Pioneering Woman of American Architecture

Phyllis Birkby (1932–1994) was an architect, co-founder of the Women’s School of Planning and Architecture, and a key member of the 1970s and ’80s lesbian feminist movement. In 1973, she initiated a groundbreaking research project, asking women and members of her lesbian community to break with patriarchal norms of design and draw their “fantasy environments”—the imaginative homes, shared spaces, and cities they’d like to inhabit. In her professional practice, she was not only attentive to the environmental needs and desires of women, but also to those of the elderly and people with disabilities.

Early Life and Education

Noel Phyllis Birkby was born on December 16, 1932 in the predominantly white, middle- and upper-class town of Nutley, New Jersey. Her father, Harold S. Birkby, worked in sales, while her mother, Alice Green Birkby, stayed at home to care for their three children.11Stephen Vider, The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality & the Politics of Domesticity after World War II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 112. From a young age, Birkby (who more commonly went by Phyllis) began imagining and drawing detailed city plans.22Vider, The Queerness of Home, 112. In high school, her college counselor recognized her interest in, and aptitude for, design, yet dissuaded her from pursuing the largely male-dominated career after graduation. She applied to the Women’s College of the University of North Carolina to study art instead, matriculating in 1950.33The Women’s College of the University of North Carolina was located in Greensboro, N.C. In 1963, it became a coed institution, and was renamed as the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

At Women’s College, Birkby fostered her first romantic relationships with women and encountered “many ‘first views’” of lesbian life and culture.44Transcript of CR Group One session, “Butch/Femme,” October 1971, Box 33, Folder 564, Noel Phyllis Birkby Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass. Despite the predominantly negative view of homosexuality held by faculty and administrators, she found a lesbian role model in her health teacher, who—along with her partner—shared “endless stories about gay life in Greenwich Village” in New York City with Birkby and her “budding lesbian” classmates.55Ibid. During her senior year, Birkby was expelled, likely for the open expression of her sexuality.66Prior to her expulsion, Birkby was suspended from Women’s College in 1953 on account of being caught drinking a beer. In her autobiographical reflections, Birkby links her suspension and subsequent expulsion to being public about her sexual orientation, or in her words “too reckless, and proud of my love.” Phyllis Birkby, “Voix du Silence 17 years,” October 1971, Box 21, Folder 310, Birkby Papers. After returning home for a brief period of “closety silence,” she left for New York in 1954, perhaps inspired by her health teacher’s stories of urban lesbian life and community.77Phyllis Birkby, “Voix du Silence 17 years.”

Birkby spent the next decade in New York City, save for a brief stint in Mexico, where she traveled to volunteer with the American Friends Service Committee in 1955. Living in the Bowery district, she worked seven days a week bartending, selling books at the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and moonlighting as a technical illustrator. In 1958, she enrolled in architecture night classes at the Cooper Union, where she developed design and drafting skills under the tutelage of instructors including Samuel Brody—whose firm Davis, Brody & Associates she would eventually join in 1965.88While taking night classes at Cooper Union, Birkby also worked as a draftswoman at Henry L. Horowitz (November 1960–December 1961) and Seth Hiller Associates (January 1962–September 1963). After receiving her certificate in architecture from Cooper, Birkby accepted her offer of admission at the Yale School of Architecture and moved to New Haven in 1963.

Birkby’s first year at Yale was challenging. She immediately felt socially alienated and failed her first semester of design studio.99Yale transcript, 1966, Box 2, Folder 17, Birkby Papers. She applied to Columbia in hopes of returning to New York, but ultimately remained in the program at Yale until graduating in 1966 with a bachelor’s degree in architecture.1010Birkby was awarded a Bachelor of Architecture degree upon graduation, which was later conferred as a Master of Architecture degree. She was one of six women to graduate with a degree in architecture that year.1111These women were Gerlinde Leiding, Marja H. Palmqvist (Watson), Pamela Heyne, Pamela Hoyt, and Susan Joan Willy. The year 1966 also saw the graduation of a few women from Yale School of Architecture with degrees in City Planning (M.C.P.), two years before the school’s Department of City Planning was closed (the last M.C.P. degrees were awarded in the early 1970s).

