A curt February 1963 article in Time Magazine detailed the shortcomings of the conversation pit; a mid-century modern architectural typology popularized during the 1950s; a sunken seating area, often upholstered, carpeted, and rife with cushions and pillows:
“...there were dangers inherent in its design. At cocktail parties, late-staying guests tended to fall in. Those in the pit found themselves bombarded with bits of hors d’oeuvres from up above, looked out on a field of trouser cuffs, ankles, and shoes. Ladies shied away from the edges, fearing up-skirt exposure. Bars or fencing of sorts had to be constructed to keep dogs and children from daily concussions.”1
This sunken seating type is demarcated solely by grade change, without the use of conventional barriers like walls. The design drew inspiration from the Chinese kang, a communal platform bed-stove constructed from brick, fired clay, or other masonry. The kang’s earliest documented uses date back to the Neolithic period 7,200 years ago,2 and kang are still in use by millions across rural northern China according to statistics from the early 2010s.3 The Spanish estrado, a raised dais covered in rugs or cushions, is another commonly cited influence. The estrado is a product of Islamic design, construction, and social practice on the Iberian peninsula during the medieval Convivencia period a little over 1,000 years ago.
Convivencia, a term for the period proposed in 1948 by Spanish philologist Américo Castro, describes “the ‘coexistence’ of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish communities in medieval Spain, and by extension the cultural interaction and exchange fostered by such proximity.”4 The word “convivencia” has been translated as “coexistence,” or more accurately as “living together.”5 The defining feature of the Chinese kang and Spanish estrado, plinths elevated from the plane of the ground floor, and of the mid-century modern conversation pit, a depression in the floor, is the convivial nature of these domestic infrastructures. The subtle distinction through elevation change produces space for intimacy and informality within a larger, undifferentiated space,
denoting a site for social gathering centered on the labor of cooking and the communal act of eating together. Architect Bruce Goff is credited with design of the first conversation pit in 1927 Tulsa, Oklahoma, but the typology was largely popularized by Eero Saarinen and Alexander Girard’s 1952 design in Columbus, Indiana and Paul Rudolph’s in 1955 Sarasota, Florida. Throughout the 60s and 70s, the conversation pit populated homes of the affluent upper-middle class.
Design historian Alessandra Wood, author of the 2020 book Designed to Sell: The Evolution of Modern Merchandising and Display, has observed that young people don’t see the conversation pit as a dated architectural type but rather, “are likely drawn to its ability to create a safe and intimate space in a world that’s increasingly full of impersonal experiences.”6 Wood notes that the decline of the conversation pit's popularity is coincident with the turn of the living room from a place for people to interact and have intimate social encounters, to a space that primarily accommodates various forms of media including television sets, computers, gaming consoles, and is now often a place where individual members of the nuclear family might independently scroll on phone screens inches from their faces. Dueling sensibilities regard the conversation pit as either passé or nostalgic, going out of fashion in the same manner as 70s dark wood-paneling and popcorn ceilings, or coming back in vogue as decontextualized novelty.
The grade change of the conversation pit suggests a vessel that might hold water, a place to be lowered into, or to descend into. Both its social function and geometric form recall communal infrastructures beyond the domestic scale, like the Sutro Baths in San Francisco, or the communal pools at the Wi Spa in Koreatown. A sunken geometry at a much larger scale, the stepwells of Western India, first built almost 2,000 years ago, provided the major sources of groundwater for centuries and were known to be places where women could “socialize freely without being observed by men in the open spaces of village squares (chowk) or royal courts (darbar).”7 Due to the gendered segregation of work, “collecting water, washing clothes, [and] bathing children”8 were tasks delegated to women. Thus, the use of the stepwell as a communal public infrastructure was an opportunity for women of differing backgrounds and religions to exchange stories, talk politics, and build solidarity. The public pool or bathhouse, too, has historically functioned in this capacity. Segregated design of these spaces both neglected to provide for marginalized populations, and provided space for those populations to build solidarity and coordinated movement.
