Leonard Palmer

Designer.Researcher.Maker.

Design

A School with Room for Queerness
Pipecycle_Design
Data Pub(lic)
Slope House
Inside Out
Monoliths
Perspective
Confession

Research

Pipecycle_Experiment
Feel the Flux
Moss*Crete
Shells of Light, Blobs of Shadow

Make

woodles.n.things
Zero Waste Cart
Japanese Boat Building Workshop


About

Home

A School with Room for Queerness

Queer architecture for youth

Independent M.Arch. Thesis
Fall 2022
Harvard GSD
Advisor: Mohsen Mostafavi
 Although the social climate on LGBTQ acceptance is shifting in Japan, the country’s outdated legal system largely ignores the existence of the queer population while the pressure to conform is high. Within this context, this thesis explores queer architecture for youth. Focusing on the school as a place where children spend a substantial amount of time and plays a huge role in formulating their identities, the thesis imagines a learning space that leaves room for queerness, fluidity and ambiguity.



Many LGBTQ people experience what’s called a “delayed adolescence” or “second adolescence.” The idea is that you “delay” your adolescence until you’re often well into your 20s and 30s, when you are established enough and feel secure enough to finally come out and explore your true identity - an experimentation process which, for cis straight adolescents, typically happens in their teenage years to early 20’s. What if children today felt safe enough to do the kind of self-exploration that in my generation and above have been reserved to in our adult years?
The proposed school sits on an island in the heart of Osaka called Nakanoshima, bustling with major urban redevelopment projects. The island is the epitome of an urban trend of commercial developments driven by neoliberal policies, prioritizing profit over inclusion.
The design of the school learns from the dense yet porous, urban yet intimate gay districts like Shinjuku Ni-Chome, Tokyo, and Doyamacho, Osaka, whose nature is in direct contrast to the island where mega buildings live as discrete objects. Left: Figure-ground of Doyamacho, Osaka superimposed on Nakanoshima; Right: Figure-ground of Shinjuku Ni-Chome superimposed on Nakanoshima.
“Space acquires ‘direction’ through how bodies inhabit it, just as bodies acquire direction in this inhabitance. 
Adding ‘orientation’ to the picture gives a new dimension to the critique of the distinction between absolute space and relative space.”
- Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology

In prototypical Japanese schools, we see the linear corridor on one s, and classrooms on the other. A very regimented plan, we could say that “straightness” is literally engineered into the architecture of the school. In the proposed school, the linear corridor disappears and instead creates intermediary zones between classroom and classroom, or classroom and the outside.
Classrooms spill out into the spaces in between, expanding the learning space beyond the boundaries of the classroom. This departs from the container style of classrooms in prototypical schools, where classrooms are assigned to students. Rather, variations of relational spaces create discoverable spaces by the students.
The typically gender-segregated spaces, like the changing room, are designed as a transitional space where the curvature of the space creates privacy as opposed to doors separating inside and outside.
Classrooms are arranged around an asymmetrical cluster of bathrooms. The overlaps between the classroom spaces create opportunities for the inner space to be subdivided by sliding doors, or to extend out to the exterior.
©2025 Leonard Palmer  All Rights Reserved. No visual or written material on this site may be copied, reproduced, distributed, or published in any medium, in whole or in part, without prior written consent by Leonard Palmer