Yale would shape Birkby’s career in substantive ways. It was there that she first encountered the burgeoning environmental design movement of the late midcentury through figures like her professor, architect Serge Chermayeff. As historian Avigail Sachs has argued, environmental design of the 1960s and ’70s was characterized by its “dual allegiance” to “political and public action, on the one hand, and to scientific inquiry and knowledge on the other,” placing  human behavior, emotions, and needs at the center of the design process.1212Avigail Sachs, Environmental Design: Architecture, Politics, and Science in Postwar America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018), 9. Birkby would adopt these core tenets, while also rejecting universal notions of human spatial experience in favor of studying the particular and embodied perspectives of women, people with disabilities, and the elderly. Such design research and practice, she believed, could happen better in women-only spaces, outside of patriarchal institutions breeding what she called “patritecture”—spaces made by and for men, in reflection of their image.1313Birkby coined this term with her collaborator and romantic partner (in the mid-1970s) Leslie Kanes Weisman. See Phyllis Birkby and Leslie Weisman, “Patritecture and Feminist Fantasies,” Liberation, Spring 1976, 46, 52.

Career

Given Birkby’s multiple roles as an architect, filmmaker, and activist, her biography defies neat divisions between the personal, political, and professional. Her involvement in the American lesbian feminist movement of the 1970s and ’80s deeply informed her design research and practice—inspiring, for instance, a multi-year research project on women’s fantasy built environments. Conversely, she often mobilized her artistic design skills in the service of social movements—whether that meant documenting, and collecting ephemera from radical feminist and gay liberation movements, or providing a structural analysis of a Manhattan building occupied by feminist organizers. As an architect, she inspired the works of lesbian artists and writers, many of whom were her closest friends and lovers. This feminist network also transformed Birkby’s notions of architectural design and education over the course of the 1970s and ’80s.

Birkby’s architectural career began in earnest in 1965, during her last year at Yale, when she started working for Davis Brody & Associates (now David Brody Bond). The firm’s emphasis on social housing projects since its founding in 1952 resonated with her early interests in both residential and urban design—areas where she could experiment with renegotiating accepted boundaries between public and private space. One of her earliest projects at Davis Brody & Associates (DBA) was Waterside Plaza (1974), a mega-complex with four residential towers and a public plaza nestled alongside the East River in Manhattan’s Kips Bay neighborhood.1414In her curriculum vitae, Birkby also notes her participation in several other projects at Davis Brody & Associates. She was the project architect for the renovation of the St. Ann’s School brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, as well as a staff designer for the Manhattan State School for students with learning disabilities on Ward’s Island, N.Y. (connected to Randall’s Island). Updating the language of New Brutalism, the towers gave the city what architectural critic Paul Goldberger deemed “a new style for high-rise housing.”

Waterside Plaza catapulted the firm to new heights of professional notoriety in New York City.1515Paul Goldberger, “Waterside Design Builds Reputation,” New York Times (March 12, 1975), 41. In May of 1975, only a year after Waterside Plaza was constructed, Davis Brody & Associates received the American Institute of Architect’s Architectural Firm Award, what Goldberger called “the highest honor in the nation for any architectural practice” in his review of the building. Birkby was assigned the task of stitching together the plaza and the ground floors of the towers. In her design for the pedestrian and vehicular circulation systems, we see her negotiating the challenges of the site. Divorced from the city’s public transit system on the other side of FDR Drive, the Waterside development required considerable parking (275,257 square feet). Placing parking below grade, Birkby and her colleagues reserved the plaza, with its views of the East River, for pedestrians alone, surrounding the open space with shops where residents could find groceries and essential services. Two proposed bridges—the 25th Street bridge and Bellevue-NYU bridge, only the first of which was ultimately constructed—mitigated the project’s relative isolation, enabling pedestrians to walk into Manhattan without encountering vehicular traffic.

