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I'm a master's student in art history at the University of Amsterdam and gender studies at Utrecht University. My research focuses on queer, feminist and decolonial approaches to architecture. I'm currently completing an internship at the Jaap Bakema Study Centre (a collaboration between the Faculty of Architecture at TU Delft and Het Nieuwe Instituut), for which I am working on a queer reading of the architecture archive. Together with Dirk van den Heuvel of the JBSC, I'm organising the second Queer Salon on 22 June.

The aim of my research here at Het Nieuwe Instituut is to contribute to a queering of the National Collection of Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning. By this, I mean that I want to question the invisibility of 'deviant' sexual orientations and try to disrupt the heteronormative character of the archive. In my research, I focus on the archives of three Dutch architects: Wim den Boon, Dick van Woerkom, and Onno Greiner. They were all active in the 1950s and 60s and designed in the modernist tradition. In their personal lives and in their own individual ways, these architects all resisted the prevailing norms of their time around gender and sexuality, and had (with varying degrees of openness) relationships with people of the same sex.

More specifically, I looked for traces of these queer histories that can be found in the archives. On the one hand, I try to trace their stories in an attempt to undo the neglect of queer bodies and voices in the archive. On the other hand, I want to investigate the relationship between architectural design and (sexual) identity. By reading the homes that these architects designed for themselves through a queer-theory lens, I hope to be able to say something about the way in which, as an alternative to the family home, they imagined and created for themselves space for a different kind of household composition and relationships, within the framework of a heteronormative society.

In each archive, I found traces of a queer history through objects that seemed to have ended up in the archive by chance, such as newspaper clippings, nude photos, love letters and private legal correspondence. I was surprised by the extent to which their personalities are expressed in the archive material, not only as architects, but also as private individuals. For example, I discovered that Wim den Boon's desire for freedom permeated every facet of his life, from his motorbike and canoe trips around the Mediterranean to his private albums filled with homoerotic nude photos. He broke all kinds of taboos. The fascinating thing is that he also translated this into his professional practice. He didn't like anything bourgeois: antique furnishings were replaced by sleek and minimalist interiors.