Cuir Architecture: Queer Voices from Latin America

Mexican transfeminist philosopher, Sayak Valencia, once said that the difficulty of translating queer into Spanish is, in part, because every word in the language “contains an epistemic, racial, cultural, class, gendered, and geopolitical archive.” In Spanish, the word cuir with a “c” is often used as an alternative to the word queer with a “q.” For Valencia, this is a meaningful and deliberate deviation: a “southern geopolitical” linguistic turn, a “counteroffensive toward the Anglo-American and colonial historiography." As Marko Jobst and Naomi Stead affirmed in their recently published book Queering Architecture: Methods, Practices, Spaces, Pedagogies, "Queer theory itself has a problem with its lodgment in the hegemony of the Global North, a pattern which is also true of architecture.”

In a globalized world where we continuously consume, translate, and adopt ideas from multiple latitudes, language — in this case, Spanish — has a fundamental impact on our understanding of design. Camila Lesch (b.1995, Chile), Facundo Revuelta (b.1990, Argentina), Luis Rojas Herra (b.1985, Costa Rica), and Gislenne Zamayoa (b.1974, Mexico), four architects working, teaching, and thinking about cuir architecture in Latin America, have grappled with these slippery concepts firsthand. The following text is the result of four hours of conversation with these architects, touching on education, recent projects, and a LGBTQIA+ slang as a possible source for new architectural vocabularies.