The House Is (Not) a Prison
The House Is (Not) a Prison
On the Queerness of Architecture
Where is sexuality, especially queer sexuality, in architecture? The House Is (Not) a Prison approaches this question from a radically new position, looking not for a theory of queer architecture, but rather for a queer theory of architecture. Starting from a reconsideration of the foundational principles of architecture, Colin Ripley demonstrates how the division of space steals land from the commons and forces separations and categories. In the process, queerness is created as an indispensable outside to architecture’s disciplinary interior.
Tracing the evolution of architecture from the late Enlightenment to the postwar twentieth century, Ripley shows how distinctions between the prison and the domestic home began to collapse in nineteenth-century initiatives to rehabilitate the criminalized, and blurred even further with the popularization of glass and concrete in the modernist cell. He examines sites such as Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, Guillaume-Abel Blouet’s Mettray penal colony, Fontevrault prison, Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, Philip Johnson’s Glass House, and the architecture of North American suburbs to better understand how structures both facilitate and regulate queer sexuality. A parallel text in the endnotes connects Jean Genet’s prison-set writings to buttress the relationship between architectural features and queerness. A provocative and surprising work, with a foreword by Slavoj Zizek, The House Is (Not) a Prison advances understandings of queer space.
Ripley’s book is not about queer sexuality, as if there are two species of two species, straight and queer; it is about how sexuality as such is queer. Queerness changes its status from predicate to subject which is a universal ontological feature. That’s why Ripley deals in his book with queerness of architecture, with special focus on the work of Jean Genet: not to discover in architecture traces of queer sexuality but to discover in architecture at a more general level traces of the same queerness which ‘distorts’ sexuality. … That’s why his book is more than just worth reading: if seriously read, it is destined to change radically our basic experience of who we are.
Colin Ripley challenges us with an occasionally brilliant and occasionally puerile book. In fluid, well-written, and witty text, Ripley demonstrates, as he puts it, how architecture is a ‘reification’ and direct realization of many of the laws, languages, and other codes of an abstract nature that define and imprison us. The House Is (Not) a Prison makes a major contribution both to the fields of queer studies and to that of architecture.
