Building Backward: Archaeology of a Queer Built Future

Abstract

Any center forms an edge. In Marseille, France – a city built on concrete and tile production – the spirit of industrial progress has fallen to ruins and toxic soil. What if architecture’s agenda for repair was not to erase and redevelop, but to inhabit the time it takes to heal earthly damage? This light tenure takes hold of the ruined Rio Tinto mining site above Marseille while it undergoes an ambivalent remediation: a queer form of life that appears at the postindustrial edges of many cities. Reading through dust, water, and graffiti, the project works from details at the body scale up and from cartography back down to the mediated ground. Accumulated building waste is stacked into new forms, returning a localized material cycle to the site. This method produces a series of interventions that calibrate human occupation to shifting soil. The “territory awaiting development” above the city is now the test site for a new maintenance regime: a queer narrative method for architecture to suspend animation and rearrange the parts. In this space, health is made legible. Bodies are loosely engaged – through bathing, play, building, and taking out the trash – in architectural cycles they can witness. By taking care, these interventions make room for peripheral lives to register themselves and hold territory. Queer architecture forms a soft new center.