Mimi Zeiger

Critic, editor, curator and instigator.

MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House: October 12, 2019 – February 16, 2020

Curator: Mimi Zeiger

Participants: AGENdA agencia de arquitectura, Tanya Aguiñiga, Pedro Ignacio Alonso and Hugo Palmarola, Laurel Consuelo Broughton—WELCOMEPROJECTS, Design, Bitches, Sonja Gerdes, Bettina Hubby, Alice Lang, Leong Leong, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Anna Puigjaner—MAIO, Bryony Roberts

Graphic design: still room studio
Catalog: PIN-UP
Catalog contributors:
Leslie Dick
Susan Orlean
Photography: Taiyo Watanabe
Catalog photography: Ian Markell
Exhibition design: Andrea Dietz
Exhibition fabrication/installation: Lauren Gideonse
Coordination and installation: Bedros Yeretzian
Tension bar design: alm project Read More …

“Queerness is not here yet. Queerness is an ideality,” writes José Esteban Muñoz in his introduction to Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Utopia.1 Published in 2009, Muñoz argues against the pragmatics of the present and sees radicalism in the potential of an evasive event horizon. As such, he values utopia as a map towards the potentiality of queerness—a future world just beyond reach.

This position, by default, destabilizes notions of queer space in relationship to architecture that were historically tied to acts of desire, transgression, and artifice.2 Texts such as Stud, edited by architect Joel Sanders (1996) and Aaron Betsky’s Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire (1997) focused primarily on spaces occupied or designed by gay men and were temporally concerned with observing and theorizing contemporaneous conditions—bars, bathhouses, nightclubs—conditions that Betsky has more recently noted have been largely assimilated out of existence.3

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Construction is abundant across Los Angeles right now, and amid the backhoes and the cranes we are seeing signs of fresh takes on expressive architecture: glass domes, geometric facades, soaring arches. Charges of elitism swirl around big-time architecture, but many of the new designs opening this season promise to advance cultural and social life in L.A., whether with a riverside park that filters rainwater or a campus crafted to uplift the lives of LGBTQ homeless youth.

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