Dolores Hayden's Non-Sexist City

Irina Vinnitskaya

Images of Dolores Hayden's Non-Sexist City, reprinted in Gender, Space and Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction (Routledge, 1999).

Dolores Hayden’s essay, “What would a Non-Sexist City Be Like? Speculations on Housing, Urban Design, and Human Work,” from the Spring 1980 Supplement of Signs magazine, examines how architectural design and urban planning in the United States have been instrumental in constraining women’s equal participation in physical, social, and economic life and explores alternative egalitarian housing solutions that support women. Hayden argues that the adage, “a woman’s place is in the home,” has been the de facto principle governing residential design in the “urban region,” which encapsulates cities, suburbs, and exurbs. She reflects on how the design, siting, and financing structures of residential architecture are orchestrated around the “ideal nuclear family,” which views men as breadwinners, engaged in the workforce and public life of the city, and women as the symbol of domestic order, confined to the private life of the home and the needs of the family. Such planning choices, she writes, have created hardships for women who break out of their traditional roles as homemakers and enter the workforce. She rejects the home as an homage to “patriarchal fantasies” and male authority and proposes measures to address this shortfall through the work of community organizing, warning against market solutions that she deems exploitative. The Non-Sexist City that Hayden proposes unites housing, services, and jobs to support employed women and their families by adapting a financial model like those of limited-equity housing cooperatives.

According to Hayden, the rise of the suburb and homeownership in the early twentieth century altered the relationship between private and public life. The suburb was conceived as a safe haven from the noxious urban core—a place of serenity for family life to prosper. Federal programs financing the development of the suburbs had certain conditions; they supported racial covenants that excluded people of color from white communities and unequivocally denied mortgages to unmarried women. The primary beneficiaries of these new homes, designed for “a male worker and unpaid homemaker,” were the white middle class. Hayden writes that this socioeconomic dynamic is rooted in the “happy worker” movements of early industrial cities and would solidify into the status quo with the construction of suburbs, asserting that “men were to receive family wages and become home ‘owners’ responsible for regular mortgage payments, while their wives became home ‘managers’ taking care of spouse and children.” The power vested in male breadwinners would transform the home into a “container for female unpaid labor” and the stage on which the “fantasies of patriarchal authority” would play out, argues Hayden. But just as suburban sprawl was becoming a fixture of American life, women’s participation in the workforce was growing. The home as designed to fit the ideal family was quickly becoming outdated.

The rise of women’s employment would cause an imbalance in women’s relationship with domestic work. Hayden notes that the frantic housewife/wage earner would find herself torn between employment, commutes to and from the workplace, domestic chores, and the “physical and emotional maintenance” of the family. Traditional zoning practices exacerbated the strain on time and labor that intentionally isolated the residences from “shared community space—no commercial or communal day-care facilities, or laundry facilities, for example, are likely to be part of the dwelling’s spatial domain.”

To Hayden, this challenge to bridge domestic work with women’s economic position is not a private problem—it is a social problem that cannot “succumb to market solutions.” Responding to the rise of fast-food chains to replace home-cooked meals, commercial day cares, and television to replace childcare, and expanded credit on products for domestic work, Hayden warns that these market replacements lend themselves to creating exploitative conditions for workers. She writes that these jobs are often underpaid, nonunion, and unsecure, filled by marginalized women of lower-class status to substitute the unpaid domestic work of affluent families.

In Hayden’s Non-Sexist City, housing is a confluence of living, working, and supportive services designed around community-delegated, egalitarian support for domestic and public life. Hayden suggests organizing small participatory groups called Homemakers Organizations for a More Egalitarian Society (HOMES). HOMES strive to create an environment of shared unpaid domestic labor, supporting all residents in the paid workforce, eliminating segregation, eliminating programs that sex-stereotype work, reducing duplication of domestic labor, and supporting personal choice towards recreation and sociability.

