Our Village: a Queer Paradise in the 1980s

Abstract

A drag queen is as American Dream as a suburban house surrounded by a white picket fence. Drag performance is more than entertainment in a night club: it is a way of expressing, dreaming, commenting, and escaping the crippling reality. For many, doing drag is their only way to achieve their dreams, however short-lived. “Drag is not a means of destruction but of rescue a little beauty, however perverse and rococo.” Our Village uses architecture to demonstrate that identities are not “natural” or an isolated act but social signifiers which drag unapologetically points out and celebrates and what should be the new face of American Dream. Set in the 1970s, the project provides a safe haven for the queer community excluded from mainstream society. It creates an architecture that embodies the vibrant subcultures within the community: a homophilic heterotopia on the Hudson River butting against the heteronormative city. Like the community that it hosts, the architecture is dynamic and adaptive, evolving along with the changing needs of the queer community over the past few decades. Taking a novelist’s approach, the project follows the scrapbook of a fictitious queer architect who designed the building in the 1970s and has been recording its evolution till today. Our Village demonstrates the agency we have as architects by showing how a humane architecture can alter history for the better.