VIRTUAL: Prague Heritages

Abstract

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This research aims to analyze the houses of some of the most prominent orientalists, such as the Maison de Gayer Anderson, the Maison de Pierre Loti, and the Castle of Monserrate in Sintra, by Sir Francis Cook. The purpose of this paper is to show how these houses became shelters and refuges that often sought to conceal what we could call the queer identity of their owners, or the visitors associated with them. Orientalism appears here as a device to transmute the identity of its inhabitants. An orientalism that in these cases begins in literature, in painting and ends in architecture. Thus, they are buildings that respond to a narrative rather than an architectural structure, thus placing themselves in the realm of fiction rather than reality, hence for some authors they can be called follies. Its architectural concretion takes the orientalist imaginary to another level, since by turning it into a built work, which can itself house all the other orientalist manifestations, it ends up closing the orientalist discourse by giving it a concretion in physical reality, which makes the dreams somehow come true. The choice of cases responds to the fact that each character accounts for different types of orientalism, the Egyptian Orientalism of Gayer Anderson, the French Orientalism of Pierre Loti, and the Anglo-Lusitanian Orientalism of Francis Cook. In this way, the Orient, architecture, and queerness come together to configure what we could call the personal and intimate geography of its conspicuous inhabitants.