Please join us for a conversation between Colin Ripley and Olivier Vallerand to discuss Ripley’s latest publication, The House Is (Not) a Prison: On the Queerness of Architecture, published by Concordia University Press.

Where is sexuality, especially queer sexuality, in architecture? The House Is (Not) a Prison approaches this question from a radical position, looking not for a theory of queer architecture, but rather for a queer theory of architecture. Starting from a reconsideration of the foundational principles of architecture, Ripley demonstrates how spatial division steals land from the commons and forces separations and categories. In the process, queerness is created as an indispensable outside to architecture’s disciplinary interior.

Tracing the evolution of architecture from the late Enlightenment to the postwar twentieth century, The House Is (Not) a Prison shows how distinctions between the prison and the domestic home began to collapse in nineteenth-century initiatives to rehabilitate the criminalized, and blurred even further with the popularization of glass and concrete in the modernist cell.

This event is free of charge, but space is limited, so registration is recommended.

Colin Ripley is an architect, professor, and chair of the School of Interior Design at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Olivier Vallerand is an architect, historian of the built environment, and professor in the School of Design at Université de Montréal.