While reading about Berkeley’s Naylor House — designed by noted California modernist Harwell Hamilton Harris in the 1930s, I came across the Weston Havens House also designed by Harris and just up Panoramic Hill from the Naylor house.
In an interesting preview of a 2008 tour of the Havens house — cutely called ‘Havens Above’ by Havens — from the Berkeley Daily Planet, we are introduced to Professor Annmarie Adams, who “seeks to foster an awareness of [LGBTQ] communities in the history of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, and the built environment disciplines.” Sigh.
I heart this kind of exploration of the built environment — mashing together how architecture and planning shape experience (the filmmaker Antonioni once described architecture as a frame for living) with how identity shapes experience and how these two interact. There’s a great book Queer Space that I completely recommend that was my starting point for this subject. Recently, professors at Gallaudet have been exploring the idea of Deaf space looking at what kind of environments best facilitate Deaf communication and living. And so all these studies start to emerge into social and anthropological history and analysis of our environment. Good stuff for a theory and architecture/planning geek.
Anyway.
I came across this paragraph in the Berkeley Planet article.
It also seems clearly built for a bachelor. The sleeping quarters read as a series of master bedroom spaces, rather than the traditionally hierarchy of rooms for parents and children. Adams will draw comparisons to the internal arrangements of other famous modern era homes elsewhere in the country—some built for gay clients—as well as a house built earlier in the century in Berkeley for two women doctors who were apparently a couple.
And got to thinking about how LGBT have embraced and advocated the promise of modernism — an end to the old forms, the end of social stratification, the end of tyranny, the end of gender bias, the end of religion. I said promise not that this every happened. But as modernism developed as a critique against the Victorian and then got another push after the destruction of World War I. (It always is a reaction against some form of the old divisions rearing their ugly heads.)
Whether political modernism or stylistic modernism — open and honest on one hand but also coy and a love for a little bit social/sexual mystery on the other — has been often the work of LGBTQ as we challenge traditional culture.