Ray Oldenburg’s 1989 notion of third place is defined as a communal public realm that provides space to be challenged by people different from oneself, through dialogue, conflict, or conversation. Oldenburg’s analysis pointed towards cafes, coffeehouses, main streets, and post offices, the sites “between home and work” where informality
and frequent use of a given space “promotes social equity” and provides “a setting for grassroots politics.”9 Favored sites don’t include the sale of goods and services as the cost of admittance. These might be public parks; the backyards of shared apartments and cooperative homes of friends; sites that host free shows and events, or are dedicated to the creation of art, and protest or campaign signage, like the Robinson Space, Coaxial, and Navel; the bike path and the concrete plinth down on the riverfront under the 2 freeway; meandering walks and encounters with neighbors anywhere. Sometimes also, a cafe, coffeeshop, or neighborhood watering hole.
My most recent bout of musings about the conversation pit and their public-facing spatial analogues came the last week of February. It was the second week since a new bar had opened in a fairly nondescript strip mall off Sunset Boulevard, adjacent to a Baskin Robbins, a nail salon, a cleaners, and a Domino’s. L and I came night one of opening weekend, a packed Friday. The bar was already closing at 10pm, so we only slipped inside briefly to take a selfie with a massive charcoal portrait of a friend-of-friend lounging nude, hanging in the narrow hallway lit up with purple lights, en route to the bathroom marked “No Terfs.” P and I came the following night, a Saturday before 8pm, and already there was no room inside. We stood in the parking lot, glasses of wine perched on planter boxes, eyeing the crowd before dipping out for soondubu and banchan in Ktown.
That second weekend since the Ruby Fruit had been open, L and I get a seat at the bar on a Friday night. Cozied up and sharing one barstool between two butt cheeks, we shamelessly check out the crowd. Openly surveilling everyone feels bizarrely reasonable, given this is the only dedicated lesbian space LA has had in more than half a decade since the Oxwood Inn closed in 2017,10 after 45 years in the Valley. The number of dedicated lesbian spaces has decreased nationally in recent decades,11 despite a number of “roving queer parties”12 including Bubble T, QNA, Papi Juice, a Club Called Rhonda, among others. A securely housed space “for the sapphically inclined”13 remains difficult to locate.
My aunt C’s longtime, late friend Elaine Romagnoli worked as a community-minded businesswoman for the success of several dedicated lesbian bars across New York City, beginning with Bonnie & Clyde’s in 1972 where “the staff was all female, and the tabletops were covered in laminated photos of women.”14 Romagnoli’s 1983 Cubby Hole’s 360 square foot space is now occupied by Henrietta Hudson’s, and a 1994 Cubbyhole copycat was still bustling pride weekend summer 2018. Stormé DeLarverie,
who threw some of the first punches at Stonewall in June 1969,15 had worked as a bouncer for Romagnoli’s Cubby Hole. Sitting at the Ruby Fruit bar counter, I think about Elaine's expressive exclamations and weathered hands back in 2018, showing me printed photographs from when Bonnie & Clyde's had first opened.
I’m watching someone with a thick shock of black hair out of the corner of my eye, a person with brown skin like ours in the pale room. L wants me to brush past and mention the venue by the river where we’re headed after this for a friend’s show, and I’ve worked up the nerve to do it before I realize that the room is packed in so tight, all of us little upright sardines, that I won’t be able to pass by on my way out the door even if I try to. L makes a big show of taking a flash photo of my ass perched on the barstool as recompense, shamelessly trying to get this person’s attention. I don’t notice at first because I’m reorganizing the room in my mind, inventing an alternative arrangement and mentally constructing custom furniture for the space.
I picture two high-backed, facing booths at the center of the room, and a squat coffee table. Each high-backed booth has a bar countertop hanging off of the seat back, so that somebody seated might turn and interact with somebody standing. Or, somebody else might pull up a chair to sit alongside the hip-height armrest, wide and deep enough to be used as a tabletop for several glasses of wine or a shallow plate of olives. The set of booths provides raised platforms at varying heights, to accommodate both sitting and standing, implementing subtle level change to produce multiple possible intimacies, while maintaining adjacencies. There isn’t a single correct way to occupy the booths.
