear family exist? What are ecologies of friendship, comradeship, and accompliceship?

3)OBJECTS & FURNITURE
How can furniture operate as a performative agent that actively produces alternative modes of living? What are the relations and entanglements between objects of living, subjects as inhabitants, and the spaces we occupy?

4)TYPOLOGIES & SPACES
How can openness, adaptability, and ambivalence be embedded within architectural layouts and housing models? Can we navigate from fixed units of kitchens, bedrooms, and living rooms toward transformative, processual living environments?

Reflecting on a planet in crisis, queering the home explores alternative narratives of domesticity and offers approaches and possibilities for living and housing otherwise by designing spaces where diverse realities can converge. Through workshops and speculative design exercises, the studio aims to create multiplicities of spaces and homes that allow for the coexistence of diverse and ambiguous uses, occupations, forms of intimacy, and temporalities. Is it possible to develop a practice that is more plural, less harmful, and capable of holding space for one another by designing non-normative homes, exploring queer-feminist housing practices, and creating spaces of solidarity and liberation?

FORMATS
In the studio SALONS, we engage with the home as a site of observation, exploring queering as a critical spatial practice. We imagine fictional domesticities through drawing otherwise, mapping, and designing countless stories of homes waiting to be revealed.

The studio is accompanied by our CRITICAL FRIENDS Katarina Bonnevier, Audre Lorde, Afaina de Jong, Eileen Gray, Ursula Le Guin, Sara Ahmed, Andrés Jaque, Jack Halberstam, Paul B. Preciado, and many others, who will inspire and support us.

There will be four WORKSHOPS with invited guests, including political rapper EBOW, architect Wenke Schladitz (LOVO Berlin, tbc), Irene Feria (KU Leuven), researcher Paule Perron (ETH CARE, tbc), and others.

The studio culminates in a PUBLIC GATHERING and a COLLECTIVE MAGAZINE that assembles design and research outcomes, positioning the home as an open, contested, and continuously renegotiated space.

“Queer not as being about who you’re having sex with (that can be a dimension of it), but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.”
— bell hooks, Outlaw Culture, 1994