Trans-architecture

Authors

  • Tim Gough Kingston University, Department of Architecture and Landscape

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7480/footprint.11.2.1900

Abstract

Starting from the intense experience of the gay club, this paper asks whether that experience or event can be acknowledged by architectural theory. Via a reading of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Jacques Derrida’s Before the Law, it posits that the transing of gender can be a clue as to the transing of architecture away from essentialising ontologies. It then uses Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of an assemblage to show how this can be done, making reference to the assemblage of the gay seduction scene in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and the image of the interplay of orchid and wasp that is inspired by it. The paper concludes by showing how this ontology relates to a specific instance of transing architecture in the gay and SM clubs of Vauxhall, South London.

Author Biography

Tim Gough, Kingston University, Department of Architecture and Landscape

Tim Gough is Senior Lecturer at Kingston University School of Architecture and partner in Robertson Gough, an artist-architect collaborative based in London, working on large and small scale architectural projects and competitions. Published papers include 'Cura', an essay in Curating Architecture and the City (2009); 'Let us Take Architecture' (publication and symposium at the Wordsworth Trust with artist Lucy Gunning, May 2007); 'Non-origin of Species – Deleuze, Derrida, Darwin', essay in the journal Culture and Organisation, 4 (December 2006); and 'Defiguration of space', an essay in Figuration-Defiguration, edited by Atsuko Onuki and Thomas Pekar, published by Iudicum Verlag, Munich: 2006.

References

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Published

2017-12-22

Issue

Issue # 21 | Autumn / Winter 2017 | Trans-Bodies / Queering Spaces

Section

Article

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