The existing Ruby Fruit space formerly accommodated a recently-closed restaurant. The adaptations and inventive uses of space are born of necessity and spatial constraints. According to Tejal Rao’s early April review,
“The beauty of the wine bar is in its creative use of nooks and crannies, shared counters and narrow ledges, hallways and corners where bodies and drinks aren’t really supposed to fit, but somehow do. The crowd is cooperative and accommodating. The room is packed.”16
This observation is in some ways less about the layout of the space than it is about
people’s willful misuse of the space. The focus is less any specific design feature, and more about appropriation of space. Architecture —noun. the art or science of building, formation or construction resulting from or as if from a conscious act, a unifying or coherent form or structure17— is only realized as such through inhabitation. Design, a word used loosely in contemporary contexts ranging from the cavalier and unspecific to the highly articulated and institutionalized, operates in both directions. There is a push/pull quality to the way space is constructed and how its use by human and non-human entities shapes it back.
To an extent, the word “design” implies fixity of form. This object is designed for this purpose; this space is designed for this activity; this interior is designed for this interaction; this public space is designed for this population; this private space is designed for individuals with this amount of money; this communal realm is designed to exclude this type of person; this shared public resource is designed to service a select few; this infrastructural necessity is designed to harm this population in proximity; this polluted or otherwise marginalized site is undesigned, and therefore available for misuse, appropriation, and occupation.
The word diseño is used to denote “Spanish and Mexican Land Grant Records” in California from roughly 1827 to 1846. These hand-drawn sketch maps designate “naturally occurring boundaries such as rivers, mountains, rock outcropping, and trees as markers.” They denote “neighboring properties” as well as “existing travel routes, locations of houses, and place names.” The word diseño, B says to me in the course of their research on uniquely Californian histories of railroad construction, mining industry, environmental destruction, dispossession and displacement, the paths of Chinese laborers, the impact of extractive oil infrastructures, “the word diseño, literally the word “design,” is the word used for US settler colonial land grabs.”
In his 1998 Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, James C. Scott describes the interconnected violence of colonial land grabs and subsequent centralized planning of cities.18 City planners, police, designers of the hostile architecture of public plazas, bus stops, and metro stations —well-documented in Robert Rosenberger’s Callous Objects: Designs Against the Homeless— participate in attempts to produce legible social order through centralized design. This aim to control, manipulate, and make legible remains, overwhelmingly, the institutionalized ethos of architectural education and design training today.
Within this framework, there are designs that attempt to do less harm, but I remain unconvinced that the word design can be used to describe the construction of spaces for people not profit, more invested in the well-being of our neighbors than in controlling or monitoring them, in service of non-human and human relationships moreso than in an anthropocentric mode of building and destruction. I often think of Alice Constance Austin’s 1916 drawings and models for Socialist city Llano del Rio, in the high Mojave Desert northeast of contemporary Los Angeles. Scholar Dolores Hayden has described this as a distinctly feminist aspirational utopia, a “garden city of ten thousand people housed in graceful Craftsman apartments with private gardens but communal kitchens and laundries to
liberate women from drudgery.”19 The collectivizing of women’s labor was a central tenet of the design.
“Social order is not the result of the architectural order created by T squares and slide rules. Nor is social order brought about by such professionals as policemen, nightwatchmen, and public officials.” Scott cites Jane Jacobs, a pro-union and anti-“urban renewal” journalist known for her advocacy around a community-based approach to city building and inhabitation of the public street. “The public peace —the sidewalk and street peace— of cities … is kept by an intricate, almost unconscious network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves.”
