Exchanging the sidewalk for the road, the flâneur stopped walking some time ago and began driving. As the American city changed, so did the figure of urban modernity. In his travel documentary Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, the architect takes to the streets of LA in a car: “…freeway driving is interesting in itself, from up here, you see the most weird and extraordinary things and places you can hardly see from down below”. His voyeuristic gaze, framed by the rear-view mirror and steering wheel of his car, takes in the urban mess.

The car as the classic symbol of individuality serves to highlight the truly solitary condition of the flâneur. He consumes the city: an array of endless streets and infinite freeways running for miles. He drives alone, but amidst the traffic surrounding him. To Baudelaire, the flâneur was the “man of the crowd”. Refusing a possible isolation, for Banham, the flâneur becomes the man of the traffic. While Banham’s 1970’s documentary, reflects on the emerging car-centric culture of Los Angeles, it is clear that as of today, the city hasn’t changed and the flâneur drives on.

Imagery of the road inhabited is, perhaps unwittingly, recurring in the recent Australian film Samson and Delilah. The protagonists, indigenous teenagers Samson and Delilah, live life amongst a scatter of derelict community settlements in central Australia. The inadequate condition of housing (largely due to the government’s continued, incoherent response) means life, with all of its complexities, spills outside. In the film, buildings exist in the background; it is on, and at the periphery of roads—wide, gently convex, empty—where we sense an activation of space.

Absent of solids and voids, how would have Giambattista Nolli mapped the networks of habitation in the Australian desert? This is a land of inversion; a vacuum of openness, in which the built environment is a frail intrusion. From a bird’s eye, the strongest human mark is the swath of roads which carve long, asymmetrical shapes across the terrain.

There have been extensive writings on viewing landscapes from the seat of a car, for example Tom Wolfe’s infamous labeling of the Las Vegas urban strip as… more

Despite the prevalence of homosexuals in the field of architecture—I can attest to their high numbers as a member of this group—I cannot say that I have ever come across an architecture that is distinctly homosexual in appearance. It is not surprising given that the architects of past generations operated from within the closet. While Paul Rudolph’s work is often cited as overtly homosexual—the corduroy banding of his Yale Art and Architecture building is said to be a vision of frolicking boys in trousers—I am genuinely left unconvinced.

For Susan Sontag, the most homosexual of aesthetics is camp, an umbrella term for everything that we homosexuals hold dear: rainbows, Lady Gaga, The View, mushrooms, mugs, Us Weekly, lamps (of all sorts), googly eyes, martini’s, Les Misérables, penises, gold spray paint, The Legend of the Seeker, bright colors, androgyny, Oprah, rhinestones, cupcakes, textiles, pyramids, Dolly Parton, to name just a few. Camp and architecture, however, lead exclusive lives.

Due to the enforced seriousness of the discipline, gay architects have denied themselves their playful inclinations (their propensity for camp), and have insisted on carrying the aesthetic burden of their heterosexual colleagues and clients in order to prove their capacity for high design. To this effect, there is no greater insult for the queer, educated architect, than being mistaken for the “gay decorator”. But, while the homosexual architect operates in the realm of understated polite (boring and outmoded) taste, the gay decorator is playful, risque, punk, loud, in your face, garish, silly, humorous, sexy, spontaneous, innovative, absurd, ridiculous, happy, but above all, he remains relevant to contemporary practice. It is my sense that in coming out of the closet as homosexuals, collectively as architects, we have left this gay decorator behind. It is about time he was released to work his magic.

We live in a designed environment. Our urban context has been shaped by the minds of planners, designers and architects; the freeways we drive on, the parks we nap in and the stores we purchase groceries from. Much of the fabric of reality we take for granted has been assembled intentionally for aesthetics, for utility, or for power. Our sexuality, as defined by culture, is also a designed environment.

The construction and dissemination of culture is largely what differentiates us from the other animals we share this planet with. These cultural memes may convey simple messages such as what food is poisonous and what is safe to eat and they may communicate complexities such as what particular subculture of person we find attractive. We all generate culture in our day to day interactions—learning and teaching, thinking and speaking—but some voices are louder than others. Kalle Lasn writes, “from the moment your radio alarm sounds in the morning to the wee hours of late-night TV microjolts of commercial pollution flood into your brain at the rate of around 3,000 marketing messages per day. Everyday an estimated 12,000,000,000 display ads, 3,000,000 radio commercials and more than 200,000 television commercials are dumped into North America’s collective unconscious,” and each of these messages agrees or conflicts with our ever-evolving and growing sense of normalcy. It is through the advertising and purchasing of branded products that many of us develop our sexual identities. For example, queer children are raised in a culture that constantly reminds them that heterosexuality is normal (buy roses for your wife on Valentine’s Day!) and may transform their innate sexual feelings into slapstick, or worse.

We can all generate a list of cultural messages quite easily. Without reading too much into it… more