Public space has been historically conceived, constructed and construed as heteronormative. From bathrooms to sports fields and campuses, the architecture and design of these spaces has long reflected and reinforced gender binaries and the prohibition of various sexualities. Increasingly this is changing with more conversations about design beyond the binary. Queering Public Spaces convenes conversation on the role of design and planning in the curation of public spaces and landscapes that are accessible and welcoming to all, across the dynamic and vast spectrum of sexual and gender identities and lived experiences.
Queering Public Spaces features architect Joel Sanders, landscape architect Sami Melynas Sikanas, and author, educator, and activist Kimm Topping. The Larger Landscape Conversation is hosted by Gardner Museum Ruettgers Curator of Landscape and Harvard GSD Professor of Landscape Architecture Charles Waldheim.
Tickets
Advanced tickets are required and include Museum admission. Adults $20, seniors $18, students $13, free for members and children 17 and under.
Seating in Calderwood Hall is first come, first served. Seating begins 45 minutes before the event. Late seating is not guaranteed.
To request accessible or wheelchair seating please call the box office at 617 278 5156.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Joel Sanders is an architect and founder of JSA/MIXdesign, an architectural studio design think tank dedicated to making restrooms, art museums, and university campuses welcoming to people of different ages, genders, abilities, cultural identities, and religions. His projects include Stalled!, an AIA award-winning project that responds to national controversies surrounding transgender access to public restrooms.
Sami Melynas Sikanas is a landscape architect, activist, and curator of the Queer Landscapes platform. Sikanas’s work interrogates identity and its manifold relationships to design. She sees landscape architecture as a nexus of natural and social systems, with the ability to support community development through equitable and beautiful landscapes, while honoring history, context, and ecology."
Kimm Topping is an author, educator, and activist who is committed to centering youth voice and leadership. For over ten years, Topping has worked closely with organizations on youth programming, professional development, curriculum design, and organizational change. Topping is the author of walking tours of Cambridge's feminist and queer histories. Their debut book, Generation Queer, is forthcoming from Tu Books / Lee & Low Books in 2024.
Charles Waldheim is an American Canadian architect and urbanist based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Waldheim’s research examines the relationships between landscape, ecology, and contemporary urbanism. Waldheim is author, editor, or co-editor of numerous publications on these topics, including Landscape as Urbanism: A General Theory and The Landscape Urbanism Reader. Waldheim developed the theory of landscape urbanism in response to the industrial economies and emergent ecologies of the American city. On this topic, he curates Harvard GSD’s Future of the American City platform.
Waldheim is John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design where he directs the school’s Office for Urbanization. He also serves as Ruettgers Curator of Landscape at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston where he convenes The Larger (Landscape) Conversation. Waldheim is recipient of the Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, the Visiting Scholar Research Fellowship at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Sanders Fellowship at the University of Michigan, and the Cullinan Chair at Rice University. He has been visiting scholar at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and the Bauhaus Foundation in Dessau, Germany.
Landscape and Horticulture public programs are supported by the Barbara E. Millen and Markley H. Boyer Endowment Fund. These programs also are supported in part by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, which is supported by the state of Massachusetts and the National Endowment for the Arts.
