It started through volunteering at the 519 [a community centre in Toronto’s Church-Wellesley Village dedicated to serving the 2SLGBTQ+ communities]. As I became more present in queer establishments, I started to think more about queer space — which, before that, I’d thought about maybe in terms of a bar or club, but less so in terms of intimate, individual spaces like homes. This was around a time when I was doing quote unquote “typical architecture work” designing condo housing, so that was part of it too. At the same time, I also started meeting new friends, like Chad Burton, who would go on to become an integral team member in Portraits of Queer Living, and exudes extravagance. It all made me think about the way that people showcase their identity through space.

The exhibition itself came out of the Waterloo Architecture Emerging Practitioner Teaching Fellowship. I wanted the subject to be something personal, and something that built upon some of the courses that I was bringing into the school. I realized that this was my chance to do something about queer space. It was a topic that I had thought about before, even in grad school, but one that I had never felt courageous enough to really tackle.

Adam Nathaniel Furman and Joshua Mardells’s Queer Spaces atlas explores queer space as a subversion of cultural norms that can be created both by claiming existing space and by building new space. Working off that, I set out to rethink the one-bedroom condo that has become quite universal in its form. I would create zones that matched the size of rooms you’d find in a condo, like a bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, and living space, and then start to blur the lines between those spaces, because a lot of those fixed boundaries have been influenced by the nuclear family model. But I also wanted it to feel grounded in community, so I had the idea to fill the space with objects from actual queer homes. That’s where contributors became a really significant part of the show. There’s this underlying theory about space that’s grounding the exhibition, but then layered on top are these artifacts that allow people to jump into different narratives that support that theory.

I stripped typical wall partitions down to the metal studs to make them more naked, and to start to reveal the potential of new ways to move in and around different spaces. Then there are these fluid curtains, which exist in two layers — what I called introvert and extrovert curtains. The white, extroverted curtains are representative of existing boundaries that define space, continuing from the metal-stud partition walls, while the colourful, introverted ones create these new, intimate, adaptable third spaces where things can happen in between — alluding a bit to the idea of cruising in the woods. It’s a go-at-your-own-pace type of experience. The general idea was to counter the rigidity and monotony of movement, creating more of a waltz between doors openings. With the white, extroverted curtains, you’re able to expand and contract them so that space is blurred together, and with the colourful introvert curtains we had a mechanism that allowed them to move up and down, so that space could spill out depending on someone’s level of comfort and desire for privacy or exposure.

The mass production of North American homes such as the American Levittown Ranch homes or the CMHC Bungalow homes of the 1950s and 60s communicated a very clear idea of what home should be. There’s a big window at the front that gives you this picture-perfect view into the living room, while the porch becomes this kind of stage where your family steps outside into the world. Authority is represented in the structure of the bedrooms and bathrooms, while gender roles are concretized between the living room and kitchen, and sexuality and intimacy are hidden away completely in the bedroom. There are all these ideals that I started to think about subverting. Not everyone likes to be hidden away, and these ideas about what need to be private spaces could be flipped. 

In my research, one of the first examples that I found of a home that actually flipped this narrative was Eileen Gray’s E-1027 house. She brought the boudoir into the actual living room, which enabled these different types of encounters and gave it this exposure to the exterior. It flipped the narrative of what’s private and what’s public. The curtains I introduced in the exhibition were meant to be similar, creating this choose-your-own-adventure experience that allowed the space to respond to how people wanted to use it and how comfortable they felt overall.

Those modules came out of a question of whether or not we wanted to furnish this queer house with actual known pieces of furniture. I felt that bringing in a literal bed or fridge would be too prescriptive in terms of dictating what each space was. Instead, the idea was to take the dimensions of a king-slash-queen bed — which is also a very gendered piece of furniture — and then use those to develop a system of components that could be stacked together to create variations of furniture in different types and sizes for different forms of gathering. Clusters of those modules with some cushions on them created an intimate seating area, while larger groupings formed benches or a sectional sofa. And then they also functioned as podiums that allowed objects and artifacts to be displayed. The idea had been to allow people to move around and construct their own home based on where they thought different spaces should be — whether the bed should be in the tiny, intimate room or the more exposed room — but in the end, not that many visitors engaged in that. I think next time I would come up with a way to make that invitation clearer.

It was a very loose, open question on purpose. I shared it through social media, and had some folks at the 519 and other organizations share it as well. There were some people who knew what that question meant to them right away, and others who initially said “I don’t have anything queer in my house,” but then thought about it more and still came back with something. Later on, in some writing I did about the exhibition, I reflected on this idea of the inherently queer object versus the passive queer object. The inherent, active object is something that’s obviously queer to many different groups of people — something that could be very camp or evoke a sense of pride. Whereas the passive object is something that has more of a personal, biographical narrative that connects to someone’s identity tied to it. There was a plate in the show that was a family heirloom that had been passed down through the different generations in someone’s family, and to them it became this reflection of how they had stronger relationships with the female figures in their family than they did with the male figures, and how that developed based on societal expectations of how they should be performing as a child. Whereas in terms of an inherently queer object, there was a concrete butt plug — but in that case, the story behind it was also tied to the idea of joy and community building through a collaborative workshop held to teach concrete casting skills.

