PSA sits at a challenging point of provocation, from the perspective of historical oppression, necessity and social unacceptability. Starting with questions over what it means to be a queer architect, this project moved to reimagine Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens via the queer tradition of cruising. What does it mean to design a space that is traditionally appropriated? What does it mean, socially, to designate a space in the city for acts and exposure of the body normally expected to be contained in domestic space?
Thomas David Phillips
I am a queer designer and maker. Having completed an undergraduate degree at Cambridge and then worked at Nissen Richards Studio and Foster and Partners, the RCA was an opportunity to build upon that grounding and look inwards, and question what the architect themselves, specifically, a queer architect, brings to a project and how they perceive and conceive designs. Taking queering as simply as anti-normative, allowed me to question and experiment with form, methodology and representation, with my dissertation being short stories, my history and theory studies looking at Modernism through a queer lens and both design projects taking on queer subjectivities and theories.
Cruising is solitary and collective. Legally risky, but often a necessity. Queer people’s oppression in the city is spatial; with the example of Russell Square, in 2001, it was ’cleaned up’ and its planting was drastically thinned, along with a lockable iron enclosure added, to stop people having sex in there, or even entering after dark. My thesis question implied sex is expected to happen in bedrooms, but, sex already happens publicly in London.
There are designed spaces; saunas, where sex is not domesticated, yet having sex in public is permitted through your entry fee becoming a membership to a private space. Cruising happens in forests; where it is technically legal to have sex, unless you’re caught; where it would be outraging public decency. Public toilets have historically been appropriated for cruising, but where it is illegal to do so.
What does it mean to expose our bodies in space? Electric communing. Beautifully freeing. Can a language of desire captured in a fleeting and fading polaroid, be translated into an architectural project?
Taking inspiration from traditional cruising, and the dark walks in the Georgian Pleasure Gardens, my main intervention is darkness. Using fast collages, large scale and full scale models, I explored this controlling of vision, obscuring and revealing. Wary of balancing what should be shown of this activity and the fact it is normally hidden from society, the representation is also always verging on obscuring and revealing. It seeks to give the sensation of an event and enticement.