Ripley, Colin, author

The house is (not) a prison : on the queerness of architecture / Colin Ripley.

First English edition.

Montreal, Quebec, Canada : Concordia University Press, 2025.

xiv, 329 pages : illustrations (black and white) ; 21 cm

"Where is sexuality, especially queer sexuality, in architecture? The House Is (Not) a Prison approaches this question from a radically new 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, Colin Ripley demonstrates how the division of space 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, Ripley 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. He examines sites such as Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, Guillaume-Abel Blouet’s Mettray penal colony, Fontevrault prison, Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, Philip Johnson’s Glass House, and the architecture of North American suburbs to better understand how structures both facilitate and regulate queer sexuality. A parallel text in the endnotes connects Jean Genet’s prison-set writings to buttress the relationship between architectural features and queerness. With a foreword by Slavoj Žižek, The House Is (Not) a Prison is a provocative and surprising work that advances understandings of queer space."-- Provided by publisher.

1988111617
9781988111612 (softcover)

Homosexuality and architecture.
Architecture, Domestic.
Prisons Design and construction.
Queer theory.
Homosexualité et architecture.
Prisons Conception et construction.
Théorie queer.

Localisation: Bibliothèque main 322987
Cote: 322987
Exemplaire: 1
Statut: Disponible