Urban environments offer excellent qualities for queer life: simultaneously allowing to acknowledge diversity and to find common ground. It is where a desire for difference can actively challenge the fear of the unknown. This city-based potential is decreasing due to urban optimisation practices, which can be understood as the (re)production of orientations that narrow the 'corridors of spatial possibilities'. In some case studies, the process of continuously creating an orientation could even be considered a form of 'smooth violence'. As a counter, this project offers an explorative inquiry of developing a design philosophy rooted in disorientation.

Through understanding disorientation not only as an emotional mode, but as a concept that spans phenomenology, philosophy and spatial theory, several situated interventions imagine alternative ways of use, design and projection within the context of the Parisian Historical Axis. They show how spatial disorientation (as a design approach) could serve to expose imposed systems, to question inequitable dynamics and to create openings for other ways of living together. Ultimately, it calls for a reconsideration of the position of architecture and the role of the practitioner in scripting and guiding openings in dialogues between orientation, disorientation and re-orientation. In doing so, we could find other urban directions that should be supported by our architectural practices through open-mindedness, care and allowance: to embrace the unexpected turn, to value other interpretations and to make space for difficulties beyond, and against, normativity.

This work aims to infuse theoretical knowledge of queer space to further the understanding of the history of luxury retail stores. It analyses certain spaces of a metropolis inconspicuously connected to the history of fashion, by taking three Parisian boutiques of influential designers in the belle époque as examples of the origin of maison de haute couture culture: maisons Worth, Paquin and Poiret. In a pioneering attempt, while combining queer historical literature with a ficto-critical approach, this work strives to clarify the ties that bind queerness and boutique history together. Interactions between architecture and queerness are sought out in books and articles on queer space, such as the eponymous literature of Betsky (1997), and linked to fashion historical literature, i.a. Joseph (2014), Steele (1988, 2013) and Vänskä (2014). The findings of this thesis exemplify the knowledge gap that seems to be present in the connection between interior space, fashion and queerness. Moreover, the theoretical framework of what queer space entails, is employed to show the evocative qualities of the discussed boutiques, using definitions of closet and mirror space, fabricated fantasies and collections as queer modernist interiors. Despite the fluid definition of queerness complicating the forming of rigid answers, this research contends that there is a multiplicity of indications connecting queerness to the boutiques of the belle époque.