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Hidden Histories: Discovering Los Angeles' LGBTQ+ Collections

Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) Media Archive

The Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) Media Archive is a continuously-expanding online showcase with over 1,000 hours of video, featuring the world’s most significant architects, designers, and theorists—including 11 Pritzker Prize winners—from 1972 to now, offered to the public unedited, for students, scholars and anybody with an interest in architecture, Los Angeles and experimental design.

LGBTQ+ topics and themes represented in the collections held by the SCI-Arc Media Archive include Arts and LGBTQ+ activism.

Featured Collections

Chase (John) papers, 1953-2010

This collection contains 18 boxes of drawings, sketches and texts for architectural design and projects, manuscripts, 35m slides, syllabi, and publications mostly on Southern California vernacular architecture.

Queer Architecture (video collection), 1995-2021*

The notion of queerness, as it relates not only to gender, politics, and personhood, but also to design, architecture, and aesthetics, can be understood as a conceptual framework through which academics and practitioners have developed meaningful discourse in the twenty-first century. SCI-Arc Librarian Kevin McMahon has curated a series of lectures from the SCI-Arc Media Archive alongside films and documentaries produced by SCI-Arc Channel featuring architects, designers, curators, and artists that delve deeply into conversations considering ideas of equity, space, bodies, mythology, materiality, liberation, performance, form, and history.

Books and Manuscripts

A Difficult Balance - Harm Reduction Housing for People with AIDS. 1998.

Edited by John D'Amico and John Chase, with special assistance from Norman Millar. With the participation of students in SCI-Arc’s Spring 1996 HIV Research Seminar taught by D’Amico and Chase. Designed by April Greiman. Published by SCI-Arc, 1988. A set of three brochures: introduction and background information (46 pages); client, student, faculty texts (38 pages); and an outline of housing considerations to guide future design (30 pages).

UCLA Queer Space Reader. 1992.

Queer Space: If you’re in a building you’re in drag. Readings for AUP 219.4, Special topics in the built environment, Spring 1992, UCLA. Faculty advisor: Ed Soja. Student coordinators: Geoff DiGirolamo, Moira Kenney, Eric Lee, Jonathan Massey, Eric Reyes. 322 pages of comb-bound photocopied book excerpts, news articles, academic essays on queer spatial practices, theories of gender and sexuality with spatial implications, and spatial activism. Plus 14 loose pages of flyers, commentary, assignments related to the course. This copy belonged to the classicist/architect/theorist Ann Bergren (1942-2018) and contains some notes.

*online materials available

Contact the SCI-Arc Media Archive

For more information about the SCI-Arc Media Archive's LGTBQ+ collections and holdings, including citation and copyright information, please contact Kevin McMahon.

✉ Email: kevin_mcmahon@sciarc.edu
☎ Call: 213-356-5323

The SCI-Arc Media Archive is an L.A. as Subject member. For more information about L.A. as Subject, visit their website here.