The Q:DREAM workshop for queer and trans collective visioning and dreaming will ask attendees to share their stories and experiences, and to reflect on them through collaging and model-building exercises. Quotes from the workshops, collages, and models will be added to the gallery walls. Over the course of the exhibition, visions of “home” dreamed up by participants will actively insert everyday queer and trans voices into the architectural discourse on “home.”
This workshop is presented as part of CFA Lab resident A.L. Hu, NOMA, AIA, NCARB, EcoDistricts AP, installation, Queeries: Designing Reality Equitably and Madly (Q:DREAM)
in the CFA Lab: Seeking Refuge and Making Home in NYC exhibition.
About Q:DREAM
Queeries: Designing Reality Equitably and Madly (Q:DREAM) leverages the Center for Architecture’s physical and virtual properties to enact an emergent research-creation process that asks queer people: “What are your definitions of ‘home’?” The project spotlights NYC’s queer architects, designers, organizations, and places at different scales, with a participatory component for folks to recognize and celebrate the spaces they call “home.” “Designing Reality” refers to the creation of space for imagining worlds where queer folks have autonomous agency over their lives, while “Equitably and Madly” expresses parallel principles of equity of access, pride, and extraordinary imagination. Multimedia storytelling and queer data analysis will expand the frame of “home” to encompass queer families, support networks, spaces of one’s own, privacy, security, and stability. Through the course of the residency, Q:DREAM will begin to build a living archive that documents and celebrates queer designers, their work, and their desires.
About A.L. Hu
A.L. Hu, NOMA, AIA, NCARB, EcoDistricts AP, is a transgenderqueer Taiwanese-American architect, activist, and organizer. Their interdisciplinary practice synthesizes organizing for racial, class, and gender justice with world-building and spatial planning; queers the architect’s role in facilitating accessible spaces; and manifests in design, visual media, cartographies, events, and collaborative cultural work. Hu was a 2019-2021 Enterprise Rose Architectural Fellow and they are currently Design Initiatives Manager at Ascendant Neighborhood Development in East Harlem. They are a core member of Design as Protest and Dark Matter U. Hu provides brainpower and energy for Queeries, an ongoing community-building design-queering initiative for and by LGBTQIA+ architects and designers.
Center for Architecture