RuPaul’s Drag Race winning its first Emmy last year marks a great leap forward in the history of drag. The show’s recent jump from the LGBTQ+ “Logo” channel to the basic cable channel VH1 further showcases this rapid acceptance and visibility. Far from basic however, the show comes at a time where drag queens are no longer hidden within gay bars, but are celebrated as walking forms of art; persons that have been engulfed by their character, dictating their fashion, mannerisms, and personalities. What was once looked down upon as a trivial pastiche of theater, the performance of drag has grown to encompass high art, hot media, and a sudden surge in pop culture. Meanwhile, Architecture – the old maid to drag’s femme fatale – clutches onto its history and prestige, wary of this newcomer. Architectural critic Reyner Banham dismissed postmodernism as a semblance of drag, exposing architecture’s reluctance to regard drag as anything other than a comedic jab. “Postmodernism [is] in the same relation to architecture as female impersonation is to femininity. It is not architecture, but building in drag.” Banham’s experience with drag must come from sub-par performances, for he neglects to mention the art form’s deep rooted ties to mimicry, exaggeration, and contortion that respond to the social construct of gender and identity. It is not the impersonation of a woman but the woman, being a critique and commentary of the ideal. To dismiss any architecture as the ‘lesser’ drag would be to miss out on the abundance of connections and opportunities for both fields to learn from each other.

Though where we do see architecture in bed with drag is with recent collaboration between Grayson Perry and FAT’s Charles Holland, The House for Essex. Perry, whose art goes beyond pottery and quilts, presents the project dressed in drag. He is dressed as the fictitious former resident (and now its patron saint) Julie Cope, serving kitschy, grandma-chic realness. The House for Essex, which will henceforth assume the pronoun she, presents herself as a formidable contender in both the world of drag and the architectural discourse. As a structural home that has been transformed into a mausoleum but remains as a vacation rental, she mindfully plays with the concept of identity. She does not merely identify as a new program and adopt its form, a la transgenderism, but rather exaggerates and elaborates on the features systematically associated with that identity. For her, it’s not just about verisimilitude of an impersonation, but the expression of what that persona conveys.

Her façade is caked with garish and tawdry makeup. A basecoat of white and emerald ceramic tiles. Sharp rouge mullions within each window as eyeliner. A foot thick copper frame around the enlarged, dilated windows emphasizes the openings like that of false eyelashes and drawn-in brows. Makeup is the vital step in drag that separates a drag queen from a boy in a dress. It is the cosmetic feature that works directly with the skin (envelope or surfaces) and is used to paint and therefore convey the identity of the intended character. Here, the makeup of the house (wallpapers, tiling, and paint) is not trying to deceive the viewer into believing this is actually a church or home. Instead of realness, she’s serving clown. They say a drag queen should paint her face for the back row and the House for Essex does so and then some, catching the gaze of passerby from a hundred yards away. Against the somber Essex landscape, her color palette reads foreign, applying unfamiliar aesthetics to familiar elements. The interior living room is a hodgepodge of clashing aesthetics: crimson altar, chartreuse polyester sofas, grey wooden paneling, black and white fishbone tiled floor, and ceilings plastered wood-cut prints. The central fireplace is decorated with traditional Celtic sheela na gigs with non-traditional jade tiles that portray the fictitious patron saint, Julie Cope. Similar to a mausoleum, the entrance patio has an inscription describing Julie Cope and the dates of her birth and death, but it does so with a decadent Mexican inspired mosaic with references to sugar skulls and Our Lady of Guadalupe, Our Lady of Essex in this case. The House for Essex’s makeup is a blend of concepts, poignantly sampling from historic feminine references. She pokes fun of these traditions and what it means to be a chapel and home. She throws shade at her fellow Essex women, with their own hyperbolic tans and collagen-filled lips. While Grayson Perry says Julie Cope is the ‘Everyday Essex woman’, The House for Essex becomes another Essex Queen living this absolutely fabulous lifestyle.