Hayden’s HOMES rely on grassroots organizing and collective bargaining to acquire zoning variances and legal conversions to accommodate the proposed structures. A HOMES group may consist of any number of households that establish housing with collective services, including day cares, laundromats, kitchens, grocery stores, a garage, gardens, and offices. Services are staffed by residents, compensated to eschew what Hayden calls “sex-stereotyped attitudes towards skills and hours.” Housing can be new or rehabilitated, taking a typical suburban block of homes and inverting the position of public and private space. Dwellings, side yards, and portions of front yards remain private, while auxiliary spaces are integrated into the community. Backyards are combined to create a shared park that the houses face instead of the street. Sheds and porches become community spaces. A dial-a-ride garage replaces numerous private cars, and appliances, such as washers, dryers, and power tools, are shared among neighbors. Alternatively, existing single family homes, designed with open plans, can be converted into duplexes and triplexes varying in size from studios to three bedrooms to create collective arrangements. Hayden suggests a limited equity housing cooperative—in which residents already share an economic stake—as a model for integrating collective services.  

Hayden explores the ideas of a Non-Sexist City in several books following the essay’s publication. The Grand Domestic Revolution (1981) explores the material feminists and their stance on economic and spatial issues as part of women’s depressed social position in relation to domestic and public life. Redesigning the American Dream (1984, 2002) recounts the history of the American suburb, making clear the correlation between the separation of public and private life and strict divisions of gender roles.

Despite this advocacy, we continue to live in much the same housing that Hayden’s essay deems incongruous with an egalitarian society. We witness a housing crisis that struggles to provide secure and affordable housing—a crisis compounded by a legacy of segregationist policies—while communities struggle against city governments’ emphasis on the private market to resolve these issues. The Community Land Trust (CLT) model challenges that. It combines tenants, building owners, community organizations, and people living near the associated development to set aside land for housing that is independent of real estate market fluctuations. CLTs and the numerous organizations that support them demonstrate that housing equality continues to be an issue and emphasize that, like Hayden did in 1980, community control and participation are cornerstones to challenging discriminatory policies whose effects linger today.
 

References

"What Would a Non-Sexist City Be Like? Speculations on Housing, Urban Design, and Human Work"
Dolores Hayden, Signs, Vol. 5, No. 3, Supplement. Women and the American City (Spring, 1980), pp. S170-S187
Published by: The University of Chicago Press

1980

Hayden, Dolores. “What Would a Non-Sexist City Look Like? Speculations on Housing, Urban Design and Human Work.” Gender Space Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction, ed. Jane Rendell, ed. Barbara Penner, ed. Iain Borden, Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003, pp. 266–281.

1981

“Introduction.” The Grand Domestic Revolution a History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities, by Dolores Hayden, MIT Press, 2000, pp. 2–29.

“Feminist Politics and Domestic Life.” The Grand Domestic Revolution a History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities, by Dolores Hayden, MIT Press, 2000, pp. 291–305.

1984

Hayden, Dolores. Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of Housing, Work, and Family Life. 2nd ed., W.W. Norton & Company, 2002.

Tanaka, Aaron. “The Transformative Vision of Community Land Trusts.” Dissent Magazine, 20 Nov. 2015, www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/transformative-vision-community-land-trusts-boston-dsni.

Women in American Architecture

Susana Torre

Installation view of Women in American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective, Brooklyn Museum, 1977. Photo: Norman McGrath. Courtesy of Susana Torre.

Women in American Architecture: Changing Practice and Discourse

What was the significance of the exhibition and book Women in American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective when they were being put together in the early and mid 1970s?¹ We can look at this question through two lenses: First, the project's influence on professional practice and the discourse, and second, the relevance of the ideas it presented.

Regarding professional practice, our main objective was to shake up the status quo that ensured the subordinate roles of women, thus initiating a change in the harsh conditions of women’s practice. We thought this could be best achieved by examining the history of the many invisible professional women working in the design disciplines from interior design to architecture and urban planning, albeit mostly in supportive roles.

