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Don’t Assume the Position: Strategizing Methods for Spatial Agency in a Default Built Environment

Paul Schreiber

Paul will be graduating this year with a Master of Architecture. His research examines issues of queer space development with focused attention on the relationship between transgender identities and architecture’s expression, discourse and practice.

This thesis seeks methods for space-making that enable agency within our built environment’s default settings. In order do this, it focuses on Lucas Crawford’s Transgender Architectonics.

Crawford advocates for the viewing of the transgender body as an archive via two analytical methods. The first is self-critical remembrance, which discourages dissimulation. The other is forward-looking bodily forgetfulness, which stimulates evolution. With this in mind, I developed a series of exercises that begin with and extend from the body. In collaboration with colleagues, I first created critical self-remembrance garments that locked us into postures that have been imposed on us and influence how we occupy space. A second iteration of forward-looking bodily forgetfulness garments were made to lend us more experiential authority.

Shifting in scale, Crawford conceptualizes how architecture has the ability to behave as a revolutionary archive that celebrates ephemeral, nonlinear narratives. In an attempt to construct such an archive, the garments from the initial exercises were disassembled and aggregated to produce a malleable spatial object ready for installation and critical dialogue.

Department>

Architecture

Program>

Architecture M. Arch

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