Additional information, email: Adam Thibodeaux
This studio functions as a conceptual follow-up to the Fall 2021 Inclusive Design Graduate Research Studio, Post-Gay: On Archive, Exhibition and Ghosts, where students focused on a collection of buildings in Buffalo that once served as a queer gathering space but have since been abandoned or assumed other functions. Together, the studio engaged a two-phase methodology to imagine a future for these buildings that memorializes their past and challenges existing limits in the scope of “inclusive design,” through the actioning of queer methodology on architectural space.
In this course, students will focus on the collective reclamation and restructuring of one larger building: Buffalo City Court at 50 Delaware, which sits on the site of the now-demolished Avenue, an important queer gathering space where the Matachine Society of Western New York was founded in the 1970s.
Students will first expand on the methodology from the previous studio to develop exterior transformations of Buffalo City Court (partners, 4 weeks). Each student will then focus on the programmatic and architectural restructuring of the interior of one floor of the building (individual, 10 weeks), developing their own unique vocabulary of architectural restructuring that learns from queer methods of reclamation.