After driving for more than three hours north on the CA-128 from San Francisco, a winding highway through old-growth redwood groves and densely foggy mountain ranges, the scenery opens to the striking blueness of the Pacific Ocean, picturesque cliffs, and sculptural rock formations. Heading toward Albion Ridge, the “Turtle Time Farm” sign Carmen Goodyear described in her email appears beside the uphill dirt road, amongst small sprawling eucalyptus trees. Turning left, the road leads to the huge cedar barn and ends in an open garden area surrounded by redwood trees, where the turtle-time stillness seems to dissolve past and future. A cat under the blooming trellis arch was the first one to greet me.
The massive octagonal barn is much larger and sturdier than I had imagined. I first learned about the farm when I stumbled upon a photograph of women building the barn in a 1978 Mother Jones article a friend shared with me during a conversation about my interest in the architecture of feminist rural collectives from the 1970s.1 I have long sought alternative spatial practices that challenge the anthropic hegemony that perpetuates capitalist growth and environmental destruction. My intuition kept returning to the way radical and socialist feminists identified with nature, opposed patriarchy, and rejected capitalism. These interests converged into an ecological ethics that led them to question every aspect of how they lived with the land. From the perspective of architecture’s futurity in the face of climate catastrophe, there is much to learn about how feminist environmental ethics materialize in the built environment.
The built environment of Turtle Time Farm, originally named T’ai Farm, embodies the political and ecological values of 1970 feminist intentional communities in Northern California.2 In this context, the octagonal barn is not only a material structure, but a materialization of the values these women sought to enact in their relationship to the land. The barn exemplifies how feminist collectives used construction as a form of political world-making—challenging dominant architectural norms through ecological design, collective labor, and non-hierarchical spatial forms.
T’ai Farm is particularly significant because it emerged prior to the more generalized lesbian separatist movement in the United States.3 The collective did not adhere to a rigid understanding of gender and did not exclude trans women. While many were lesbians, the collective also welcomed women who identified as bisexual and straight. At the same time, like many countercultural movements of the era, the group reproduced dominant narratives about land and nature, failing to fully reckon with the histories of Indigenous dispossession, white supremacy, and settler colonialism that shaped the landscapes they sought to inhabit differently.
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T’ai Farm was founded by Carmen Goodyear (who still lives there), and her partner, Jeanne Tetrault. Together with women from the various nearby communes that came to be known as the “Albion Nation” along Albion Ridge, south of Mendocino and Fort Bragg, they started a collective where they learned how to farm the land and soon shared their learned skills by starting a magazine called Country Women, along with other publications.4 The periodical offered practical notes on country life, spirituality, and the sexual politics of homesteading. Its roots began in a consciousness-raising group started by Tetrault in 1971, which was made up of women from the nearby communes. What began as a small consciousness-raising group of five women soon grew to include twelve or fifteen “earth mothers.” They met weekly and shared their stories of oppression, not only from childhood, but also within their partnerships with hippie men. Over time, they formed a weaving co-op, purchased sheep, and learned to shear and dye wool.
In Issue 8 of Country Women, called “The Women’s Movement in the Country,” Goodyear recounts how the weaving cooperative eventually led to organizing a Women’s Festival and then to the idea of launching a magazine.5 Together with writer Sherry Thomas and others, they envisioned Country Women as a space to share both personal narratives and practical skills.6 The magazine was conceived in opposition to male-dominated and consumer-driven media, aiming instead to foster feminist eco-politics and DIY culture.7 They borrowed $300 to print 1,000 copies of the first issue and relied on a San Francisco printer, since no local press would accept the job.
Country Women reflected the collective’s ideas about how to live with and on the land. It became a space where ecological awareness, mutual support, and feminist politics converged. The magazine centered everyday country skills as sites of knowledge and consciousness-raising, showing how practical, embodied experiences could challenge both capitalism and patriarchy. The group’s feminist environmental values, which began to take shape in their writing about architecture and design, culminated in the construction of the octagonal barn. Goodyear and Tetrault had decided to expand their farm by building the barn, which later became both a symbol of female empowerment and a model for female self-sufficiency in the rural landscape. Their work inspired women to build other multi-sided structures, including pentagonal and hexagonal cabins, yurts, and other designs that materialized the non-hierarchical principles of feminist politics, all along the I-5 highway across South Oregon, which came to be known as “The Amazon Highway.”8
When I asked Goodyear about the barn, she explained how she and Tetrault’s originally envisioned the farm as a goat milking operation.9 To make that possible, they needed two structures: a barn to store hay and a milking barn built to meet strict hygiene codes. Since the original California barn on the property was falling apart, they imagined constructing a new one near the existing garden and well. The idea for the barn’s non-hierarchical shape—which resisted centralized authority both symbolically and in use—came while driving on the highway through Santa Rosa, where they saw an old round barn in Fountaingrove. “Well, that would be such a great way to have a farm!” they said, drawn to the round form’s openness and lack of corners, which contrasted with the directional, enclosed structure of a typical rectangular barn.10 They researched Shaker barns and other early utopian spiritual communities and decided they wanted something similar. They reached out to a Bay Area lesbian carpentry collective called the Seven Sisters Construction, who connected them with a Berkeley-based architect named Jean Doke.11 Doke suggested it would be easier to build the barn as an octagon rather than a circle, and helped them position it for optimal sun exposure.