Birkby’s most significant project at DBA came when she assumed the role of lead designer for the Long Island University’s (LIU) Library Learning Center in 1968. Building on the rapid growth of the student population, LIU approached DBA with a set of new building programs for its Brooklyn campus in the low-income Fort Greene neighborhood. The new Library Learning Center would include stacks to house 400,000 books, a computer center, audiovisual production center, conference rooms, lecture halls, a student lounge and a theater. In 1970, Birkby significantly revised DBA’s 1968 plan, taking into consideration LIU’s commitment to educating people with disabilities through their on-campus and remote learning by telephone programs.1616May Khalife, “Long Island University’s Library Learning Center: Noel Phyllis Birkby’s Anti-Ableist Activism in the 1970s,” Arris 35 (2024): 6. As historian May Khalife describes, Birkby’s plan “empowered users of all abilities with ease of access and navigation, which restored their agency in space.”1717Khalife, 3. Characterizing her work as “knitting together a sort of non-building,” Birkby designed the Library Learning Center as a connective tissue between the campus’s existing buildings, for instance providing a “campus link” between the library and the Humanities and Social Science Building by providing a third-floor pedestrian sky bridge.1818Phyllis Birkby, “Library for Long Island University,” in the public lecture “Alberto Bertoli & Phyllis Birkby,” “Introduction to New Faculty Series,” Fall 1980, Southern California Institute of Architecture, Los Angeles, California, YouTube Video, 1:47:32, SCI-Arc Media Archive, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7O5d4O-D41oA. This gesture allowed for students and faculty with disabilities to navigate between structures with greater ease and without exiting each building into the busy public plaza. Her triangular structure also included restrooms with wheelchair-accessible stalls conveniently located near elevators, an accessible theater with movable rollaway seating on the first level, and an open-plan reading space uncluttered with furniture and therefore more easily navigable by wheelchair users.

The almost seven years Birkby spent at DBA were formative not just professionally, but also personally and politically. Having previously identified as bisexual, she came out as a lesbian at the beginning of the 1970s. Shortly thereafter, she joined the first lesbian feminist consciousness raising group (CR-1), where she met many of the women who would form her closest circle of friends. These included Kate Millett, whose book Sexual Politics (1970) opened the decade with a rigorous critique of patriarchy and heteronormativity; novelist Alma Routsong; and activist and author Sidney Abbott.1919Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970). See also Alma Routsong, Patience and Sarah (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1972) and Sidney Abbott and Barbara Love, Sappho was a Right-on Woman: A Liberated View of Lesbianism (New York: Stein and Day, 1977).  Routsong originally published Patience and Sarah under the title A Place for Us (1969) using the pseudonym Isabel Miller. With novelist Bertha Harris, cultural critic Jill Johnson, anthropologist Esther Newton, and graphic designer Jane O’Wyatt, Birkby also co-edited one of the earliest collections of American lesbian feminist writing, Amazon Expedition: A Lesbian Feminist Anthology.2020Phyllis Birkby, Bertha Harris, Jill Johnston, Esther Newton, Jane O’Wyatt, eds., Amazon Expedition: A Lesbian Feminist Anthology (New York: Times Change Press, 1973). The essays within Amazon Weekend are wide-ranging in subject matter—from histories of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century lesbian life in the U.S. and France, to personal reflections on coming out and lesbian motherhood.

