Mighty Real: Dignified Hall Realness
“Realness: To be able to blend. That’s what realness is. If you can pass the untrained eye, or even the trained eye, and not give away the fact you are gay [or a plunger that might be a vase / a furniture that might be a building / etc] that’s when it is realistic. The idea of realness is to look as much as possible like your straight counterpart. It is not a take-off or a satire, it is actually being able to be this.” - Dorian Corey, American Drag Queen. “Paris is Burning” (1990).
Aesthetics are always political, and architecture as a discipline participates in the construction of aesthetic, spatial, and social norms. Here, we will address the norm of the dignified. We will be rethinking the categories things usually fall into.
We will work on the politics of aesthetics, considering the gendered and metaphorical relationship between bodies, things, and buildings. The quote above introduces a term from Ballroom culture, a safe space for queers, women, and people of color to find joy and self-respect through fashion, dance, gesture, and queer kinship–all of which are forms of design. We will ask what it takes to be respected not only as a person, but will generate new aesthetics that locate value in the undervalued and misunderstood, starting with an overlooked personal object. Who says a plunger cannot be a vase?
Students will develop their own hybrid aesthetics starting from their own aesthetic category and melding it with dignified, not-dignified, fine, mighty, weak etc through a close analysis of their chosen object, realizing its unseen potential.
Aesthetics are always political, and architecture as a discipline participates in the construction of aesthetic, spatial, and social norms. Here, we will address the norm of the dignified. We will be rethinking the categories things usually fall into.
We will work on the politics of aesthetics, considering the gendered and metaphorical relationship between bodies, things, and buildings. The quote above introduces a term from Ballroom culture, a safe space for queers, women, and people of color to find joy and self-respect through fashion, dance, gesture, and queer kinship–all of which are forms of design. We will ask what it takes to be respected not only as a person, but will generate new aesthetics that locate value in the undervalued and misunderstood, starting with an overlooked personal object. Who says a plunger cannot be a vase?
Students will develop their own hybrid aesthetics starting from their own aesthetic category and melding it with dignified, not-dignified, fine, mighty, weak etc through a close analysis of their chosen object, realizing its unseen potential.