Victoria Collins MA Interior Architecture

The Breadth of the Unbound

The Breadth of the Unbound explores the indeterminate and ephemeral qualities of queer space as a boundless, interrogative and layered spatial strategy. This work criticises Queer Britain, dubbed the first and only LGBTQ+ museum, and questions how design practices can reflect the queer embodied experience. 

Queer in itself is spatial as the culture understands ideas of transition and the public and private nature of ‘coming out’ or ‘staying in the closet.’ Drawing from this point of origin, the project interrogates the landscape of Granary Square, the site of Queer Britain, and infiltrates the space with organic contours to understand the relationship between the orthogonal and the abstract. 

Through a series of collage-style drawings to understand this shifting nature of change, the threshold becomes a space to examine these ideas, to fog perception and to evince ‘realness’. These ideas are manifested into a dynamic undulating mechanism to enfold visitors into this lacuna, a cavity of anti-space flowing inside and outside through anamorphic forms. 

The building comprises four key spaces representative of queer culture. First, the Bar, an acting memorial to the lost gay bars of London. Second, the Stage, a tribute to queer movement and performance. Third, the Library, a working double entendre to ‘reading’, designing a space both to read and be read. Finally, the Archive, a space to understand the ‘oblique archive’ (Alice Friedman) and how queer history exists as innuendo. The conclusion to this project remains a work under construction, but substantiates the necessity for queerness in the future of design.