Bartlett Research Conversations: Daniel Ovalle Costal

A Disobedient Canon of Queer Domesticity: Design Fabulations

Speaker: Daniel Ovalle Costal 
Supervisors: Professor Ben Campkin and Professor Barbara Penner
Guest panellist: Professor Cat Rossi, University for the Creative Arts 

Abstract

This thesis explores the critical potential of architects’ toolkits to re-design domesticity as a space of inclusion for sexual and gender diverse people.

Scholarship on queer space has historically prioritised public and commercial spaces, while the home has historically received less attention and has often been framed as a site of normalising power – despite the richness of feminist critiques of domesticity as a key agent in the construction and reproduction of gender and sexuality. This thesis builds on work by scholars of queer studies who have since problematised this reading of home and argued for more nuanced understandings of domesticity.

A practice of dollhouse-making has been developed to assist a co-design process, facilitating the design of domestic utopias between participants and researchers. The research explores dollhouses’ ability to project queer futures into everyday spaces, as well as their role as disobedient objects, which enable critiques of architecture’s disciplinary conventions, and of the spaces and aesthetics of normative domesticity.

About The Bartlett Research Conversations

The Bartlett School of Architecture’s Research Conversations seminars comprise work-in-progress and upgrade presentations by students undertaking the Architectural Design MPhil/PhD and Architectural and Urban History and Theory MPhil/PhD. All current UCL staff and students are welcome to attend.

Held regularly throughout the academic year, the seminars are attended by the Programme Directors, Professor Sophia Psarra and Dr Nina Vollenbröker; PhD Coordinators, Dr Stamatis Zografos and Dr Stelios Giamarelos; and other PhD supervisors.

Image: Dollhouse as literature review of queer domesticities. Photography by Sophie Percival.