Dylan Cleverly is a writer and artist based in Boston, MA. He will be pursuing a Master's degree in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture at Columbia University in the fall. All images published with permission from Adam Nathaniel Furman.

Adam Nathaniel Furman paced the stage as excerpts from his portfolio glowed on the projector behind him. We were in an auditorium on the ground floor of Seattle’s Central Library, a wondrous product of architectural imagination itself. Furman’s work rendered the library tame. His images were kaleidoscopic. Thousands of hand-painted ceramic chevrons stacked in columns that pulsed electric blue, unrealized polychromatic monuments towered over greyscale cityscapes, and reflections of technicolor mosaics danced across the audience’s faces. 

I longed to live inside each image. 

Democratic Monument, 2017, via Adam Nathaniel Furman

I was invited to Adam Nathaniel Furman’s lecture last summer, as his creative practice overlapped with my research on radical imagination in the arts at UC Berkeley’s Othering & Belonging Institute. I had spent weeks reading and writing about our urgent need for radical imagination, and I was experiencing that need acutely. 

Furman’s practice fuses an architect’s spatial sensibility, a ceramicist's mastery of texture, and a visual artist’s passion for polychrome. He delivered stories of his time at London’s Architectural Association: while his classmates toyed with early principles of parametric design (which he waggishly dismissed as alien blobs), Furman layered historied ornament with classical cues, sculpting fictional universes based on the queer spaces in which he found safety. His devotion to creative vision resulted in partnerships with pioneers in 3D printing who sought artists to push the capabilities of their new technologies, and his ensuing works translate baroque ornament and queer sensuality into large-scale installations. 

I recently had an opportunity to speak with Furman about radical imagination in design, the importance of a queer architectural canon, and his recent publication, Queer Spaces. 

Furman’s orange shirt wonderfully clashed against a seafoam wall to his right, a lavender one to his left, a fluorescent yellow radiator behind him, and the numerous prototypes that graced his shelves. Clearly, their design sensibility disrupts work/life separations; he lives inside the world from which his creations were born. 

Early in our chat, I asked him about utopia. He visibly shuddered when I said the word, which affirmed my ill feelings toward the notion; the word utopia has cast a long shadow over my research on radical imagination. 

Derived from “no place” in Greek (ou-topos), the term carried little hope since its inception. In architecture, it remains deeply charged—due in part to the reverberations of Modernist experiments. Yet, as Furman cued slide changes in the library, the word kept coming to mind. His public installations conjure cityscapes where austere International Style skyscrapers were relegated to the ash heap of history by eccentric queer creatives with a propensity for the eclectic, the joyful, and the childlike. To me, maybe that was utopia.

Furman quickly pulled an analogy from the scholarship of visual artist and critical theorist Svetlana Boym, which brought clarity to the utopia problem. Boym pays close attention to the cultural function of ruins. Instead of assessing ruins as souvenirs from nostalgic pasts, Boym asserts that ruins reflect unrealized futures. In this way, ruins are temporal interruptions in our built environment: plural, fragmented views of unfulfilled utopias. Furman sees his installations similarly: 

ANF: We look to instantiate [utopia] in ways that provide glimpses….contribut[ing] to the richness, weft, and weave of our contemporary existence and reality without looking to replace it with something, which is inevitably totalitarian.

Furman’s radical imagination doesn’t promise upheaval or revolution. Instead, his work temporalizes space by offering utopian fragments of unrealized futures. He hopes to see other artists follow suit, contributing to a public-facing urban fabric of radical imaginations. 

Queer Voices, 2023. Photography by Gareth Gardner via Adam Nathaniel Furman

The references that surface in Furman’s work are curated, political, and personal. Pulling from the decadence of late British aestheticism, Furman’s installations extend a historical throughline of queer designers, artists, and writers. For the Queer Nature festival at the Kew Gardens in southwest London, Furman designed Queer Voices, a series of silk hangings that coated the east Octagon of the Temperate House in illustrated flora. The featured species, chosen for their historic associations with queerness, vine around one another in tendrilous spirals to form an indulgent print. Texturally and spatially, the silk installation recalls the sensual materiality of late 19th-century British interiors (which, as Furman pointed out during our conversation, were quite queer). To the British masculine elites of the period, this was horrific. I heard echoes from Furman’s autobiographical presentation in Queer Voices. An oppressive school environment pushed him into queer havens as a student, which reverberates through the lush interiority of his work. Furman spoke of his aesthetic sensibility, which challenged the limited range of styles deemed worthy by the academy. Here, it became the driving force behind the work’s sensuality and success. 

Queer Voices was a nostalgic utopia, wielding cultural, personal, and regional histories to transform the Octagon into a futuristic queer sanctum. Welcome to Furman’s radical imagination. 

* * * * *

ANF: Having a canon is a weapon.

Aside from the clever turn of phrase, these words reverberated for weeks after our conversation. Canons are key architects of history. Intended as shorthand for work produced across an era, region, or demographic, those who construct canons shape how art and architectural history are told and retold. Furman’s new publication, Queer Spaces, co-authored with architectural historian Joshua Mardell, critically carves a position within the academy for a queer architectural canon. Both visually stunning and textually rich, Queer Spaces is a compendium of global sites that protect, preserve, and exalt LGBTQ+ communities. Furman’s remark about canons referenced the book’s chosen publishing house, RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects). He clarified that the book could have been released years prior through an independent publisher, but explained that “...it needed to be published by the center of architectural authority in the UK.” Furman didn’t covet RIBA’s institutional stamp for the sake of prestige, but for a younger generation of queer architects who can bring Queer Spaces into a classroom as an academic precedent. 

Images of Queer Spaces: via Adam Nathaniel Furman, Myah Phelan

When asked if Furman sees his own work differently after Queer Spaces, he paused for a moment. 

ANF: It's been liberating and eye-opening. I didn't realize quite how much I actually fit in within certain parts of the tradition; I think a very big part of this process over the past 10 years has been the de-isolation. The most personally beneficial side has been feeling part of something so numerous, so broad, so deep in history. That has removed any sense of loneliness that I might have, even if I don't necessarily have practitioners who are doing the same thing around me. I don't feel isolated. I feel part of a continuum.”

Furman is a practitioner of that continuum. Queer Spaces affirms the radical imagination of queer architects within an established canon. Likewise, his installations are interruptions of queerness, sensuality, and joy in our urban fabric. Each instance is a thread of a utopia worth weaving.

--