But we had another aim beyond rescuing the work of women architects from oblivion; we also wanted to show the opposing ideas of women designers and theoreticians. Some had been complicit in shaping the spatial distribution of homes and neighborhoods that continued women's domestic drudgery and social isolation, while others had presented and were continuing to present influential alternative designs to liberate them from those patterns.² For this, we wanted to reintroduce housing and neighborhood design³ into the discourse of the discipline in the United States, which was at the time entangled in a pseudodispute⁴ between the so-called Whites, architects working on versions of Neo-modern design, and the Grays, followers and colleagues of Robert Venturi, interested in reintroducing history and context in design.

The widespread attention the exhibition received in the national media and professional journals was critical in achieving these objectives. The New York Times published three articles, including a review by architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable. Ms. Magazine, Newsweek, Art Forum, and other newspapers and art publications also provided prominent coverage. There was a special issue of Progressive Architecture—then a leading professional journal—exclusively devoted to the exhibition and book, earning the attention of gatekeepers in the professions. The initial exposure was further amplified as the show toured cities—traveling across the United States and the Netherlands for a full decade of after its opening. In each new setting, the exhibition changed with the addition of work by women architects in that city or region. Moreover, the exhibition panels could be printed as blueprints on demand, allowing schools of architecture to mount them inexpensively and to save the un-mounted panels afterward in their libraries as an oversized publication. In the first showing, at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, our targeted audience was the general public—we even included a portable playground by artist Sheila Berkley so mothers could bring their children, while in other cities the organizers generally aimed at more professional and academic audiences.

The book published alongside the exhibition was meant as a freestanding project, not as a catalog. Seeing that no single scholar could write the ongoing history of women in architecture, I commissioned essays that would explore historic and contemporary issues, which I organized both by theme and time. The brief essays at the end of sections on specific individuals were included not because those women were exceptional, but rather as examples of the questions raised in the chapters. The collective result—a choral work on the history of the conditions of practice, the historical alternatives to those conditions, and contemporary conditions—emphasized the wide range of forms that women were exploring outside conventional professional practices. These included experiments with soft materials, collaborative design, a feminist critique of historical monuments, and theoretical investigations of matrix-like spaces.

Forty years later, the book continues to be a reference for scholarly work on women in architecture.⁵ However, the expected changes were slowed by the political and economic contexts, not only in architecture but also in all social and cultural matters. The late 1970s and early 1980s were the beginning of the political era of conservative Ronald Reagan and anti-feminist Margaret Thatcher, both bent on cutting social welfare programs, privatizing industries, and reducing trade union power. Many college women believed, with Thatcher as prime minister, that women’s rights had already been won, and the limitations suffered by the women shown in our exhibition were no longer relevant to them and their careers. Some accepted the role of “token” woman, granted access to the opportunities and privileges enjoyed by men as individual exceptions, as long as they adopted the institutional values that continued to obstruct women’s professional development. Schools of architecture began to feature a few women in their lecture series, and professional associations like the American Institute of Architects included women, primarily in those positions and tasks that required a great deal of unpaid effort. Also, interview lists for prestigious architectural commissions used women as “window dressing” to show inclusion. But women almost never got the jobs after spending enormous amounts of effort and money to make themselves competitive, leading to bitter frustration and withdrawal from such experiences.

Along with other publications in the late 1970s, the book and exhibition helped spur a movement toward the identification of women in architecture⁶ and their inclusion in historical surveys that continues to this day. This inclusion, however, has mostly been the type historians deride as “add women and stir,” little more than amplified tokenism that fails to challenge the continuing gender bias. And feminist ideas about interiors, buildings, and cities have been simply co-opted into the architectural discourses of the past decades without explicit acknowledgement of their origins.

