Queer Design Research in Architecture: A Cross-Cultural Method from the Philippines to Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

This article examines how queer theory can inform architectural design research through Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of the closet. The research investigates how relationships between concealment, visibility, safety, identity and belonging can become architectural questions. A research-through-design process combined theoretical investigation, community interviews and questionnaires, contextual research, and iterative architectural experimentation across Manila, Philippines and Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. Conceptual models explored the spatial implications of the closet before informing two site-specific proposals. The Manila project investigates adaptive reuse and collective living through different degrees of visibility. The Wellington proposal explores a queer social and cultural venue organised around changing relationships between private experience, social interaction and public participation. Their comparison shows how a shared conceptual framework can generate different architectural responses when developed through situated cultural and community knowledge. We argue that the closet can operate as a productive design framework for investigating relationships between visibility, concealment, safety and self-expression. The research demonstrates how queer theory, community knowledge and design experimentation can generate situated architectural knowledge while remaining responsive to diverse experiences of identity and inhabitation.