It was also during this period that Birkby developed a keen interest in filmmaking.2121Many of Birkby’s films have been digitized by Smith College archivists and are available online, Accessed April 10, 2025. Her films, shot with a Super 8 camera, captured the vibrant lesbian social worlds she inhabited, as well as early gay liberation and women’s movement marches in New York City. In one notable film shot in January 1971, she recorded a feminist occupation of an abandoned building in the East Village. The Fifth Street Women’s Building, as it was called by its feminist residents, was an experiment that aimed to “put into action with women those things essential to women—health care, child care, food conspiracy, clothing and book exchange, gimme women’s shelter, a lesbian center, interarts center, feminist school,” and “drug rehabilitation.”2222Fifth Street Women’s Building occupiers, quoted by Leslie Kanes Weisman in “Women’s Environmental Rights: A Manifesto,” Heresies 11, “Making Room: Women in Architecture” (1981): 7. Less than two weeks after its opening, police evicted everyone from the building, claiming that it was structurally unsound and a hazard to inhabitants’ health. A month after the eviction, Birkby returned to the building with agents from the NYC Real Estate Department to evaluate its structural stability. In contradiction to the police department’s claims, she found “the building to be in sound structural condition with only minor plaster and masonry cracks observed.”2323Despite Birkby’s persuasive inspection, the building was never reoccupied by the Fifth Street Women’s Building organizers. Phyllis Birkby, “Inspection of 5th Street Women’s Bldg,” February 23, 1971, Box 12, Folder 194, Birkby Papers.

Birkby’s early experiences in feminist organizing led her to resign from her position at DBB in 1972 and to pursue a career in independent professional practice and work closely with like-minded clients: artists, designers, and women—among them several lesbian couples. After completing a year working as a consulting architect for the firm Dober, Paddock and Upton in which she completed a master plan for Thủ Đức Polytechnic University in Vietnam, she received her first independent commission from the artist David Jacobs. She designed a 25’ by 50’ wood-frame studio space with a double-gabled roof on the same lot as Jacobs’ family home.2424Phyllis Birkby, David Jacobs sculpture studio description, undated, Box 12, Folder 200, Birkby Papers. The structure’s north-facing skylight and high windows filled the interior space with natural light. Two barn doors—made of the same cedar wood used for the building’s siding—opened to connect the studio to an outdoor mezzanine, which hosted many of Jacobs’ metal sculptures. The project was an exercise in restraint. Birkby’s design centered the environmental needs of the sculptor and used natural materials to compliment the surrounding landscape.2525Jacobs was inspired by the studio Birkby designed for him, creating a series of three bronze sculptures in 1975 that mimic its beams and voids.

Birkby was hired by several lesbian couples over the course of her career. Her most significant commission came from Debra Lobel and her partner Beverly Dash in 1977. The project was a new residence situated on a waterfront site overlooking Gardiner’s Bay in East Hampton, Long Island. Birkby’s early sketches of the home built on the architectural strategies she deployed in the Jacobs sculpture studio. A pitched roof with clerestory windows and a prominent skylight were positioned to bring daylight into a second-floor bedroom and the stairwell. Reflecting a growing environmental consciousness in architectural design, she also proposed a solar heating system for the home. Ultimately, high construction costs and roadblocks from contractors unfamiliar with passive energy systems forced her to simplify the design. The result was, in her own words, a “basic program with a flat roof and ‘cube’ like form.”2626Phyllis Birkby, Lobel/Dash house description, undated, Box 13, Folder 206, Birkby Papers.

As she encountered limits in architectural design, Birkby forged a more open space of experimentation in her research and pedagogical practice. In 1973, she hosted the first of her many “fantasy environment” workshops, in which she asked her friends and acquaintances, almost all lesbians, to imagine and draw their own ideal homes and cities, without concern for the constraints of reality.2727Drawing on Birkby’s personal reflections, Vider argues that Birkby’s interest in fantasy was inspired by the ideas and writings of her then-lover, novelist Bertha Harris. It is likely that Birkby also had another formative encounter with the notion of fantasy when she read Clare Cooper Marcus’s 1970 working paper “The House as a Symbol of Self,” written for the Institute of Urban and Regional Development at the University of California, Berkeley in May 1971. See: Box 18, Folder 278, Birkby Papers. As historian Stephen Vider has described, Birkby’s early workshops made space for women’s “unspoken and unspeakable desires,” allowing them to more freely “imagine new ways of organizing self, space, and community” in defiance of patriarchal conceptions of kinship and design.2828Vider, The Queerness of Home, 120.

