Fantasizing Design: Phyllis Birkby Builds Lesbian Feminist Architecture

The Center for Architecture is excited to present Fantasizing Design: Phyllis Birkby Builds Lesbian Feminist Architecture, opening Thursday, May 8, 2025, at 6pm. Curated by Stephen Vider and M.C. Overholt, this exhibition explores the life and impact of lesbian feminist architect Phyllis Birkby (1932–94). RSVP for the opening reception here!

Inspired by the women’s movement and gay liberation, Birkby joined one of the first lesbian feminist consciousness-raising groups, staged a feminist building occupation, and co-founded the Women’s School of Planning and Architecture. Her most groundbreaking intervention, however, was a series of workshops that encouraged women to imagine and draw their “fantasy environments”—the home and community spaces they would like to inhabit. Fantasizing Design takes Birkby and her circle of friends, lovers, and collaborators as a lens on the broader ways feminists and lesbian feminists have worked to remake architectural practice, domestic space, and the broader built environment.

The exhibition will showcase over 80 images, fantasy workshop drawings, and personal letters, as well as other artifacts and ephemera from Birkby’s archive at Smith College, bringing the largest show of her work to date to the Center for Architecture.

“Birkby’s immense archive is a crucial lens on lesbian life and activism in the 1960s and 70s, at turns playful, moving, and deeply inspiring,” says curator Stephen Vider. “While her professional aspirations were often constrained by the limits placed on women in architecture, the spaces she designed and built speak to her desire to push past the limits of conventional architecture, placing the needs of women, queer people, the elderly, and people with disabilities at the center. This was all informed, first and foremost, by her fantasy architecture project. At a moment of ongoing housing crisis and gentrification, Birkby’s work calls on all of us to reimagine how the spaces and places we call home can best serve the needs and dreams of our communities.”

“Through tracing Birkby’s life, activism, and architectural work, the exhibition works to raise awareness about the 1970s lesbian feminist movement and its investment in reconceptualizing a more inclusive and just built environment,” says curator M.C. Overholt. “For architects today, Fantasizing Design offers Birkby’s idea of fantasy as an engine of design—one that continues to inspire creativity in the service of marginalized communities.”

The exhibition will also feature two contemporary installations that engage with Birkby’s life as well as themes of queer and feminist identity and agency. Artist LJ Roberts has been commissioned to create a mixed media installation for the front gallery of the Center for Architecture. Quilted textiles, wheatpasted posters, and a series of neon signs drawing from the Birkby archive collages elements of her intimate life, activism, architectural accomplishments, and fantasy drawing practice. Roberts’ installation intertwines Birkby’s blueprints and love letters, manifestos and mementos, and drawings and documents, to build a richly textured non-linear mosaic of Birkby’s life, friendships, entanglements, and desires.

The second piece of commissioned work, “(Glue is More Permanent and Stronger Than Tape,) But Tape is Easier to Use and Can Be Used Immediately,” (working title) is an installation by Audrey Tseng de Melo Fischer and Chong Gu, co-founders of Rehearsing, a collective dedicated to framing others in transience. The piece is a mnemonic rehearsal on the transient habitats of migrant Asian massage and sex workers in Queens. Using temporary materials like tape and cellophane to represent the repairing and sustaining of dwellings, the installation traces economic and cultural survival as well as commercial ingenuity, domesticity, and policing.

Marissa Martonyi created the exhibition’s graphic identity drawing from the styles and aesthetics of the 1960s and 70s as well as Birkby’s working environment. Organic shapes and forms pull from Birkby’s fantasy drawings and the Wholeo Dome, an iconic artistic structure of stained glass completed in 1974. Xiaoxiao Guo developed the exhibition’s design and layout.

*Image above: Participant in fantasy environment exercise in Phyllis Birkby and Leslie Kanes Weisman’s course “Women and the Built Environment: Personal, Social, and Professional Perceptions,” at the first session of the Women's School of Planning and Architecture, Biddeford, Maine, August 1975. Women's School of Planning and Architecture Records, Sophia Smith Collection of Women's History, Smith College Special Collections. Credit: Sophia Smith Collection of Women's History, Smith College Special Collections.