#44 Unvoiced Heritage – Queerfeminist Care for Tabooed Spaces

Who or what remains silent—or is silenced—in architecture and planning? Who or what is heard? Who has the right to inherit and own, and who is excluded from these mechanisms?

This episode explores queer-feminist perspectives on the built environment and reflects on the traditionally male-dominated canon of architecture. It discusses the challenges and associations that come with embracing a plurality of voices, while the guests consider the meanings of inheritance and ownership and examine who is excluded from these structures and practices.

The episode is inspired by the publication Unvoiced Heritage. Queerfeminist Care for Tabooed Spaces , which is available as an open-access publication on the website of TU Wien Academic Press.

Since February 2023, Sophie Stackmann has been a University Assistant at the Chair of Denkmalpflege und Bauen im Bestand at TU Wien. Previously, she worked as a Research Associate in the field of heritage conservation at the Competence Center for Heritage Sciences and Heritage Technologies (KDWT) at Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg. From 2019 to 2021, she was a Research Associate in the DFG-funded project Architectural and Planning Collectives in the GDR: Institutional Structures and Creative Processes in Socialist Architectural Production. She completed her PhD in 2022 with a dissertation on the concept of integrity and its significance for discourse in heritage studies, supported by a doctoral scholarship from the Johannes Rau Society. She studied Art History and Heritage Conservation at Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg.

Julia Nuler combines questions of space with feminist approaches in her work as an architect, researcher, and educator. She studied architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and in Copenhagen. She co-founded the two women-led architectural practices miss_vdr architektur and Häfele Nuler Architektinnen. She also worked for several years as a Research Associate at the Research Unit for Spatial Design and Design Methods. As part of the queer-feminist collective ClaimingSpaces*, she contributed to the conference Whose History? (Az W, 2022). She is currently completing her doctoral dissertation on Halina Skibniewska and her relationship to norms.

Elke Krasny is Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Dr. Krasny conducts research, publishes, and lectures internationally on questions of care in architecture and urbanism, as well as in contemporary curatorial and artistic practices. Her exhibition Hands-On Urbanism was presented at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2012. In recognition of her contributions to feminist scholarship, she was awarded the Gabriele Possanner State Prize in 2023. Together with Angelika Fitz, she co-edited Critical Care. Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet (MIT Press, 2019); with Lara Perry, Curating with Care (Routledge, 2023); with Sophie Lingg and Claudia Lomoschitz, Feminist Infrastructural Critique (FKW Journal, 2024); and with Angelika Fitz, Abundance not Capital. The Lively Architecture of Anupama Kundoo (MIT Press, 2025).

Christian Haid is a sociologist, architect, urban researcher, curator, and educator. He conducts research within the DFG Collaborative Research Centre 1265 Re-Figuration of Spaces at Technische Universität Berlin and is co-founder of POLIGONAL, a Berlin-based practice working at the intersection of critical urban research, cultural production, and spatial design. His research and curatorial work focus on queer spatial practices, urban ecologies, and the translation of spatial and social theory into design and planning. He develops and applies interdisciplinary methods that combine storytelling, oral history, sound, mapping, and speculative practices to challenge dominant conceptions of space and open up new perspectives on inclusive, relational, and transformative spatial practice. He has published extensively on informal urbanisms, storytelling as a spatial practice, and queer spatial practices. In projects such as Constellations, he investigates how marginalized spatial histories can be activated as design knowledge and used to develop collective futures beyond normative spatial orders.

References and Recommendations

Caroline Criado Perez (2020): Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men.

Henrike Kohpeiß (2025): Bourgeois Coldness.

Larry Mitchell & Ned Asta (1977): The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions.

Pipilotti Rist (1995): I Am a Victim of This Song. YouTube.

Silent Heritage – Queer-Feminist Heritage Conservation of Tabooed Spaces.

Theresa Knosp, Thomas Moser, Julia Nuler, Sophie Stackmann (eds.) (2026): Unvoiced Heritage. Queerfeminist Care for Tabooed Spaces. TU Wien Academic Press.

Podcast Credits

Episode #44

Concept and Host: Sophie Stackmann

Recording, Audio Production and Editing: Larissa Benk

ZUKUNFT STADT Podcast Production: Lukas Bast, Larissa Benk, Lisa-Marie Kramer, Lena Hohenkamp, Madlyn Miessgang, and Nico Schleicher

Intro Music: Jakob Kotal

The ZUKUNFT STADT podcast is a project of the Faculty of Architecture and Planning at TU Wien. It is produced in cooperation between the future.lab and the Research Unit of Local and Regional Planning at TU Wien.