McGill University School of Architecture, April 2014
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
This project aims at analyzing and modifying the sexual nature of Montreal’s built environment, showcasing the presence of the dominant feminine, the unwanted, the sexualised, the erotic*. The review of gentrification processes in the downtown area clarifies the rejection of sex workers towards the industrialized peripheries, a tendency which the project seeks to reverse. A strip of desirable exposed bodies is inserted on the pedestrian portion of Prince-Arthur Street, an infill architecture that serves as representative, transgressive tool of empowerment of sexualised women and minorities. The Sex Wall parasites a street of failed urbanity but of high public visibility.
What this thesis recognizes is that the manifestation of sexuality is not limited to acts of sexual conduct but also in the gendering of space. Gender segregated architecture can be seen to produce issues surrounding areas of social justice as space is employed to operate as a political technology of body, gender, and sexual production normalization. In that context, the rooms and other volumes’ design is informed by culturally agreed-upon architecture signifiers.
“People are in general not candid over sexual matters. They do not show their sexuality freely, but to conceal it they wear a heavy overcoat woven of a tissue of lies, as though the weather were bad in the world of sexuality. Nor are they mistaken.” Sigmund Freud, Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, London, 1959.