Thesis: Glitter Urbanism – LGBTQ Narratives in Architecture
Student: Will Dendinger
Faculty Mentor: Peter Olshavsky
Project Description
Will Dendinger:
Glitter Urbanism explores queer space in architecture to understand its relationship between LGBTQ social narratives and their impact on spatial conditions. This thesis is approached through the study of Chicago’s built environment and its LGBTQ community. By analyzing their conjunction, we can see queer space as a temporary, fleeting atmosphere defined by the stories enmeshed with these spaces.
Through the exaggerated and avant-garde lens of “camp,” this design exploration sprinkles queer spaces throughout the urban landscape to create vibrant moments that evoke glimmers of connection to the stories of LGBTQ figures and events that have often been overlooked or erased. As these stories develop into architectural interventions, each taking on a different facet of LGBTQ life filled with raw emotions and histories, they become active agents in their own narratives.
The anthology of projects explores queer space at varying scales, levels of detail, and representation. These projects are not meant to be fully finished architectural buildings, but rather each is meant to scratch the surface of a topic and provoke conversation, laughter, or anger. They serve to draw people to them, stand in silent solidarity with them, or actively disrupt them.
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Will Dendinger: The Party Pier is inspired by the Belmont Rocks project, an archival Facebook project that is working to document and save the LGBTQ histories and images of the Belmont Rocks, a former queer space in Chicago along the Lakefront. This organic space that existed into the early 2000s until it was destroyed when the Army Corp. of Engineers declared the shoreline stone revetments unsafe and created a massive seawall in its place.
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Will Dendinger: The project is located in Belmont Harbor, near the original site of the Belmont Rocks. The bridge connects back to the other side of the harbor where the City of Chicago is currently building a memorial AIDS Garden. Permanent diving piers and a bridge structure are placed in the harbor. A temporary net bridge is supported by balloons and a floating pier surrounded by smaller red swim platforms are floated in during the summer months.
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Will Dendinger: It provides a fun gathering place on the lake like the rocks did for people to come and swim, layout, drink at the bar and meet people, kayak around, or even make their way up around the ramp onto the bouncy net balloon bridge to the other side of the harbor towards the AIDs garden. The pier creates an enclosed swimming and diving area surrounded by array of deck chairs allowing people to see and be seen as they lounge in the sung. The underside of the ramp forms a bar area and canoe or float rental space with launching areas on the backside into the harbor. Finally, the walls of this are a translucent mesh with larger than life graphic models superimposed on the fabric.
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Will Dendinger: After a few weeks, something starts to happen in the water. It is barely noticeable at first, but soon becomes a larger issue as traces of a sticky red dye appear on swimmers, boats, and the pier itself. People don’t understand what is happening at first and soon panic ensues about this mystery sickness in the water.
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Will Dendinger: It soon becomes clear that the red swimming platforms have dissolved and dyed the entire harbor red. The dye leaking in the harbor creates vast splotches which have stained boats and swimmers to the point where nobody enters the water.
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Will Dendinger: This project is a protest piece bringing awareness to the AIDs crisis. When it first started, people didn’t know what was happening and why, and the groups affected by it, mainly drug addicts and homosexuals, were seen as disposable or that they deserved it, being abandoned by their jobs, families, churches, and even the government. As the structure soaks up the red dye, from above it is clear that it is the shape of the red ribbon symbolic of AIDS.
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Will Dendinger: At the end of summer, when the water is cleared and people return to the pier, the balloons of the net bridge finally release, disappearing into the sky in memory of all the millions of people lost to AIDS. An entire generation of LGBTQ people, wiped away or forgotten similar to the fragile history of the Belmont Rocks. The Party Pier brings awareness to the early days of HIV/AIDS and its impacts still felt today.
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Will Dendinger: The (trans)Port-a-Potty is meant to place users, specifically, conservative lawmakers, under the magnifying glass of pressure and public scrutiny that trans individuals face. Section A highlights the boundaries of privacy being broken in the space.
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Will Dendinger: Section B indicates multiple details of the conjoined bathroom designs meant to make users uncomfortable and flip the idea of a private stall on it’s head. The project explores satire in architecture to highlight many of the hypocritical stances taken in legislation, such as the bathroom debates.
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Will Dendinger: The Belmont Theatre project takes on the growing, but still disproportionate representation of LGBTQ representation in media and forces queerness into the face of those passing by on Chicago’s L train into Belmont Station. Drag queens stroll along an elevated catwalk as projectors broadcast LGBTQ films onto the side of trains as they approach the station.
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Will Dendinger: An existing theatre and a drag bar both sit next to Belmont Station, so this project erupts queerness in multiple forms of media off the stage and into the site, using supersized canopy structures, projectors and screens, and multiple types of stages.
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Will Dendinger: The northern stage structure’s canopy provides cover to multiple drag performance stages and a quarter-mile long drag catwalk incoming trains pass by. It then connects across the street to the southern stage via a zipline for the drag queens and actors.
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Will Dendinger: The southern structure ties to its site conditions with multiple canopy super structures. It hosts three stages for theatrical performances, multiple screens, and a modular structure to display behind the scenes programs. Thus, passengers experience bombardments of snippets of multiple LGBTQ focused plays and movies as they pass through the station, wait for trains, or occupy adjacent buildings.
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Will Dendinger: The Capella of Queerness acts as an open-air chapel clinging to the side of Our Lady of Mt. Caramel Catholic Church in Boystown. The chapel acts as a memorial to the Chicago nuns who helped the LGBTQ community fight to pass anti-discrimination laws in the 1980s and challenge Chicago’s aldermen and Cardinal Bernadin.
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Will Dendinger: This chapel takes elements of the existing gothic revival church’s tracery and obscures them into familiar, yet queered forms. It plays with gothic tracery, interactions between columns and structure, and finally layers of symbolism. The stained glass windows portray saints rumored to have been LGBTQ.
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Will Dendinger: The main focus of the chapel is to provoke the Catholic Church’s stance on same-sex marriage. By creating an outdoor chapel adjacent to the main church, it brings into question is marriages are allowed in this separate space. The chapel pushes same-sex marriage right in front of the church’s doors, showing it must be accepted rather than forced away.