Queer Spaces within Cities

A city is built around its countless number of cultural, social, economic and environmental systems that interact with and learn from one another, each playing a unique and necessary role in the composition and functionality of a city’s complex system.  In order for a city to reach its maximum potential success and effectiveness, its system must be highly adaptable, heterogenous, and autonomous.  Often times, though, the biases and discrimination that exists within our societal norms impede a city’s ability to expand and improve its complex system.  For so long, minority groups such as African Americans, Latinx people, the LGBTQ+ community, etc. have been isolated, denied a space in the larger community, and therefore denied the right to contribute to society’s growth.  In order to delve as deeply as possible into the effects that prejudice and intentional homogeneity have on a city, I will focus on one minority group’s presence and influence on the shaping of New York City: that of the LGBTQ+ community.   In order to understand the relationship between the queer community and the city’s complex system, we must ask some important questions: What constitutes a queer space, where do queer spaces exist, how has the access to queer spaces been regulated or denied in New York City, and how has the modernization of the city affected the normalization or adoption of queerness in society? Using the writings of George Chauncey and Beatriz Colomina, and the perspectives of theorists such as Marx and the Situationists, we can begin to understand the relationship between the built environment and queer communities, along with other minority groups, and how that relationship continues to change and be redefined throughout the shifts from the modernist period to postmodernist period, and beyond.

The way in which a city is designed and redesigned is a process that can have the power to shape its dwellers’ lived experiences endlessly. The layout of a city can define the political, economic, racial, and age demographics— it can be restrictive or it can be inclusive, but its effectiveness in doing so depends largely upon the culture that inhabits the space. Through the comparison of its origins and current culture, it’s easy to see that New York City is a particularly paradoxical space. Its neatly designed grid plan feels coherent on paper, but somehow all of the order and neatness is completely lost in real life experiences.  There is no way to anticipate or ‘design’ the massive crowds of people, the honking horns, the hot fumes and odd smells—these are just effects of a city being lived in, or rather being brought to life. Though New York City’s plans were designed with intense organization, the city’s beautifully diverse peoples and culture are a direct refusal of those guidelines. And it is the contradiction and interaction of these clean, organized plans with the perfected disorder of its culture that makes New York City a perfect place for modernism to exist and to grow.

In his book “All That Is Solid Melts into Air,” Marshall Berman defines modernism to be “any attempt by modern men and women to become subjects as well as objects of modernization, to get a grip on the modern world and make themselves at home in it.” (pg. 5) Because of New York City’s ever-changing, fast-paced culture, its people are constantly subjected to and often forced to adapt to the changes that their environment throws at them. But in terms of architecture, this adaptability is much more difficult to achieve, especially with the modernist push for a mechanical approach. While New York City’s designs have latched on to and taken advantage of the technological advances that come with modern life—advances that have led to the redefinition of the city’s vertical, horizontal, and societal limits— the emphasis on the machine has also taken away some of the creative and personal value that makes architecture so interactive. Berman argues that in a modern world that centers itself around the mechanical, the problem arises that “with brilliant machines and mechanical systems playing all the leading roles…there is precious little for modern man to do except to plug in.” (pg. 27) Only when the people are able to interact with the technology and guide the machine towards the desired meaning and program of a space is architecture truly modern.

Though New York City represents an incredible amalgamation of so many backgrounds, styles, interests, etc., some aspects of its designs prove to be unrepresentative of the mix. The Flatiron Building, among so many other massive skyscrapers, is an example of the divide between the city’s culture and its design. It stands tall and proud in the middle of the city, claiming dominance, power over the people who cannot see it from the top. While in “Delirious New York” Koolhaas writes about the beauty of a skyscraper’s ability to bring you closer to the sky and natural light and take you away from the filth that congests the streets, the height and dysconnectivity of skyscrapers can create a cultural divide between the people of the city. Architects can become caught up competing to build the best, tallest, most unique building in the city that they often forget about the implications their creations could have on the people. Berman explains a deep need for communication and conversation, not only between the designer and the commissioner but also including the people of the city. A truly modern environment is one that transcends all political, social, and cultural values, which is not possible without conversation.

New York City is still often affected by the boundaries that were created at the birth. But as designers and communities together work toward a modernism that rejects the suppression of change and instead welcomes the participation of all of its people, the city—ever-changing as it is—can see its different assets as one beautifully complex array of possibility.

