Notes for an androgyned architecture. Gender migrations in contemporary architecture

Architecture, gender and sexuality are not crystallised categories but interconnected processes in constant change and redefinition. If social constructions of gender identities and sexualities produce spaces - designed or constructed, represented or imagined, collective or individual, public or private - at the same time the spaces themselves produce identities. "Architecture", argues Beatriz Colomina in Sexuality and Space (Princeton University Press, 1993) "is not simply a platform that accompanies the viewing subject. It is a viewing mechanism that produces the subject. It precedes and frames the occupant." Avoiding disciplinary monolingualism, feminist critique has been particularly effective in mobilising the possibilities of Derridean deconstruction in architecture to enable an ongoing critique of binary oppositions, but especially of separate spheres or the 'public-private' division of gendered space that is manifested. This study, in fact, draws attention to spaces marginalised within gendered binaries in traditional architectural discourse, such as the domestic and the interior, and/or positioned as terms that transcend this binary distinction, such as the marginal, the between, the everyday, the heterotopic and the abject. Starting with Bruno Zevi's text, written in L'Espresso in April 1982 about the feminist movements of the 1970s that affected architecture, citing the courageous ethical-social initiatives protesting a misogynistic discriminatory custom, we investigate Zevi's question to female architects " [...] Instead of the positivity of difference, why not embrace an androgynous integration?". An androgynous architecture challenges identity-based categorisation. Without necessarily getting rid of them, it calls for a renewed understanding and critique of spaces not as places created specifically for a community, but rather as mutable, performative, context-dependent and relationship-dependent places in their defiance of heteronormativity, and even homonormativity. To alleviate the weight of old prejudices and cultural connotations and to overcome the issue of gender in architecture, the image that is proposed, therefore, is of an androgynous architecture, which is conceptual and energetic, embodied and emotional, abstract and welcoming, elected to challenge the fixity of form, norm and identity.