Abstract:
Masculinity & Materiality postulates that the Man disciplines architecture to design and decimate the human condition. In Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire (1997), acclaimed theorist Aaron Betsky urges for gay men to validate their existence towards others who share their taste, and eventually put a show on to the world.1 Predispositions of binary thought, hegemony and institutionalisation are in fact rigid diatribes used by the Man to fragment and sublimate an entity to the verge of unbeknown corruption. However, within these confines, a subject can collect and exploit these dissensions as tools of exaltation and empowerment. The author of Masculinity & Materiality, known as The Editor, no longer expels his desire or disgust, and instead expels himself into this document,2 spilling discernable and dimensional communications within its pages. To be able to curate the virtuosities and controversies of masculine behaviour, The Editor intervenes in the practices ingrained within both the architecture of the premodern and the contemporary, and the heteronormative and homonormative dialects of men. This document posits the chaotic matters of queer men into a domain of both recognition and artifice. These matters confess a series of discrete microcosms, narrating the sacredly profane disposition of an entity performed within a closeted world where one confronts his insecurity and inabilities in isolation. The sliced magazine pages, abrasive loads of sediment and cold gleaming hunks of metal produced in Masculinity & Materiality act to speculate partial views and synthesized aggregates3 of queer sexuality and its shifty, perverted and alluring environs. These places manifest destabilised and demystified orders of masculinity, revealing its hegemonic imposition upon the world and its inhabitants. While The Editor transfers these artefacts, paraphernalia, and tchotchkes into a masculine allegory, he simultaneously seeks to reconcile his identity with his practice. Documenting his abnormal, unfamiliar and strange mechanisms to observe his surroundings, The Editor will confess to a presence of intangible, concentric or inverted worlds.