The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - December 30, 2024


Queer Architecture is the Future! (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_775)

Topics
queer architecture futurity
Hosted by
Gad Saad
Mentioned
José Esteban Olivier Valorant Queer Collective Utopias McGill Draxet
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Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

114.97

Word count

668

Sentence count

41

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

5

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In the first episode of 2020, Ghat Saad continues her exploration of the concept of "Queer Utopia" and the work of a person at McGill University, Olivier Valorant, in a piece called "Home is the Place We All Share: Building Queer Collective Utopias."

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.320 Hi everybody, this is Ghat Saad. I was sitting working on my latest book and in doing some searches I came up with a term and concept that you've heard me discuss before, but it's one that you really can't get enough of.
00:00:16.320 And so I did some more searches and I thought to continue the tradition of me reading you some of these great works from academia.
00:00:23.420 This is a wonderful piece of work, actually from a person at McGill University, one of my alma maters.
00:00:30.760 It's published in, let's see, the Journal of Architectural Education.
00:00:39.340 Okay, the title is Home is the Place We All Share, Building Queer Collective Utopias. 0.99
00:00:47.240 So this is part of the field of queer architecture. 0.54
00:00:50.820 The gentleman's name is Olivier. I'm thinking he's a gentleman, but he may be non-binary or two-spirit. We don't know.
00:01:01.140 But the person's name, they's name, theirs name is Olivier Valorant from McGill.
00:01:09.620 So here we go.
00:01:11.480 This is the abstract and then I'll read more later.
00:01:16.620 I mean, I'll continue reading.
00:01:18.440 In the early 1990s, feminist challenges to mainstream architectural discourses were taken up by queer space theorists who broadened the focus from understanding how space is gendered and sexualized to suggest new ways of inhabiting space. 0.80
00:01:38.620 In the last decade, a new generation exemplified by artists Elmgreen and Draxet's transformation of architectural spaces further pushed the challenges, offering a communitarian ideal that puts aside traditional public and private divisions.
00:01:57.680 These spatial experiences can be linked to the ideas of queer theorist José Esteban Munoz, who proposes a queer futurity tainted with political idealism, which can inspire architecture to emulate a queer collectivity. 0.90
00:02:16.980 Now, this is a quote to start us off from queer theorist José Esteban Munoz.
00:02:24.360 We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine.
00:02:54.360 Imagine a future.
00:02:56.660 The future is queerness's domain.
00:03:00.140 José Esteban Munoz.
00:03:01.920 Let's keep going.
00:03:02.680 This is in the Journal of Architectural Education, folks.
00:03:06.260 In his 2009 Cruising Utopia, queer theorist José Esteban Munoz suggests that queerness is essentially utopian, that it can only exist as an ideality.
00:03:17.160 With this suggestion, Munoz adds another layer to an already complicated definition of queer that has evolved and diffused throughout various disciplines since it was reclaimed by activists and theorists in the late 1980s.
00:03:32.960 In architecture, however, the influence of queer theory has been fairly limited after an initial burst of interest in the mid-1990s.
00:03:44.940 This disinterest in queerness is surprising, considering the history of domestic spaces in the 20th century.
00:03:53.940 Looking back at this history, one is confronted with a series of contrasting utopian desires, visions of domesticity that implicitly and explicitly address gender and sexuality.
00:04:06.680 From Le Corbusier's dream of a machine for living in, fueled by the changing values of modernity to the radical networks of controlled environments of the 1950s and 1960s,
00:04:20.820 these critical projects most often aimed at transforming the individual living cell to make it more efficient and protective,
00:04:29.800 even if often anchored in larger social critics.
00:04:34.560 While these utopias have been repeatedly challenged from various points of view,
00:04:39.680 I focus here on recent queer utopias that suggest a radically new way of building collectivity.
00:04:48.340 These utopias call for the blurring of traditional understandings of public and private
00:04:53.380 and attempt to open windows onto new potentiality towards freeing queer futurity. 0.99
00:05:04.080 There you have it, folks.
00:05:05.660 I hope that you've enjoyed this.
00:05:07.340 This is my little gift for you for a great new year.
00:05:12.440 If there are any aspiring architects out there, if you're thinking of buying a house,
00:05:18.540 try to resist your queer phobia.
00:05:22.260 Try to explore ways by which you can live in a home that's queer friendly, 1.00
00:05:28.660 develop architectural solutions that are queer friendly,
00:05:32.960 build interior spaces that are queer friendly,
00:05:35.320 because that will say, hey, I'm an ally to queerness and its futurity.
00:05:44.520 This is all taxpayer funded.
00:05:46.700 Take care, everybody.
00:05:47.540 Have a great year.
00:05:48.420 Cheers.