Sex Under Construction: Architecture, Gender, and Sexual Science in the 20th Century American City

DISSERTATION

This dissertation examines the influence of sexual science – including sexology and the scientific subfields it influenced -- on American architectural thought and practice from the advent of the Chicago School of Sociology (1915-1935), to the height of postwar ‘deviance studies’ in the 60s and 70s, to the rise of feminist and queer activist movements in the 70s and 80s. It argues that, throughout 20th-century sexual scientific discourse, urban landscapes (and the buildings within them) have been positioned as laboratories for studying and theorizing non-normative sexual expression. Further, for many 20th-century architects, such research signaled the architecture’s exceptional power in shaping human behavior. Architecture, it seemed, could operate as an instrument to either curtail or affirm sexual and gender deviance through strategic design efforts. Attending to an array of spatial artifacts – housing, maternity wards, bars, dance halls, public restrooms, and design studio syllabi – this dissertation seeks to uncover moments of coordination, collaboration, tension, and dissensus between American architecture and sexual science, revealing how the study of human sexual behavior shaped the construction of the American built environment in powerful and often contradictory ways. Indeed, in the hands of different  from Bertrand Goldberg (1913-1997) to N. Phyllis Birkby  (1932-1994)  scientific representations of human sexual behavior were alternately leveraged towards pathologizing and segregationist projects, on the one hand, and the formalization of queer architectural imaginaries, on the other.  

M.C. Overholt