Architecture, as a discipline, has insisted on representing space through plans, programs, and forms. However, what really sustains the city are the affective choreographies that bodies produce within it. Among these choreographies, cruising is—perhaps—the most uncomfortable, the most ambiguous, and the most epistemologically fertile. Cruising is a practice that operates between anonymity and exposure, between surveillance and desire, between vulnerability and bodily agency.

The presentation will address cruising as a research methodology for tracking spatial practices that are difficult to recognize at first glance. From ancient Greece to the infamous molly houses of 18th-century England; from the vibrant 1970s to the algorithms of Grindr; from Oscar Wilde to George Michael, cruising is both a reclamation of public space and the creation of a place of one’s own: one in which individuals of all races and classes interact, even under the shadow of repressive governments.

Carolina Sepúlveda is an architect, researcher, and curator based in Berlin, currently a doctoral candidate at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and a guest researcher at the Georg Simmel Center for Urban Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin. She holds a Master’s degree in Design Studies from Harvard GSD and a degree in architecture from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. She is co-founder of Sentimental Studio, together with Juan Carlos López, an architecture practice that investigates the built environment through an affective lens. She has developed curatorial projects, exhibitions, and teaching in different countries. Her doctoral thesis examines Berlin as an exceptional case of a queer city.