It is also important to recall how the exhibition's contents and installation design constituted a critique of exhibition practices at the time. The sponsoring organization, The Architectural League of New York, had assumed that it would include only a handful of "exceptional" women—those whose work would be acceptable to the dominant “one-at-a-time” access system. But the complex thematic/chronological structure of an exhibition that included urban design proposals of communistic societies and kitchen-less houses of the cooperative housekeeping movement, along with the built work of professional architects, obliged the sponsor to accept ideas well beyond the comfort zone of most of its board members. The installation at The Brooklyn Museum also challenged architectural shows' exhibition standards. Instead of wall-mounted large photographs—sometimes in backlit boxes—and carefully crafted models—with brief labels identifying the architect and building’s name, date, and location—our exhibition consisted of 30 x 40 inch blueprint panels and a single conceptual model. The panels—inexpensive reproductions our bare-bones budget could afford—were mounted as the tops of drafting tables low enough for children to read, though the amount of text was more demanding than usual. Rejecting the “exceptional woman” approach, all work was treated non-hierarchically, though with extra panels for more prolific architects, such as Julia Morgan. The “drafting room” installation allowed viewers to follow a meandering path of their own selection rather than a prescribed linear order.

The male board members of The Architectural League and other prominent New York architectural figures were not alone in their criticism of the structure of the exhibition and book. Members of our own Archive of Women in Architecture group also questioned them, having envisioned a show limited to professional architects on the “exceptional woman” model. Though they also wanted to use the exhibition as a tool for improving the work conditions of women in the professions and enlarging opportunities and recognition for them, they wanted to achieve these without challenging the professions’ values and structure, including men’s power in the assignment of unequal salaries and subordinate supporting roles. Indeed, the preferred model for exhibitions and publications in the following years continued to be that of the patriarchal institutions and professions, with activist alternatives seeking structural change receiving scant attention. The publications on women in architecture that appeared in print or online every six years or so, including biographical profiles with no in-depth discussion of the work, distinguished themselves from one another only by the different names of the women featured each time. Women-only awards created more recently to validate women’s work and professional trajectories in architecture simply reproduce the procedures and structure of similar awards controlled by men, in some cases including well-known male practitioners in their juries as the ultimate corroboration of value. These awards do offer validation in developing careers and obtaining commissions, demonstrating that the professional reputation of women is no longer exclusively dependent on men. Still, the award categories tend to emulate a structure of power that is male and hierarchical, unprepared to reward the ethics and aesthetics of collaboration that characterize feminist design. New structures of practice and reward categories for excellence and exemplary work are needed to design and construct buildings and environments responsive to the needs and desires of people in all their diversity and to achieve recognition of the collective, choral voice that creates all works of architecture and urban design.

¹ This essay is a response to that question, asked by the curators of Now What?! Advocacy, Activism & Alliances in American Architecture Since 1968, forty years after the opening of Women in American Architecture. A Historic and Contemporary Perspective.

² The advocates that promoted the design of cooperative apartment buildings in New York without kitchens in the individual dwellings at the turn of the 20th century proposed one such alternative. Food preparation following the latest nutritional standards would be prepared in commercial kitchens such as the “Rumford Kitchen,” built by Ellen Swallow Richards as a demonstration at the Chicago World Exhibition of 1893. See Dolores Hayden’s A Grand Domestic Revolution, for more alternatives.

³ Martin Pawley trenchantly analyzed this situation in his 1971 book Architecture Versus Housing.

⁴ The passage of time has proved that this dispute had been a means for publicizing the work of architects in both groups, orchestrated by Peter Eisenman, one of the Whites, and Robert A.M. Stern on behalf of the Grays.

⁵ Fortunately, there will be soon a book on the history of women in architecture, authored by Andrea J. Merrett.

⁶ Wikipedia Edit-a-thon events organized by New York-based ArchiteXX, where volunteers help write female designers, architects, and planners into Wikipedia and the “Un Dia, Una Arquitecta” website, also staffed by volunteer scholars, are two major initiatives.

Broadening the Discourse

Martina Dolejsova

Pages from the catalogue of Broadening the Discourse, an exhibition and conference, Santa Monica, CA, 1992. "Organization of Women Architects and Design Professionals Records, 1965-2005," Ms1988-080, Special Collections, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA.