Architecture is a highly competitive sport which consists of too many bold contestants to count, but only a select number of champions who remain on the podiums—some thousands of years old— and continue to inform how the game is played today. It would be mad not to acknowledge the incredible impact that the great buildings and architects of the past have had not only on the way we create but on the way we think about and respond to art and architecture as well. That said, it would be equally irresponsible for current and future designers to limit themselves to the strict principles that previous influential architects deemed acceptable. When creating work, every great designer has his or her own set of requirements that are considered essential in the result that he or she produces, a checklist to critique past projects and to guide future ones, a personal manifesto. The most famous of these manifestos, such as those of Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos, can go on to define the style and movement of entire architectural eras thereafter. When Le Corbusier defined the perfect house as a “machine for living,” and when Loos described ornament as a crime, modern architects began to create homes with no ornament, large horizontal windows, and open floor plans. The modern architectural era changed with the advancements in technology, placing more emphasis on the structural and functional properties rather than the aesthetics. But along with the de-ornamentation came a decrease in artistic expression and creativity.

As a designer, it is so easy to get wrapped up in the idea that your work must please everyone. Designers work their entire lives trying to create a universally loved piece, something so aesthetic and yet so functional that it transcends the debate of form over function. But more often than not, in designers’ attempts to please the crowds, much of what makes their work unique and great is lost to the public’s demands. Instead of crafting to satisfy his own visions or those of his client’s, the designer conforms his work to what is expected and safe. This seems to be because we, as humans, are taught to learn from the mistakes and the successes of those who have come before us. We are comforted by repetition, organization, and the knowledge that what we are trying to accomplish has been done successfully before. This human desire for order explains why we idolize the firm, set-in-his-own-ways architect—the kind who has determined, without a doubt, what is right and what is unacceptable in design. But why are these sorts of limitations still assumed to apply to the designers who don’t think of our work as a necessity but an open opportunity? Where is the fun in that? I believe that a building’s design should be a result of how the designer can interpret and better its surrounding social/economic/natural conditions. Design, while influenced by the world around, should not be limited to what has existed before. I design to play, to share stories and experiences and spaces, to explore my own self-expression, I design to solve problems occurring around me— I do not design to be restricted by one architect’s definition of perfection.

The Complex Contemporary City

Big cities provide the opportunity for mass amalgamation of various types of people, professions, cultures, and landscapes. They act as switchboards, connecting small systems such as transportation, social groups, and businesses within their local realm, to a diverse, ever-growing complex system. To understand the city as a complex system, though, it is first necessary to understand “how relationships between parts give rise to collective behaviors of a system, and how the system interacts and forms relationships with its environment” (Emergence and Systems Thinking, Complexity Labs). Many theorists have taken their turns at analyzing cities’ systems, some using holistic approaches to look at the system as a whole, others using reductionism to break the system down in attempts to understand each individual part that makes up the whole. But when we analyze a city’s complex system from an urban planning point of view, often times we realize the chaos and complexity that runs through the city’s system is what makes the city functional. Instead of a holistic or reductionist approach then, we must instead look to the phenomenon of emergence to better understand the unpredictability and chaos of a city.

Each part of a system, no matter how seemingly small, works together between one another to create a whole that is completely different from its parts. Because of the unpredictable future of a city, planners and architects have begun to modify the way they think about a city completely. Stan Allen and James Corner see this new, contemporary city and mobile and autonomous. “Rather than existing in search of some kind of organizing body, these new city forms are an amalgam of mobile agents, provisional colonies, and diverse components” (Urban Natures). This new idea of a city fits the adaptive criteria of a complex system. Businesses are not controlled or impeded by the geographical limits of a city, instead they adapt to the changes of their environment and remold their structure to accommodate both the workers’ and the customers’ needs. A good relationship between cities and their ecological surroundings is also extremely important to ensure adaptability. “Ecology and landscape are useful because, unlike the architectural object, they escape definitive control or closure; instead, they address the complexity of loosely structured organizations that grow and change with time” (Urban Natures). Growth and interconnectivity is encouraged when a place or group of people are capable of redefining their roles in a system to better suit a new circumstance.

This same interest in loose definitions of space is applied in the work of architecture firm West 8, particularly when speaking of designing contemporary homes. West 8 thinks of a home as a base, a launchpad for the rest of your life. When we think of a house as a “unit from which he organizes his life and from where he jumps into the world, works, travels, and gathers social contacts” (Base, Colonisation, Void Totem Contemplation), we begin to see a house as an integral part of a much larger, more complex system. The house itself is not only a place to live but a link into the system of which its inhabitants will consequently become a part. The base home includes open floorplans for easy adaptability to its various inhabitants’ needs. West 8’s idea of the home as a base considers the importance of connectivity and autonomy within a system by assuming that the home’s purpose is to link its occupants to the local systems of work, social groups and so on. The changes that Stan Allen and James Corner and the people of West 8 desire for our cities are ones that allow for wider diversity, interconnectivity, nonlinearity and autonomy— and therefore result in a more efficient and effective complex system.