Unruly

On September 22, 2025, in a video posted on X, Texas Governor Greg Abbott described the Bathroom Bill as “signing a law banning men in women’s restrooms,” calling it “just common sense.” Yet this law enforces a form of self-surveillance in which individuals must monitor their own bodies and gender presentation, turning private acts such as excreting bodily fluids into potential forms of scrutiny and violence.

Managed by legal codes, architecture has historically played a key role in disciplining bodies and buildings. But the filth, the grime, the graffiti, and the misuse—which architecture readily omits—testify against erasure and trace power leaks. It is within these leaks that the bathroom becomes a crucial site of resistance. How might making the bathroom legible resist absorption into the hegemonic systems that regulate our bodies? Can redrawing its surface through acts of scanning, distortion, and re-representation move toward a more just, even if more unruly, architecture?

A series of 3D LiDAR scans of bathrooms across Houston, Texas, deals with architecture’s mediated relationship to bodies, ecosystems, supply chains, and institutions. Subtly manipulated and marred by the scan’s own faults—which sometimes obfuscate reflections into doubles—the work destabilizes constructed binaries. By revealing how technologies of representation both surveil and subvert, it embraces the anxieties these entanglements produce and suggests dissidence as a possible form of liberation.