Just as important as painting her mug, a queen relies on fashion to convey her character. “One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.” From serving fish to high-fashion couture that defies gender, it’s the clothing, padding, and accessories that create a LQQK. Unlike makeup which alters one’s appearance through skin-like concealers, contours, or blush, one’s look is a formal quality that emphasizes body. Clothing has the ability to build attachments (breast plates), augment form (padding), or directly re-shape the body (corset). For the House for Essex, her look draws from the physical form of multiple sources but synthesizes it into a cohesive physique. A drag queen demands a strong silhouette for every look (compared to Perry’s own amorphous dress for the opening of The House for Essex). For The House for Essex, her architecture scales and repeats the silhouettes of both the typical steeple church and pitched cottage house, serving Viktor & Rolf or Alexander McQueen avant-garde realness in the east-west elevations. In the north-south however, it recreates the telescopic features of medieval stave churches and Russian nesting dolls. Each segment of the house varies in height but the band of white tiling seamlessly wraps around the group, cinching the five parts into a single form. Unlike the cross-dressing version of Grayson Perry, who he presents alongside The House for Essex (a direct imitation of a bland, unidentified version of a woman), The House for Essex is on par with the drag Grayson Perry of the 80’s– the experimental glam artist who lived with Boy George. The pair would regularly create outrageous outfits for Blitz, a New Romantic nightclub in London. New Romanticism was a gender-bending glam collective that celebrated individuality, identity, and eccentricity that would eventually inspire the American “Club Kids” of the 90’s, and subsequently the provocative party monsters of today. We see this glam punk re-emerge with The House for Essex’s look, her form and physicality transcends accepted constructs of what homes and churches ought to look like.

The House for Essex furthers this illusion of borrowed identities by performing as those characters, primarily through a comedic fashion. The performance aspect of a drag queen is twofold: the caricature of a diva through dancing and lip-syncing and the formation of a new character through a theatrical personality and witty (and often crude) humor. In regards to the latter, a drag queen must create an alter ego for herself, one that is the “glorification of character” to truly make a campy queen. The House for Essex retains artifacts of her past personas (the former home and mausoleum of Julie Cope) but primarily performs as her latest character: a vacation home. The house’s single bathroom is occupied by the overly large 9’ bathtub, an allusion to a baptistery, a role that would never have actually occurred in either mausoleum or original home. In line with much of FAT’s tongue-in-cheek repertoire, The House for Essex does not shy away from the ridiculous. Hanging in the middle of her living room is a moped chandelier, made from the very curry-delivery bike that ended Julie’s life. On the second floor overlooking the queen beds are two 10’ tall quilted tapestries – one of Julie and her first adulterous ex-husband, and the other of her embraced by her second husband, the unfortunate widower. Both however look down upon the beds in a last-judgment fashion. The campiness continues outside, where adorning the façade is the fictitious Cope family sigil: a needle and thread. Instead of a cross atop the roof as one would expect for a church, The House for Essex is topped with a voluptuous female fertility statue with hips for days. While being seriously non-serious, Holland and Perry satirize and caricaturize social and architectural concepts of domesticity and religion. Only laughing with (and at times at) these norms are we as an audience able to earnestly evaluate our current culture.

Had Reyner Banham dived deeper into the world of drag and tipped his queens, he’d have seen that the drag of architecture is far more than just a one dimensional joke. In his defense, the drag of his time had not evolved to the level that it is today. Before the Gay Liberation, drag fell under Banham’s generalization of flat (and faulty) female replication intended for the heterosexual gaze (more of a gawk). After the 1969 Stonewall Riots in which, a handful of gay men mourning the death of Judie Garland struck back against the gender enforcing police raids, drag turned into the reclamation of the imposed feminine stereotypes, ironically masculinizing the art through hyper-femininity. This created the two traditional schools of drag: the older Pageant Queens and the new Comedy Queens. Pageantry is centered on the accurate female impersonation. It is a serious, competitive field where realism and femininity are judged in a manner similar to Miss America. Makeup, fashion, and performance are focused on true-to-life imitation and the art form finds itself commonly spread throughout the globe. The second school is Comedy Queens, who use charisma and humor to remark on the unfavorable features of femininity. Though both use the woman as the base form, one gives her a floor-length sequin gown and the other a robe, curlers, and bunny slippers. Within the past decade a third school of drag has emerged, one of avant-garde high fashion who is motivated purely by her new age look and eleganza. She defies gender, adopting beards, wigs, and unconventional clothing to produce a living work of art. She is the school of drag that Banham could never foresee, one that if adopted by architecture, could push the discourse into unfamiliar territory. As a drag queen The House for Essex teeters between comedy and avant-garde, pushing the house beyond the box of gender, identity, and normative form. As a building, she calls out architectural norms and serves a new, redefined program and form. The doctrine of architecture must drop its elitist attitude against drag and instead see it as a possible path of expression. It is an art form that has yet to be formally adopted by the field and thus limits the possibilities of an unprecedented architecture that embraces identity and exaggeration and paints for the stage.

Tonight, my Queen, your look was stunning.

Shanté, you stay.