Gays and dolls: How an architect uses dollhouses to imagine homes for queer people
Scholars of gender and sexuality have been exploring ‘queer spaces’ for over six decades. While for many years homes and domesticity remained out of focus or at the margins of queer space research, a recent ‘domestic turn’ has brought queer people’s homes to the foreground. Queer Spaces, a recollection of case studies of queer domestic spaces edited by Joshua Mardell and Adam Nathaniel Furman, is just one significant work within the recent shift to explore the intersection of queer identities and domesticity, for example.
Disobedient Dollhouse No.1, 2023, Photography by Sophie Percival
Over the past four years I have documented the homes of LGBTQ+ people and come to understand how they inhabit them through interviews, detailed spatial drawings and the creation of dollhouses. This methodology deliberately subverts traditional architectural model-making conventions, emphasising narrative over spatial clarity, interior qualities over façades, and incorporating elaborate details that standard architectural models typically avoid. While this may feel like a rather unusual pursuit for an architect, it’s also one I feel is necessary and urgent.
Disobedient Dollhouse No.1, 2023, Photography by Sophie Percival
My current research builds upon years of professional practice in London and scrutinises the limitations of standardised design approaches. Through interviews and detailed spatial surveys, I am examining how queer families navigate living spaces designed according to the London Plan’s Housing Design Guide.Advertisement
Early findings from my field work show a chasm between the queer daily lives of some of London’s LGBTQ+ families and the rigid homes the standard produces. In cases where spatial flexibility is available within domestic architecture, wonderful, innovative, caring and radical uses of domestic space emerge, enabling queer forms of raising children or coexisting with current and former lovers. These are not just joyful nice-to-haves, but essential for my participants to live their queerness at home, in full. Homes should not just be where queer folk feel safe; they must also be spaces where our queerness flourishes.
Disobedient Dollhouse No.1, 2023, Photography by Sophie Percival
The housing emergency in the UK and most of the Western world has urged architects, planners and developers to focus on an increased delivery of ‘units of housing’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my early findings suggest that this sense of urgency risks under-delivering on quality and space. Housing standards have codified aesthetic, functional, and spatial homogeneity. They reproduce conservative ideals of housing and family at a time when families are growing more and more diverse. All the while, with the expansion of permitted development rights, they are failing to deliver an overall improvement in size and quality of the UK’s housing stock.
Disobedient Dollhouse No.1, 2023, Photography by Sophie Percival
The need for an alternative, open-ended and, perhaps, queer toolkit to design homes – one that expands the ethical and aesthetic horizons of housing design – has never been more urgent. I am therefore also working on developing my ‘disobedient dollhouse making’ as a design tool. One that puts future users at the centre, allowing them to fabulate a different horizon for housing design. My aim is to use dollhouses as a ‘serious’ design game that enables participants to explore the true possibilities of housing beyond the ‘straightjacket’ of the standard.
Follow Daniel Ovalle Costal’s research at @QueerDomCanon on Instagram
2025-06-03
Fran Williams
comment and share
#gays #dolls #how #architect #usesGays and dolls: How an architect uses dollhouses to imagine homes for queer people
Scholars of gender and sexuality have been exploring ‘queer spaces’ for over six decades. While for many years homes and domesticity remained out of focus or at the margins of queer space research, a recent ‘domestic turn’ has brought queer people’s homes to the foreground. Queer Spaces, a recollection of case studies of queer domestic spaces edited by Joshua Mardell and Adam Nathaniel Furman, is just one significant work within the recent shift to explore the intersection of queer identities and domesticity, for example.
Disobedient Dollhouse No.1, 2023, Photography by Sophie Percival
Over the past four years I have documented the homes of LGBTQ+ people and come to understand how they inhabit them through interviews, detailed spatial drawings and the creation of dollhouses. This methodology deliberately subverts traditional architectural model-making conventions, emphasising narrative over spatial clarity, interior qualities over façades, and incorporating elaborate details that standard architectural models typically avoid. While this may feel like a rather unusual pursuit for an architect, it’s also one I feel is necessary and urgent.
Disobedient Dollhouse No.1, 2023, Photography by Sophie Percival
My current research builds upon years of professional practice in London and scrutinises the limitations of standardised design approaches. Through interviews and detailed spatial surveys, I am examining how queer families navigate living spaces designed according to the London Plan’s Housing Design Guide.Advertisement
Early findings from my field work show a chasm between the queer daily lives of some of London’s LGBTQ+ families and the rigid homes the standard produces. In cases where spatial flexibility is available within domestic architecture, wonderful, innovative, caring and radical uses of domestic space emerge, enabling queer forms of raising children or coexisting with current and former lovers. These are not just joyful nice-to-haves, but essential for my participants to live their queerness at home, in full. Homes should not just be where queer folk feel safe; they must also be spaces where our queerness flourishes.
Disobedient Dollhouse No.1, 2023, Photography by Sophie Percival
The housing emergency in the UK and most of the Western world has urged architects, planners and developers to focus on an increased delivery of ‘units of housing’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my early findings suggest that this sense of urgency risks under-delivering on quality and space. Housing standards have codified aesthetic, functional, and spatial homogeneity. They reproduce conservative ideals of housing and family at a time when families are growing more and more diverse. All the while, with the expansion of permitted development rights, they are failing to deliver an overall improvement in size and quality of the UK’s housing stock.
Disobedient Dollhouse No.1, 2023, Photography by Sophie Percival
The need for an alternative, open-ended and, perhaps, queer toolkit to design homes – one that expands the ethical and aesthetic horizons of housing design – has never been more urgent. I am therefore also working on developing my ‘disobedient dollhouse making’ as a design tool. One that puts future users at the centre, allowing them to fabulate a different horizon for housing design. My aim is to use dollhouses as a ‘serious’ design game that enables participants to explore the true possibilities of housing beyond the ‘straightjacket’ of the standard.
Follow Daniel Ovalle Costal’s research at @QueerDomCanon on Instagram
2025-06-03
Fran Williams
comment and share
#gays #dolls #how #architect #uses
English
Arabic
French
Spanish
Portuguese
Deutsch
Turkish
Dutch
Italiano
Russian
Romaian
Portuguese (Brazil)
Greek
