Any center forms an edge. In Marseille – a city built on concrete and tile production – industrial progress has fallen to ruins and toxic soil. What if architecture’s agenda for repair was not to erase and redevelop, but to inhabit the time it takes to heal earthly damage? This light tenure takes hold of the ruined Rio Tinto mining site: a queer form of life that appears at the postindustrial edges of many cities.
Accumulated building waste is stacked into new forms, re-localizing a material cycle. This produces interventions that calibrate human occupation to shifting soil. The “territory awaiting development” is now the test site for a new maintenance regime: a queer narrative method for architecture to suspend animation and rearrange the parts. Bodies are loosely engaged – through bathing, play, building, and taking out the trash – in architectural cycles they can witness. Queer architecture forms a soft new center. Advised by Yasmin Vobis at Harvard GSD.
