YEAR: 2021
LOCATION: AUSTIN, TX
AIA Austin Force Majeure Competition, Second Place
This competition is meant to serve as a tool that prompts intense thinking and tough discussion on how design can help mitigate crises. Austin is currently responding to a large-scale crisis resulting from a rapid increase in housing costs that has left many of our neighbors unhoused. The issue is coming to a head after the city voted in May to pass an ordinance that makes it a criminal offence punishable by a fine for anyone to sit, lie down, or camp in public areas and prohibits panhandling in certain locations. Our team responded with the following:

I.     The normative unit of the motel room blankets and makes acceptable a diverse suite of non-normative behaviors such as sex work, transience, adultery, and financial precarity. As such, the motel is a queer space; it is a space of distasteful domesticities.

II.    Houselessness is a queer condition. Queer people are more than twice as likely as the general population to find themselves houseless at some point in their adult life. Further, America’s dream single family home is a critical symbol of heteronormativity tied inextricably to the ideal of the nuclear family. Houselessness necessitates constant adaptation of the body, appropriation of space, and the abandonment of domestic norms. 

III.    Social housing programs often serve primarily to re-integrate the houeless body into domestic norms synonymous with heteronormativity by privileging family structures that comply with these norms, enforcing stringent rules around deviant behaviors such as drug use or sex work, and removing any agency that is not bent towards obedience from the houseless body.

IV.    The proposal considers what a queer domestic space that respects and emphasizes the existing synergies of the motel typology and houseless condition might look like. The site is converted to a community land trust governed by residents and community members. The disciplinary unit of the motel room is manipulated, combined, distorted, and reprogrammed to serve diverse family structures. The site is programmed to enable the formulation, maintenance, and presentation of non-normative identities by providing space for performance, social cohesion, food production, and architectural experimentation.

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