Archinect - News

BoND’s new Company Gallery space offers a unique showcase for Queer artists and for themselves

2021-12-16T12:33:00-05:00

One of the flashiest openings in the art world this fall came not in the form of a suite of salable oil paintings or an of-the-moment sculptural showcase but rather from a one-time dry goods storage space which has been converted into the new home of New York’s Company Gallery by an upstart duo called BoND.

The duo is formed by Noam Dvir and Daniel Rauchwerger, partners in business and in life, who say their design was inspired by several different elements of the history of the city’s Queer arts community for whom Company was founded seven years ago.

Photo: Nick Glimenakis. Image courtesy BoND.

The gallery’s roster features a veritable who’s who of hot young artists like Jonathan Lyndon Chase and Raúl de Nieves and was looking for a space to help inaugurate “a jump to a different chapter” with the help of some highly skilled hands from inside that same community.

Photo: Nick Glimenakis. Image courtesy BoND.

“It was almost like a political discussion a little bit, and I think that we ...

Los Angeles' LGBTQ community gets much-needed senior housing thanks to a new project from the Ariadne Getty Foundation and KFA

2021-10-08T18:50:00-04:00

In an effort to tackle the effects of America’s ongoing affordable housing crisis on LGBTQ seniors, KFA and Leong Leong are teaming up with the Ariadne Getty Foundation on the design of a five-story apartment complex that will help meet the needs of the greater Los Angeles community.

The development will sit adjacent to the Los Angeles LGBT Center’s newly-opened Anita May Rosenstein Campus in Hollywood and will be able to provide 98 studio, one- and two-bedroom apartments to those in dire need of housing. A total of 72 of the apartments will be made available through a lottery system, while the remainder will be set aside for those experiencing chronic homelessness and require assistance through municipal or countywide grant programs.

Image © Jim Simmons/The Ariadne Getty Foundation

“The lack of affordable housing in this country is at an all-time high and presents even greater hardships for the LGBTQ community given the many biases which continue to exist. It’s an even greater probl...

The Pulse Nightclub site is now officially a National Memorial

2021-06-29T08:00:00-04:00

President Biden formally signed H.R. 49 into law this weekend, officially recognizing the now-vacant site of the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting as a national memorial in a historic move that clears the way for a new permanent monument in Orlando.

The bill, named to honor the tragedy’s 49 victims, designates the club’s former space as an official unit under protection of the National Park Service along with 36 other planned and completed national memorials that include the Washington Monument and Pearl Harbor.

“May no other president ever have to sign for a monument like this,” Biden said at the Oval Office ceremony.

Winning design for the proposed memorial campus. Image credit: Coldefy & Associés with RDAI/onePULSE Foundation.

A team of designers including Orland-based HHCP was announced before the pandemic as the winners of a two-pronged memorial design competition hosted by the onePULSE Foundation. Their design would feature a spiraling flower-like museum and garden space that is...

Colonial Williamsburg embraces its queer histories

2019-12-20T13:00:00-05:00

Alongside a wider effort to uncover and rediscover the lost and forgotten histories of historically marginalized groups and populations, Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia has recently taken steps to uncover the 18th century living-history museum's queer legacies.

In a recent report, Atlas Obscura takes a look at the nascent efforts being undertaken at Colonial Williamsburg to shed light on these historical narratives in order to present a more complete picture of the time.

Photo of the Raleigh Tavern in Colonial Williamsburg. Image courtesy of Wikimedia user Humberto Moreno.

A recently formed research committee is digging through court records, historical accounts, and other forms of documentation pertinent to the era of the museum in order to better understand and communicate the lived experiences of people who did not conform to the gender or sexual norms of the time, with the eventual goal of incorporating these stories into the "living" aspects of the museum in some way.

Of par...

Queer Spaces, Intersections, LGBT Historic Sites: Urban Omnibus launches new series

2018-02-22T14:32:00-05:00

As designers and urbanists engage with LGBTQ+ identity, what role do gender and sexuality play in the preservation, design, and management of urban space today? [...] Marginalization means invisibility, both in history and space. New efforts seek to reclaim and preserve queer histories inscribed in sites across the city.

Urban Omnibus, a publication of the Architectural League of New York, recently launched its new series Intersections: Surfacing (guest-edited by Jacob R. Moore), allowing a more informed look at issues of gender and sexuality in the context of design & urban history.

Queer Space, After Pulse: Archinect Sessions #69 ft. special guests James Rojas and S. Surface

2016-06-23T14:45:00-04:00

In light of the recent killing of 49 people at Pulse, a gay night club in Orlando known to many as a center for Queer and Latinx culture, our focus for this week’s podcast is the role and significance of queer spaces in creating community and culture.

We wanted to use this time to encourage constructive discussion of why recognizing, and preserving (in some way), these 'third spaces' is so important. Not just for those who identify as queer or the Latinx community, but for creating diverse, welcoming urban spaces for all.

We’re joined by two guests, S. Surface: a queer designer, curator, organizer, and the program director at Design in Public in Seattle, and James Rojas: an urban planner trained at MIT and specializing in cultural landscapes, who has written extensively about Latino urbanism.

Listen to episode 69 of Archinect Sessions, "Queer Space, After Pulse":

iTunes: Click here to listen, and click the "Subscribe" button below the logo to automatically download new episodes.
Apple Po...

Banal Sex Mansion: talking about sex and architecture with Aaron Betsky, on Archinect Sessions #62

2016-04-28T13:56:00-04:00

This week we’re joined by special guest co-host Aaron Betsky, author of Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire and Building Sex: Men, Women, Architecture & the Construction of Sexuality. As a strong presence in the architectural discourse of gender and sexuality since the 1990s, Betsky discusses with us a few of our recent Features published under April's special editorial theme, Sex, including:

Betsky was last on the podcast in his current professional capacity as the dean at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture at Taliesin, to talk about the school's then-uncertain future. You can li...