Growing up in New England I was surrounded by the vestiges of the vernacular left to us by the puritans who settled this land. Born out of a deeply problematic legacy, the puritan vernacular remains important not just as the dominant architectural style, but as fertile grounds for examination, as examined by numerous post-modernists. Yet the puritan vernacular is still tied to the hegemony of a cis-heteronormative society, binding it to nostalgia for which we should not return. Queering Puritanism shows how the vernacular can be turned on its head by queer culture and its celebration in shared civic space. It is the starting point for defining the qualities of a queer architectural landscape shifting between the exceptional and the everyday.

The landing spot for this project is Provincetown, Massachusetts. From the first pilgrims to its current status as an oasis for gays and lesbians, “P-Town” has acted as a refuge for those wishing to escape the static-ness of the everyday. Within the fabric of resorts, bars, galleries, and sex shops, one site stands out as a landing place for a queering of the architectural vernacular. The Boatslip Resort and Beach Club is a fairly typical beachside hotel that becomes atypical through the various rituals which have been grafted onto the architecture. The Tea Dance is one such ritual in which for a brief moment there is a communion between the disparate crowds and cliques all on the same common ground of The Boatslip pool deck. The Architectural proposition this thesis raises is the design of a new stage that unfolds the puritan vernacular of Provincetown to realign with the desires of the queer community performed in ritualistic bursts of celebration like the tea dance.

With an analysis case study throughout the coastal towns of New England, a vernacular vocabulary is developed as the baseline of normativity within an architectural framework. Through a process of unfolding the skin of these saltboxes and cabins, the thin nature of the prototypical form is revealed and cracks the rigid barrier between the public and private. A new queer form of language begins to take shape, which is expanded upon into five prototype houses that form the new resort and the set pieces for the tea dance. These houses become unified on a new common ground that reaches back to the colonial concept of common lands while pushing against the heteronormativity of the family unit as the divider of space. On this new stage, the architecture can take several stances, moving from introverted to extroverted depending on the time and will of the user. On this new stage, the tea dance can expand, as the architecture defies the binaries, allowing the spillage of bodies across environments and states. When the music dies down at the end of the night and the crowds disperse the resort returns to an introverted state of waiting for something or someone to push it and deny the normative nature of its puritan roots and the power that ancestry holds over us. Queering Puritanism is not the end, but a starting point for a broader queering of our architectural landscape, through the creation of an affirmational architecture willing to open up, if just for a brief moment, to be consumed by the rising tides.