To collectivize domestic activity in public, whether through the laundry and kitchen, the bathhouse and public pool, links infrastructural public amenities with the possibility for intimate interaction with strangers and neighbors. Efforts to spatialize adjacency through sunken or raised seating arrangements like the conversation pit, kang, or estrado, in tightly-packed and well-used nooks and crannies of local coffeeshops, cafes, and bars, all provide for the possibility of cooperative, coordinated movement through unexpected encounters. Biking to the grocery or corner store, taking the bus and metro, spending time at the local laundromat and coffeeshop enough to know folks by name, dropping in on neighbors for spontaneous weeknight walks in the park and late night dinners, all of these acts participate in the same aspirational choreography of domesticity rendered public and communal.20
Time Magazine. “Design: Fall of the Pit.” 22 February 1963. https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,828027,00.html
Bean, Robert, Bjarne W Olesen, Kwang Woo Kim. “History of Radiant Heating and Cooling Systems.” ASHRAE Journal, January 2010. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/293488137_Part_1_History_of_Radiant_Heating_Cooling_Systems
Zhuang, Zhi, Yuguo Li, Bin Chen, Jiye Guo. “Chinese kang as a domestic heating system in rural northern China–A review.” Energy and Buildings, January 2009. DOI:10.1016/j.enbuild.2008.07.013. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/223771102_Chinese_kang_as_a_domestic_heating_system_in_rural_northern_China-A_review
Wolf, Kenneth Baxter. “Convivencia in Medieval Spain: A Brief History of an idea.” Religious Compass Volume 3 Issue 1, 21 January 2009. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00119.x
Oxford Reference. https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095636384;jsessionid=6DE00D56548570731D562E265BA739CA
Something Curated. “A History of the Conversation Pit.” 17 April 2020. https://somethingcurated.com/2020/04/17/a-history-of-the-conversation-pit/
Geroy, Ardent. “The Women Behind India’s Most Exquisite Stepwells Built For The Loves of Their Lives.” The Better India, 13 September 2022. https://www.thebetterindia.com/297140/women-queens-built-stepwells-india-architecture-history/
Shanghvi, Dhwani. “The Gendered Politics Of Stepwells In India: Space, Water And Religion: Subterranean water structures like stepwells (vav,Baoli/Baori), and stepped tanks (kund) dotted the dry and arid regions of Western India, especially Gujarat and Rajasthan, and formed the major source of groundwater for centuries.” Feminism in India, 12 July 2019. https://feminisminindia.com/2019/07/12/politics-water-space-and-religion/
Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and how They Get You Through the Day. Paragon House. Michigan, 1989. Print.
Chiriguayo, Danielle. “LA has zero lesbian bars. A new wave of queer women are changing that.” KCRW, 17 June 2021. https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/greater-la/lgbtq-documentary-caam/lesbian-spaces-bars
Lesbian Bar Project. https://www.lesbianbarproject.com/
Carmel, Julia. “How Are There Only Three Lesbian Bars in New York City? As the effects of the pandemic unfurl, lesbians are worried about losing their few brick-and-mortar spaces.” New York Times, 15 April 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/15/nyregion/lesbian-bars-new-york-city.html
Bendix, Trish. “Take a Lesbian for a Drink: On 50 Years of Rita Mae Brown’s 1973 novel Rubyfruit Jungle.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 31 March 2023. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/take-a-lesbian-for-a-drink-on-50-years-of-rita-mae-browns-rubyfruit-jungle/
Carmel, Julia. “Elaine Romagnoli, Longtime Fixture of Lesbian Nightlife, Dies at 79: The bustling downtown bars that Ms. Romagnoli created, beginning in 1972, became central to New York City’s gay community.” New York Times, 8 November 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/08/nyregion/elaine-romagnoli-dead.html
Burey, Jodi-Ann. ““It Wasn’t No Damn Riot”: Celebrating Stonewall Uprising Activist Stormé DeLarverie.” The Riveter, January 2017. https://theriveter.co/voice/it-wasnt-no-damn-riot-celebrating-stonewall-uprising-activist-storme-delarverie/
Rao, Tejal. “The Lesbian Bar Isn’t Dead. It’s Pouring Orange Wine in Los Angeles: Two recent openings testify to the power, and joy, of queer spaces.” New York Times, 1 April 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/01/dining/drinks/lesbian-bars-los-angeles.html
Merriam Webster. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/architecture
Scott, James C. Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, Connecticut. Yale University Press, 1998. Print.
Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. London. Verso, 1990. Print.
special thanks on this one to Elena M’Bouroukounda —my boundlessly adept creative collaborator and comrade, always both logical and whimsical, pragmatic and inventive— for pointing me to Mol, Annemarie. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Duke University Press, 2002. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1220nc1.