Broadening the Discourse, an exhibition on women designers in California, opened its doors on January 24, 1992, to the onlookers and pedestrians of Santa Monica, CA. This exhibition was part of an annual statewide conference of the same name for women in design hosted by the California Women in Environmental Design (CWED) and cosponsored by the Association for Women in Architecture (AWA) and the UCLA Extension School for Environmental and Interior Design. The main symposium of the conference, titled Women in Environmental Design: Reconsidering Feminist Issues, included the panelists Susana Torre, Jacqueline Leavitt, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, and moderator Ann Bergren. They addressed the relationship between feminist visions of architecture, space and the gaze of the profession.

At this conference, Torre reflected on the progress of women in architecture, from her early work in 1972 to her observations in 1992, and made her claim to the continued necessity of the category of “women” in the profession and the frustration regarding this as not an identity of acceptance but a distinction of “otherness” and trouble in the profession.¹ This distinction is one that has informed women’s practice, class identities, and social positions. Broadening the Discourse demonstrated the changing discourse in feminism and practice found in the 1990’s as it began to question how to define roles of gender, its relationship with space and how feminist theory inserts itself into architecture. The AWA/CWED exhibition looked at the terms of vision in feminist theories, in which there is “visibility” vs. “invisibility” and the “visions” of work informed by a “gaze.”

AWA President Lian Hurst Mann explained the conceptual premise behind the exhibition and its title as one meant “to actively broaden—as in stretch, disturb, displace, wrench, re-envision—the point of view (the ‘gaze’) of the discourse that dominates.”² Architectural historian Beatriz Colomina stated in Sexuality and Space that “architecture must be thought of as a system of representation in the same way that we think of drawings, photographs, models, film, or television, not only because architecture is made available to us through these media but because the built object is itself a system of representation.”³

The exhibition catalog stated it was “Broadening the Gaze” by attempting to acknowledge these systems and challenge or refuse them. This gaze is a constructed view of the modalities that feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey established as the male gaze, maintaining and controlling women and their sexuality as subjective objects.⁴ The woman is thus an object to be looked at for pleasure and controlled according to this gaze which associatively translates to objects that are associated with femininity and sexuality. This gaze informs social and power structures, and architectural structures become the visions of production and fetishization of these social models. The vision, claimed Mark Wigley in his essay, “Untitled: The Housing of Gender,” is the political and “often the most privileged.”⁵ Vision is representation, and what visualizations are enacted and seen reflect the gaze that is upon them. How gender varies, and how one refuses to be the category subjected by the gaze, is also demonstrative of what visions of representation are privileged.

The exhibition was an open submission to all women architects in California (as opposed to only women within CWED’s membership). An all-female jury selected projects, sustaining the CWED’s historic premise of creating visibility and validation within a female gaze.⁶ The jury intended to challenge the relationship between how people believed women designed and what was being designed (commissions), as well as how feminist ideologies were considered in design.

This focus on visibility has also been part of the writing of women’s architectural history⁷ and the women entering into institutions and achieving positions of authority—be it within universities, publications, or other organizations. Visibility is also deduced through institutions, such as the American Institute of Architects, which performed surveys that showed percentages of women in the profession.

At the same time in the late 1980s and early 1990s, visible bodies within institutions were directing and challenging gendered assumptions. In 1990, Adele Santos became the first women dean in an architecture school at the New School of Architecture at UC San Diego. CWED symposium panelist Sheila Levrant de Bretteville was named the head of the graphics department at Yale in 1990, and Susana Torre became the chair of the environmental design department at Parsons in New York in 1991. Participants of Women in Environmental Design: Reconsidering Feminist Issues reviewed existing feminist theories. These discussions surrounding representations in architecture that facilitated new perspectives into how women’s work has been viewed and categorized regarding representation, space, sexuality, and gender.