Goodyear and Tetrault needed a two-story building to store hay, since it was more economical to purchase it by the truckload. Goodyear acknowledged that the barn’s ambitious scale was an overreach, reflecting, “When you are young, it seems like you just dream it and it’s going to work.” The original estimate for the octagonal barn was $16,000, but, as she recalled, “after the oil embargo, prices went up, and it ended up costing $25,000.” Because they were committed to paying the women carpenters fairly, they ultimately ran out of funds and were unable to complete the milking barn.
Goodyear explained how the cedar siding for the barn came from someone in the town of Albion, just a few miles from T’ai Farm, who had a stack of big twelve-inch boards brought from a mill in Oregon. She and Tetrault had chosen not to use redwood, which they considered “too precious” and didn’t want to cut down. In retrospect, Goodyear reflected “that they might have been better off using what was already available,” meaning the redwoods they had initially refused to cut. For the structural frame, they used fir, which they “probably got from the Fort Bragg mill.” Although they weren’t heavily involved in the construction process, Goodyear and Tetrault did help the day the concrete foundation was poured.
In Country Women Issue 9, titled “Structures,” Pricilla and Jean—members of Seven Sisters Construction collective—wrote a piece about building the barn called “On the Larger Scale.”12 They focused on the practical aspects of constructing the monumental forty-two-foot octagonal structure: estimating and planning, using a transit level, pouring the foundation, erecting scaffolding, and more. During the planning phase, the collective traveled from the Bay Area to Albion with the original intention of building a barn to house forty-six goats, including a loft for storing five tons of hay and a Grade A dairy milking facility that would require complex concrete work.
Since none of the women in the collective had worked on a project of this scale before, they visited a local college in Berkeley and asked a construction teacher questions, despite not being enrolled in the class. They also visited a condominium construction site, an agricultural college, and various barns and dairies in Davis, California. Estimating books helped them calculate material needs and labor estimates. The collective moved to the site during the summer and spent two months preparing before construction began.
The most dramatic moment in the process came on the day they poured the concrete foundation: over the course of five fast-paced hours, three large concrete trucks arrived in succession and at least eight or nine women were needed to manage the pour before the concrete set. Over the course of the project, a total of sixteen women worked on the barn, rotating the role of supervisor among them. They described the build as “an endurance marathon,” lasting seven months and spanning multiple seasons of extreme weather. In the end, they would sometimes look at the beams in place and wonder how they got there, despite having done all the work themselves.
The Seven Sisters Construction collective was featured in the 2005 documentary Raising the Roof: Constructing a Sisterhood, directed by French filmmaker Françoise Flamant.13 The film tells the story of the group of women carpenters who realized that by organizing as a team of six or seven, they could become a powerful force. In the early 1970s, conversations about alternative forms of employment for women were becoming more common, and carpentry, while still male-dominated, was increasingly being taken up by feminists. “That was the atmosphere of Berkeley at that time,” one of them explains in the film. The women’s movement fostered an environment in which such ambitions felt possible.
In the documentary, Jean (O’Malley) recalls that when she told people she was a carpenter, they often assumed she made furniture or dollhouses.14 That assumption pushed her to take on large-scale projects involving massive beams and concrete pours. She saw it was a political imperative to prove that women could do the heavy, structural work traditionally reserved for men. For the Seven Sisters collective, building something as large and complex as the barn was not just a challenge, it was part of a feminist statement. They took pride in proving that their labor and skilled matched any other builder’s.
When I visited the farm, Goodyear explained that while the Seven Sisters collective was building the barn, they also constructed a small shack to use as their office. After the collective completed the barn, Tetreault left Goodyear for one of the carpenters—an outcome that reflected the close bonds and shifting relationships formed through the intensity of the building process. Goodyear moved out of the main farmhouse during that period, with people coming and going, relationships changing. For a few years, Goodyear traveled to Europe and worked as a landscape artist. Tetrault moved to Berkeley but later returned to the farm and built a cabin. Eventually, she left again, and Goodyear moved into that cabin. Later, she formed a relationship with another woman from Seven Sisters, who also moved to the farm and built her own cabin. The barn project, in many ways, had not only reshaped the land but also laid the foundation for new, enduring forms of connection that continued to transform the landscape.
During this period, Goodyear figured out how to subdivide ten acres of the land and sold it to the women who were still living in the original farmhouse. With that money, she designed and built a small cabin for herself in 2002, a twelve-by-twelve-foot open floor plan including a kitchen, dining/living area, office, and bedroom. She later added a bathroom with a standard toilet, upgrading from the outhouse she had been using until then. Tetrault passed away in 2004.
