This essay was co-written with Anna Ozhiganova, and originally published in L’atelier Magazine, #21 (2023) — Fragile. We thank the team of L’atelier for their support in developing this work and the opportunity of having it published!

Let us think for a second about the fairy tales and movies that show main characters, usually a monogamous heterosexual couple, living “happily ever after”. Happiness has become nearly a duty for everyone to fulfill, and since no universal formula for obtaining it has yet been found, understanding of whether something does or does not make one happy remains, on the one hand, highly subjective, and on the other hand, shaped by the dominant culture. The idea of an individual being in themselves intrinsically incomplete can be traced back to Platonic dialogues, according to some ideas of which, humans were expected to find completeness in romantic relationships, and supposedly, protection in a home shared with their partner or a family (1). Seemingly, this concept of obtaining completeness by finding a romantic partner has gone a long way through cultural history and still had an effect on some narratives in popular culture. Ubiquitous production of products and lifestyles by obtaining which we are expected to achieve happiness and prosperity only keeps gaining momentum despite having been repeatedly criticized. Such items, that give one a promise of happiness, a feminist scholar Sara Ahmed defines as happy objects, with marriage and a family home being central to them (2). The way our ideas of a happy life are incorporated in the built environment, more specifically, in the ways we arrange and perceive our homes, appears to be a subject worthy of particular attention and a deeper reflection. 

Domesticity is expected to provide a space where one can feel protected from the outer, potentially hostile world and feel complete being surrounded by familiar, close-to-heart settings, objects, and people. The emotional link to the home where one was born and grew up is usually really strong, and the space of home together with the family is expected to provide security and well-being to a child. Speaking of the building industry nowadays, the design of an average apartment in residential areas still aims at making a place for a family of two parents and children to dwell. An apartment with two bedrooms and more, for instance, should be accompanied by a special space for a stroller on the ground floor, while ascribing distinct functions to each of the rooms implies a certain type of relations between people who will inhabit them (3). 

While the standardized production of housing is aimed at creating comfortable homes for such nuclear families, other forms of intimacy and cohabitation shrink out of sight. For some such groups as queer people, for example, finding a home that would be able to provide safety and sustain their happiness becomes a challenge. The space of their initial family home may very often be even more dangerous and hostile to them than some non-domestic locations, which forces people of such identities to develop a sense of home elsewhere. In a conversation with Beate Söntgen, a Swedish architect Katarina Bonnevier notes that growing up as a queer woman she felt most at home in the night clubs and queer parties rather than in the actual home of her family (4). As queer people have managed to form intimacies and create places in which they can form a happy life, the causality established between the nuclear family (i.e. a heterosexual couple’s “ever after”) and happiness is questioned. 

We can see that a family house may be a solid and tangible object that promises happiness, while queer spaces, as Bonnevier describes, are liminal (4). Underground queer communities have been occupying public spaces like nightclubs and abandoned buildings, where they could build their own chosen families and cultivate other-than-heterosexual forms of intimacy. Locations, where queer communities could gather, were not technically domestic or an institutionalized space, but for the time of such events, they served as venues where new types of relationships could flourish. Therefore, unlike long-lasting solid family houses, queer spaces were short-lived and adaptable to various contexts, since most of the time it was unsafe for them to occupy just one fixed location and they were rather spread among several. On the one hand, this highlights the vulnerability of queer communities who for a long while were not allowed into public institutions, but on the other hand, the need to generate safe spaces against the dominant discourse helped to form resilience.

However, such ephemeral existence cannot be everlasting, nor suitable for each form of queer intimacy. While some demand variability of spaces and locations, others strive for creating a family and raising children under the same conditions that heterosexual couples would, which means they will likely need a permanent family home to reside in. So does it mean that we should change the standards of mass housing design for it to be more inclusive to other forms of intimacy and cohabitation? Maybe, but also it is hard to ignore the fact that while the forms of communal living today only become more diverse, the built environment is unable to reconfigure at the same pace. The lifespan of buildings most often exceeds that of humans, so some houses that are decades or even centuries old and that we live in today inevitably undergo numerous internal transformations to fit our today’s lifestyles regardless of their initial functions.

An example of such internal transformations may be the Bloomsbury house that Söntgen talks about in the discussion with Bonnevier (4). The house of Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell was known to be the home of the Bloomsbury group of modernist writers and artists during the first decades of the 20th century. Considering Woolf’s bisexuality and the fact that Bell was in an open marriage with her husband, Söntgen’s analysis of the Bloomsbury house inner organization and its functioning reveals an important queer narrative of this domestic space. The Bloomsbury house can be a great case to see how an already existing building was being transformed to incorporate various queer forms of intimacy and community long before the term ‘queer’ appeared. 

The family residences and apartments passed transgenerationally keep a record of the history behind this home and the people who lived in it. However, queer domesticity requires more tools to be developed in order to maintain the story behind it and have something to build upon later. As long as the representation of queer intimacies persists to make its way into the public discourse, the functioning of the buildings accommodating such relationships would transform accordingly, first, on the internal level, and later, on the level of more long-lasting built structures. It is impossible to create from scratch a completely new built environment that would incorporate queer happiness, moreover, this is not even the goal. Rather it may be important to focus on the history and cultural redefinition of already existing homes inhabited by queer people.

Footnotes

(1) Plato, The Symposium, trans. W. Hamilton, (Harmondsworth: The Penguin Classics, 1951).

(2) Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 21.

(3) Le Conseil d’État du canton de Vaud, Règlement d’application de la loi du 4 décembre 1985 sur l’aménagement du territoire et les constructions, partie constructions (RLATC), Art. 32 al.1

(4) Bonnevier, Katarina; Söntgen, Beate. “The New Intimacy: Liminal Spaces of Generosity”. Webinar as part of “Mindful Modernism (s)” program organized by Canadian Center for Mindful Habitats. February 5, 2022. Accessed 15 February 2023. https://www.youtube.com/live/OvHHDWAqlJI?feature=share