Inspired by Le Favolose, where transgender women create spaces of collective care and intimacy, this project reimagines the closet as both an architectural element and a queer metaphor.
By transforming Parkhaus Sihlquai, the project addresses the urgent need for supportive housing for the aging population, with a focus on transgender and queer communities—groups disproportionately affected by poverty, loneliness, and social exclusion in later life.
The project offers an architectural reinterpretation of the film's portrayal of the closet as “a spaceship for journeying to distant worlds”¹, negotiating the predefined categorizations of rooms within standardized floor plans.
Traditional apartment layouts are replaced with a “matrix of interconnected chambers”² — flexible closet rooms that serve as threshold spaces between privacy and community. Sliding doors allow residents to reconfigure their living arrangements, choosing between intimate retreat and shared engagement, and also allow different living constellation.
These spaces support the ongoing process of “coming out” at different scales, recognizing that queer identity expression is a fluid and contextual process.
Reused galvanized steel guardrails from the original parking lot are integrated into the sliding partition elements, functioning as door and wall stops and forming nodes that enable adaptable configurations. A queer rooftop sauna provides a safe gathering space with views of the Limmat. The design ensures that each resident has “a room of one's own”³ while fostering the solidarity essential to queer communities, creating architecture that supports both individual dignity and collective resilience in aging.