The resulting drawings varied in content. Some sought to bridge existing divides between nature and urban environments, while others imagined underground feminist metropolises, and still yet others proposed new spaces for community life within the traditionally private spaces of the home. Building on the architectural language of Buckminster Fuller’s dome structures, by then iconic in the New Left movement of the 1960s, Birkby herself imagined a network of spaces that could accommodate different relationship structures she would experiment with over her life—from monogamy domes, to “multiple relationship domes,” to “rotating relationship domes.” This drawing reflected her suspicion of the single-family home as a space that not only enforced gendered divisions of labor, but also heterosexual norms that inhibited erotic exploration.

In 1974, Birkby delivered her first public presentation on the fantasy environment project at the Women in Architecture Symposium, hosted by Washington University in St. Louis. At the event, she met many of the women with whom she would cofound the Women’s School of Planning and Architecture (WSPA)—a separatist, feminist architectural school that met during four two-week summer sessions from 1975 to 1979.2929The last event hosted by the Women’s School of Planning and Architecture was a weekend symposium in Washington, D.C. titled “Community-Based Alternatives and Women in the Eighties.” The cofounders of the WSPA included: Phyllis Birkby, Leslie Kanes Weisman, Katrin Adam, Ellen Perry Berkeley, Bobbie Sue Hood, Marie I. Kennedy, and Joan Forrester Sprague. Among those individuals was Leslie Kanes Weisman, who, in the ensuing years, helped Birkby take the fantasy environment project nationwide. In their joint course at the 1975 convening of the WSPA in Biddeford, Maine, Birkby and Weisman formalized the workshop structure. In each session, they began with group discussion based on the model of Birkby’s lesbian feminist consciousness raising group (CR-1): women would share their experiences of inhabiting the “man-made” built environment and develop “bug lists” of all the architectural and infrastructural barriers that interfered with their everyday lives.3030Noel Phyllis Birkby and Leslie Kanes Weisman, “Women and the Built Environment: Curriculum Proposal,” circa 1975, Box 24, Folder 361, Birkby Papers. Birkby and Weisman would then roll out large sheets of butcher paper on the floor or pin them to the walls, then and invite women to draw their fantasy homes, community spaces, and cities, one next to another.3131Film of fantasy workshop led by Phyllis Birkby and Leslie Kanes Weisman at first WSPA session, Maine, Filmmaker unknown, video, 1975. Accessed April 10, 2025: https://smith.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=b56a74a1-fce7-4feb-b1e9-af0801155c1e. During this period, Birkby and Weisman were romantic partners as well as professional ones. As they traveled together to host workshops, they also wrote about their experiences. In the feminist journal Quest, they argued that fantasy was not an escapist tool, but rather “a way of dealing with reality and problem solving,” one that was even a “productive and useful method for creating change.”3232Noel Phyllis Birkby and Leslie Kanes Weisman, “A Woman Built Environment: Constructive Fantasies,” Quest: A Feminist Quarterly 2, no. 1 (Summer, 1975): 15. Indeed, for Birkby, fantasy was a starting point in the broader project of transforming the built environment to meet the needs of women and other marginalized people.

In 1977, Birkby moved from her home in New York to Southern California.3333While in California, Birkby taught studio design at several architecture schools: California State Polytechnic University (1977–78), Southern California Institute of Architecture (1977–78), and University of Southern California (1978–80). Energized by the fantasy environment project, she took on a new research initiative, visiting and documenting what she called “women’s vernacular architecture”—buildings made by and for women. Among the sites she visited were an adobe home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, refurbished by potter Virginia Gray; an octagonal barn in a rural feminist commune in Albion, California; and a stained-glass dome designed by artist Caroling in Monte Rio, California. In a 1981 essay, “Herspace,” written about her travels, Birkby probed: “Don’t we find here evidence of what ‘female sensibility’? Aren’t these signs of a common foundation for the expression of a uniquely female imagery of built form?”3434Phyllis Birkby, “Herspace,” 28. Though her description of the women’s vernacular architecture tended toward a form of gender essentialism that was pervasive in the lesbian feminist movement of the 1970s and ’80s—for instance, by linking the notion of a “female sensibility” to the form of the womb—she ultimately left questions like these largely unanswered. One common thread amongst women’s spaces, she argued, was that they often defied conventional divisions between public and private spheres, providing space for “gathering” that enabled both personal reflection and community assembly.3535Phyllis Birkby, “Herspace,” 29.

