Bradley Silling
A Room in Camp’s Mansion
2019
Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Advised by Jennifer Bonner
We can see this in the domestic spaces that grew out of Harlem’s drag scene in the 1970’s and 80’s. Facing rejection from their childhood communities, members of the scene lived together in so-called Houses. Led by a self-styled Mother or Father, these houses gave shape, language, and legitimacy to new family structures of queer collectivity. The provided both a sense of kinship and protection from physical and sexual violence.
The physical spaces of these Houses were assembled piecemeal from New York’s ill-fitting housing stock. They might begin with a group of drag performers sharing a single-family apartment. Over time, they grew to encompass entire floors of tenement buildings. Knocking down walls, carving secret doors, and repurposing circulation spaces, the Houses became sprawling assemblages of rooms. Historian Michael Cunningham described the Houses as “baroque fantasies of glamour and stardom, all run on sewing machines in tiny apartments.”
Domestic Architecture has long been encouraged to make spaces that ‘suit’ a particular set of inhabitants, and must therefore always be able to ‘read’ bodies according to normative physical and familial structures. The practice of a Queer domestic architecture is exactly antithetical to this kind of legibility. The proudly messy and necessarily loose spaces of Harlem’s Houses were not indicative of spatial poverty. Rather, they were practices of self-design resistant to capitalism’s moral binaries and modernism’s diagrammatic drive. Queer life is unrepentantly disordered, non-repetitive, and always a bad fit for normative spaces.
The Houses offered a glimpse into a workable practice of Queer domesticity, but their existence was always contingent on the availability of neglected stock housing. If our goal is to imagine a sustainable future for Queer living, how might we learn from these Houses’ ability to project new forms of domestic space without relying on someone else’s definition of Home?
This project makes an attempt at a ‘Queer Mansion’ informed by these domestic practices. On a site in Los Angeles zoned for heavy industry but now largely unoccupied, the Mansion aims to make a permanent camp. It results in a space of safety and permanence while remaining staunchly committed to the oddities and necessary contingencies of Queer life. We love a good cliche so maybe we can call it an urban wilderness.
The plan operates through an estrangement between a seemingly legible neighborhood of single-family houses and the more promiscuous arrangements of rooms that undermine them. Its gabled roofs are a foil for a much stranger configuration of spaces underneath. The unstable and jittery rooms of each unit slip in and out as needed. Deep inside the Mansion, neighbor relations become increasingly strange. It is only possible to glean the shape of a neighbor’s home by assembling glimpses through windows and across courtyards. A mashup of otherwise polite domestic forms produces internal relationships foreign to normative images of home.