Goodyear’s current partner, filmmaker and artist Laurie York, lives in the second house. They rent what used to be Tetreault’ house to a lesbian couple. The central open space—where the cabins, barn, and garden sit—occupies around three acres, while the remaining twenty-seven acres have been left untouched for over fifty years. Many of the women who originally moved to communes like T’ai Farm in the Albion Nation during the late 1960s and ’70s seeking feminist, land-based ways of living ended up buying property nearby, building cabins and houses, and continue to live there to this day. Goodyear no longer keeps goats, so the barn now stands empty. Its cedar exterior, weathered with time, gleams with a soft silver sheen.
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Country feminists sought to reimagine a world in harmonious relationship with the Earth. Empowered to make their own decisions, they left the city, started farms, changed their diets, removed men from their living spaces, modified buildings, and shared their consciousness-raising practices with other women. The structures they built were the result of deliberate choices: who to collaborate with, what materials to use, what shape to build, where to locate the structure, and how to orient it toward the Sun. T’ai Farm’s octagonal form carried historical resonance, linking them to earlier utopian communities. It also echoed forms found in nature and created a non-hierarchical interior space. Their decision to avoid cutting redwoods in favor of cedar may not have been entirely ecological, but it reflected a principled ecological intention. Because the barn was built for goats, it ceremoniously highlighted the interdependence between humans and nonhuman life as a core value.
The T’ai Farm commune and women-built structures broaden the scope of normative architectural history by showing how feminist relationships to land and one another materialized in spatial forms distinct from those of heteronormative collectives, such as the geodesic dome. Within the history of environmental architecture, the Western canon has largely prioritized technical solutionism, designs that prolong extractive relational dynamics and capitalist growth. Incorporating feminist examples challenges this male-dominated, neocolonial framework by shifting the focus from technical fixes to the spatial politics of gender, sexuality, and power dynamics. This reframing expands the historical record to include architectural practices that foreground social and political relations of domination and resistance. Although feminist rural collectives in the 1970s did not face the possibility of societal collapse as we currently do, they actively rejected traditional social structures and found ways to survive and make sense of themselves and their environment. There is much to learn from revisiting their spatial practices and collective strategies today.
T’ai Farm was one of the earliest women-only land experiments in Northern California, becoming an antecedent to the wider lesbian separatist movement that later flourished in Southern Oregon and gave rise to what became known as “women’s lands,” or “lesbian lands.” These rural, women-only communes co-created spaces to live, farm, and build outside patriarchal control, and because of this, they have sometimes been labeled as utopian in the sense that they are considered unrealistic. And yet, when we look toward alternative ecological and decolonial futures, these lands—and the experimental spatial practices they produced—offer a different kind of imaginative resource. From another perspective, they could be understood as “arcadian.” Victorian scholar Kate Thomas uses the term “Lesbian Arcadia” to describe to the sentiment of some Anglo-American expat lesbians who lived in Italy during the fin-de-siècle and expressed nostalgia for an idyllic past that they never experienced.15 The octagonal barn at T’ai Farm can be read as a spatial articulation of this arcadian imaginary—not driven by linear progress, but by slowness, return, and a refusal of capitalist time. It embodies a different rhythm: one that dissolves the binary of past and future, where it becomes possible to both recall a distant mythical past where Sapphic women inhabited the gardens and beaches in Lesbos, and to imagine an Ursula-le-Guin-type distant post-apocalyptic future—one in which matriarchal communities have already forgotten the city flooded by a great sea-level rise.
Special thanks to Stathis Yeros for all the conversations and collaborations about queer sites in the Bay Area. Kate Coleman, “Country Women: The Feminists of Albion Ridge,” Mother Jones, April 1978, 30.
T’ai Farm was named by Goodyear after the I Ching hexagram (Chinese diagram with six horizontal lines) for “peace.”
Carmen Goodyear, “Pathways: ‘We Met in Berkeley... That Heady Summer of Love,’” in West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California, ed. Iain Boal et al. (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), 137–72; Sasha Archibald, “On Wimmin’s Land,” Places (2021), ➝.
Cal Winslow, “The Albion Nation: Communes on the Mendocino Coast,” in West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California, ed. Iain Boal et al. (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), 137–72.
Carmen Goodyear, “Country Women Herstory,” Country Women, no. 8 “The Women’s Movement in the Country,” October 1973, 25.
Carmen Goodyear, interview by Chandra Laborde, March 2022, video recording.
Scott Herring, “Critical Rusticity,” in Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism (New York: NYU Press, 2010), 63–98.
Archibald, “On Wimmin’s Land.”
Carmen Goodyear, interview by Chandra Laborde, March 2022.
Carmen Goodyear, interview by Chandra Laborde.
The collective’s name “Seven Sisters Construction” may be referencing the Pleiades in Greek mythology.
Priscilla and Jean, “On the Larger Scale,” Country Women, no. 9, “Structures,” January 1974, 24–29. It was a common practice for women to not use patronymics in “women’s land.” Archibald, “On Wimmin’s Land.”
Françoise Flamant, Raising the Roof: Constructing a Sisterhood (Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir, 2005).
Jean O’Malley is the same Jean from Seven Sisters Construction mentioned earlier.
Kate Thomas, “Lesbian Arcadia: Desire and Design in the Fin-de-Siècle Garden,” lecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design, February 18, 2021, ➝.