Pass the Popcorn

Last Friday was movie night at SCI-Arc. The L.A. school screened a trio of short films, intercut with panel talks among faculty, invited guests, and the filmmakers. John Ira Palmer’s entry memorialized now-disappeared sites of radical queer history, while Enrique Agudo’s envisaged a queer future where human and non-human anatomies have become blurred. With its ironic use of cowboys and music-video tropes, Evaline Wu Huang’s short offered something else altogether. Despite the event’s billing, architecture’s role in shaping queer identity remained ill-defined. During the panel that followed Palmer’s screening, Jaffer Kolb, cofounder of the design studio New Affiliates (and sometimes NYRA contributor), denied that the discipline had anything to offer. “I don’t think architecture can create queer spaces,” he said, “people can and spaces can, but not architecture.”