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I. CONTEXT AND BACKGROUND 

Typology

Cooperative housing for trans women

Location

Buenos Aires, Argentina

Hours of Operation

Operates as housing 24/7

Mission and Origins

Hotel Gondolin began as a standard low-budget hotel located on the edge of a predominantly Jewish working-class area of Buenos Aires and the neighboring red-light district. Exploiting the hotel’s proximity to the main thoroughfares for “travesti” or trans sex work and the transgender community’s disenfranchisement, the owner began letting its rooms to trans women at exorbitant rates while also neglecting building maintenance. Still, the hotel’s trans population grew as it became an important node in the trans survival network, with many residents migrating to Buenos Aires to escape persecution in less tolerant parts of Argentina. By 1998, Hotel Gondolin’s trans residents organized to get the city to shut the hotel down, then peacefully occupied the building and transformed it into a self-managed housing cooperative for trans women. Today, it also operates as a community center that hosts cultural activities and job training workshops with the objective of helping trans women improve their living conditions.

II. SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL ANALYSIS  

Who is cared for? Who is caring? 

“Una vez por semana:  
reunion general  
y se charla, se habla, se dialoga, se conversa  
no en terminos personales  
sino de lo que cada una hace  
con y para las demas.”

“Once per week: 
General meeting 
And we chat, talk, converse 
Not in individual terms  
but in terms of what each one does 
With and for each other”

From Reunión: Cuatro Legendarias En El Hotel Gondolín

Hotel Gondolin was founded as a rent-free housing collective managed by trans women for trans women, many of whom came to Bueno Aires. The residents care with and for each other to uphold their refuge through collective governance and shared maintenance of the space following an intergenerational, matrilineal familial dynamic. All members are expected to convene weekly and deliberate the distribution of care labor and resources, as well as contribute towards the cost of building maintenance. However, older, long-time residents who have aged out of the workforce often take on the role of “grandmother” or “aunt” and assume more administrative and domestic responsibilities like preparing communal meals or doing laundry so younger residents can focus on their work or education. 

Hotel Gondolin also collaborates with local health organizations and specialized schools to provide its residents with free health care and educational opportunities.

How does the space’s design facilitate/impede the care?  

Initially a low-budget hotel, Hotel Gondolin was not intended to house people long-term though its trans occupants adapted and gradually renovated the building to fulfill their housing and living needs.

The building’s original inward-looking arrangement affords privacy for inhabitants while encouraging togetherness.The open, circumambulatory configuration of rooms and stairwells oriented around a central courtyard emphasize the centrality of the shared meeting space and importance of community activity while also extending its reaches to the surrounding circulation spaces. Unenclosed staircases and hallways and windows looking out from each bedroom onto the hall promote opportunities for interaction and conversation between residents outside of planned meetings or communal meals. The vertical corridor also supplies natural light and air, enabling internal visibility and supervision without risking violations of privacy by community outsiders. 

Still, the residents of Hotel Gondolin serve the building as much as it serves them. Employing collective funds and collaborative effort, they converted the top floor terrace into additional housing, adapted a room to hold textile and clothing design workshops with the intention of enriching residents, and renovated the kitchen under the stairwell to more easily prepare communal meals for the building’s residents or for food sales going towards further building upkeep. The collective ambition to continuously improve the building and its utility reinforces community cohesion between Gondolin’s trans residents while simultaneously equipping them with new skills.

How is the care specific to the night? How does this space intersect with nighttime economies of care? 

Hotel Gondolin provides housing, refuge, and community to its transgender residents throughout the 24-hour cycle. It operates as a daytime refuge for residents engaged in nocturnal labor like sex work and wary newcomers preferring the safety and mobility of night. At the same time, the collective offers skills workshops and educational alliances to residents seeking opportunities outside the realm of night work while ensuring a place to rest at night independent of their ability to perform paid labor. Considering the coexistence of residents with inverted schedules, the prominence of the building's transitional spaces helps the diurnal and nocturnal inhabitants intersect and commune between moments of private rest or work.

How does night care intersect with governance, regulation, and citizenship?

Denied safe, affordable housing and legal protection from the state, the residents of Hotel Gondolin mobilized to oust the original, negligent landlord and repossess the building through legitimate squatter pathways. As a self-governing collective, they pooled together their funds to pay off previous debts and taxes associated with the property and gradually restored the space to safe, comfortable conditions. 

The space evolved from an anti-establishment punk house providing sympathetic, if chaotic, refuge to at-risk trans women abandoned by the state to a more organized, sometimes assimilationist co-operative housing model. The collective instituted policies discouraging male visitors and substance use on site and required residents who neglected communal obligations to contribute more monetarily. Some members viewed this as overly punitive, while others believed it was necessary to sustain long-term coexistence among its already precariously situated inhabitants.

Though there are many long-term residents, much of Hotel Gondolin’s history of residents have passed through onto more stable housing arrangements and occupations if not encouraged to do so by various training initiatives and advocacy efforts. Hotel Gondolin works with Mocha Celis, a public, free secondary school for trans and nonbinary people, to offer continued education to people whose schooling was interrupted by gender-based discrimination.

Hotel Gondolin demonstrates how non-market, communal housing models and a shared sense of stewardship give rise to alternative kinship-based care relations. Marginalized communities with limited access to space adapt intermediate spaces intended for transitory use and imbue them with domestic and relational utility.

Compiled by Renee Li