That was a tricky exercise, because it felt difficult and in some ways wrong to silo things into such clear groupings. Afterwards, I actually started to create a diagram that depicts a bunch of intersections, so that it was not just about this idea of there being five kinds of objects, but more about the types of emotional responses those objects might evoke. Any object can really produce a full spectrum of responses — something that is, let’s say, representative of love and intimacy could also be something that is trauma-inducing. And an object might be resting in one of those silos at one specific moment in time, but end up in another if it was tied to a relationship that starts to sour. Maybe something initially connected to love later becomes a reflection of resilience.

But those categories were my initial pass at understanding the types of things that people think about when they think about their kind of identity, and how those get transposed onto an object. The categories came from analyzing the narratives that people supplied. Another interesting thing that came out of reading those was that I gained a deeper understanding of the demographics of the contributors. We still see the queer community as dominantly hetnorm — especially in the Village — so there were more cis-male-identifying contributors compared to lesbian, trans or non-binary contributors, for instance. Many of the narratives were quite touching, and some were light and fun, so in that way it did really start to showcase this dichotomy of queer culture, where it can be super happy but also super dark, which I think is what I wanted to see  — an understanding and representation that there isn’t just one narrative.

For the Waterloo edition, we were almost given carte blanche, in that we were building a new home and it allowed for a lot of flexibility. Whereas at the Ace Hotel, I was occupying an existing domestic setting — a one-bedroom suite that was very intimate and cozy with its own materiality, finishes and lighting. There was already this backdrop of a kind of home. The curtains in that case became not necessarily to create new spaces, but to introduce a kind of contrast that helped people perceive how spaces could be connected. There was a red curtain between the living space and the kitchen that framed movement to get people thinking about how these existing spaces could be different.

Shim-Sutcliffe’s design for the Ace Hotel focuses a lot on rawness of materials — the raw concrete and plywood are exposed, which worked to our advantage. We were able to drill into the ceiling to support suspended items and a self-made curtain system, and when we deinstalled, any marks left behind just looked like part of what had already been there. We weren’t able to do as much in the actual living spaces — there’s this wallpaper in there that we couldn’t touch, but we friction-fitted some things and I found these really strong adhesive hooks for the curtains that allowed us to take them off afterwards without any damage. 

Both versions of the exhibition were received very well, but from two different kinds of perspectives. The first one, being held at the University of Waterloo, had a much more academic reception. That space hadn’t really been used for something so immersive — and so intimate — before, and one of the strongest points of feedback I received was from some grad students who identified as part of the queer community and came up to me afterwards saying that they felt grateful for finding a space away from the chaos of their studios where they could talk to other friends a bit more personally. I still have emails that were written that were super thoughtful and really validated why I should be doing this work — even within the design community, which we generally think of as being more open overall to different identities.

The version held at the Ace Hotel had a more general-interest audience — the visitors seemed to be a very diverse group of people moving in and out. People really resonated with the stories behind the objects, and I think that’s what I was happiest about, because ultimately this exhibition wouldn’t have been successful without the contributors. It was really their stories that allowed people to dive into the kind of emotional state that I was trying to evoke with space overall.

The overall question that I tried to ask was how do you shape queer space through your own work, which led to discussions about how queerness can be represented not just through materials or objects, but through aspects of the creative process like conversations between client and designer. There was one comment from an audience member, who said something about there being so many queer individuals in the design community because design emerged as this kind of outlet for creative expression during our formative years at a time when many of us had to hide our identities. I realized that I want to dive into that thinking a little bit more.

I’m still in a way coming into my own skin in that sense, because I’ve also been trained while working at design firms that cool design is supposed to look a certain way — not sterile, necessarily, but kind of subdued. So the true expression is still trying to come out for me. But lately, I am starting with more colour and texture.

That was fantastic. A big part of what I found validating about that recognition was that this exhibition was not just me coming in with an idea — ultimately, that on its own would not have been enough if it hadn’t been substantiated by all these community voices. I think over the past few years of doing research and work, I’ve come to the conclusion that we shouldn’t really be making any decisions by ourselves. I feel like it’s a very colonial approach to come in with presumptions of what should be, rather than truly understanding the needs of the community that you should be designing with, and not for. Everyone has something to contribute through their own experiences. Especially when it comes to the built environment, how do we truly engage the voices that we’re designing for, and how can we learn from them to be able to create a more inclusive future?

As cliché as it is, I entered architecture wanting to design a better world. That ambition had shifted to tackling objective challenges through project work, but I’m trying to get back to it through my volunteer efforts to see how I can have an impact and find meaning. One way to do that is by amplifying voices of those that are underrepresented generally. So I think that recognition was a great way to showcase that as a designer, or as a creative or as an architect, it’s not only on you — you can rely on others and work with them to create something that has this powerful compounding effect.

At the moment, having just done two physical exhibitions, I’ve been doing a lot of reading and writing to reflect about the process and the outcomes. But I would love to continue this exhibition theme by creating more spaces that showcase community voices. I would like to really build upon the call for proposals and broaden my outreach to get more diverse voices. I’m here in the U.S., and the climate is obviously different here at the moment, so some thought will need to go into how to find voices while making sure that people feel safe and comfortable sharing. I recently contributed to Out in Architecture volume 2, an initiative that was started by a group of architects, designers and activists to record and share our experiences in the industry, and that introduced me to a group of like-minded and inspiring individuals. I’m looking forward to building more relationships within the community to see how we can continue to reclaim our space within the system.