When Birkby returned to New York in the 1980s, she took on several larger-scale projects. In 1985, she was commissioned by a couple from Queens, New York to build a resort on Roatan Island in Honduras. Though the project was never realized, Birkby’s drawings and architectural model reveal a scheme with ample verandas and gabled rooflines, engineered to catch the island breeze and provide natural ventilation in a humid climate.3636Phyllis Birkby, Project description for Watering Place Resort Hotel, Roatan, Honduras, 1985, Box 43, Folder 695, Birkby Papers. As Vider describes, the project was unrealized “because of escalating conflict between Honduras and the Sandinistas.” Vider, The Queerness of Home, 138. Most projects, however, were closer to home. In the late 1980s, Birkby started working with the New York State Facilities Development Corporation (NYSFDC), retrofitting the Pilgrim Psychiatric Center in West Brentwood for accessibility and the Bronx Children’s Psychiatric Center to accommodate a new adolescent day treatment program. From these projects, she gained a deep knowledge of New York City’s architectural codes and standards. She applied her newfound expertise in other venues and for private clients, for instance, by renovating the Women’s Liberation Center in Manhattan to meet city codes in 1985.3737Phyllis Birkby and Cheryl Adams correspondence, 1985, Box 16, Folder 263, Birkby Papers. In 1987, the NYSFDC commissioned Birkby to design an addition to the Bayley-Seton Hospital on Staten Island. Amethyst House, as it was called, would provide shelter and support for women recovering from alcoholism for a period of six to nine months. Picking up the architectural vocabulary of the neighboring building, Birkby’s simple, brick façade avoided calling attention to itself or its residents at a moment when alcoholism was widely stigmatized.

Reimagining home—whether it was through the fantasy environment project, single-family house commissions, or the collective, temporary housing provided at a place like Amethyst House—was a core pillar of Birkby’s architectural research and practice throughout her career. Though never built, her submission for the 1984 A New American House Architectural Design Competition, sponsored by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and National Endowment for the Arts, represents one of her most imaginative reconfigurations of domestic space. Composed in collaboration with interior designer Ann Blanton and environmental psychologist Jamie Horwitz, the proposed multi-family development was aimed towards “non-traditional households”: “single-parent families, two-income families, unrelated adults, adults without children at home,” and retirees.3838Phyllis Birkby, Ann Blanton, and Jamie Horwitz, Submission to A New American House Competition, 1984, Box 13, Folder 211. The proposed floor plans were complemented by narratives of imagined inhabitants—in one unit, a divorced father, his daughter, and an unrelated lighting consultant; in the other, a therapist and her daughter. The designs proposed multipurpose spaces to meet all their inhabitants’ needs: a fold-out bed that transformed a bedroom into a child’s playroom, a second entry door that accommodated clients visiting an in-home office, and a “sociability counter” used for food preparation or games and conversation. Gestures like these were meant to respond to what Birkby called in a 1981 Ms. Magazine article “the messiness of life”: the everyday rhythms of lives unaligned with heteropatriarchal norms.3939Phyllis Birkby, “Designing for the ‘Messiness of life’,” Ms. Magazine (February 1981), 77.

In 1982, Birkby was diagnosed with breast cancer. With treatment, she was able to continue living, without significant interruption, until the cancer recurred in 1992. This time it was terminal. She lived her last two years in Great Barrington, Massachusetts with the support of her friends who called themselves the “Sisters of Birkby” or, with quick-witted humor, “SOBs.”4040Among the “SOBs” were many of the women she had met in the lesbian feminist movement—Alma Routsong, Sidney Abbot, Barbara Love, Jane O’Wyatt, and Kate Millett, to name only a few. After Birkby’s death in 1994, her friends raised money to preserve her personal and professional papers, which now reside in the Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History at Smith College in Northampton, MA.