The exhibition and the conference discourse attempted to confuse and neutralize the gaze, so as to interpret new meanings. These events posed a different construction and idea of gender—terms that took hold at the level of subjectivity and representation, in the micropolitical practices of daily life and daily resistances that afford agency, and in the cultural productions of women and feminists that inscribe that movement in and out of ideology.

¹ Kevin McMahon, “Observations from the Gender-Free Zone: Broadening the Discourse 5th Annual Conference (co-sponsored by the AWA),” LA Architect Magazine (March 1992), 14.

² Broadening the Discourse catalog, “Broadening the Gaze: Feminist Strategies for Exhibiting Women’s Work. Lian Hurst Mann Talks with Darlene Crosby,” 7.

³ Beatriz Colomina, Sexuality and Space (New York, NY, Princeton Architectural Press, 1992).

⁴ Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Visual and Other Pleasures (New York: Palgrave Macmillion, 2nd ed 2009).

⁵ Mark Wigley, “Untitled: The Housing of Gender,” in Sexuality and Space, ed Beatriz Colomina (New York, NY, Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), 362.

⁶ Despina Stratigakos discusses in her book A Women’s Berlin how the Women’s Club validated their work for exhibitions. “The use of male judges, which became standard practice at both the London and Berlin clubs, sent the message that women artists had received the most stringent seal of approval – that of their male colleagues.” Despina Stratigakos, A Women’s Berlin: Building the Modern City (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 27. Torre states that by the 1970s “the work is judged by the women themselves and by others on its own merits: through this evaluation women raise their own demands about the quality of their work and finally validate their image as professionals for themselves.” Susana Torre, “Women in Architecture and the New Feminism,” in Women In American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective, ed. Susana Torre. (New York: Billboard Publications, 1977). The performance of validation slowly changed as women were judging and qualifying their work, yet the questions in the 1990s of quality were still in the culture languages of how women’s work was viewed.

⁷ Examples of such histories are Gwendolyn Wright’s “On the Fringe of the Profession: Women in American Architecture,” in The Architect: Chapters in the History of the Profession, edited by Spiro Kostof, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 280-308; and Dolores Hayden’s The Grand Domestic Revolution: a History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1981).

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Martina Dolejsova (MSc critical, curatorial, and conceptual practices of architecture, Columbia University) is the communications coordinator at Studio Libeskind in New York City. She has contributed articles to the Architect’s Newspaper, Archinect, PIN-UP, and Artillery magazine and curated the pop-up series, A Picture is Worth 500 Words.

National Organization of Minority Architects

Pascale Sablan

A History of NOMA

African American architects listened intently to what Whitney M. Young, Jr., the prominent civil rights leader and keynote speaker, had to say. He reminded those present that as a profession, architecture had not distinguished itself by its social and civic contributions to the civil rights movement. The black architects in attendance that day had come from different parts of the country and did not know each other very well, but were all struck by the speaker’s words and recognized that the situation of the black architect had to be improved.  

Three years later, in 1971, the black architects in attendance at the American Institute of Architects (AIA) National Convention in Detroit decided to organize to change the status quo. A local African American architect invited them to his office, where they had a chance to meet each other informally and discuss the desperate need for an organization dedicated to the development and advancement of black architects. The thirty or so present at that meeting included some black architecture students who were anxious to meet the visiting black architects. These professionals recognized the desperate need for an organization dedicated to the development and advancement of African American architects.

Prior to this time, there had been two other professional organizations that supported black architects: the National Technical Organization, established in 1926, and the Council for the Advancement of the Negro in Architecture, which ran from 1951–57. But new times required new methods.  

Present at the Detroit meeting were William Brown, Leroy Campbell, Wendell Campbell, John S. Chase, James C. Dodd, Kenneth B. Groggs, Nelson Harris, Jeh Johnson, E.H. McDowell, Robert J. Nash, Harold Williams, Robert Wilson, and Robert Coles.

A cruise to the Bahamas a few months later brought together twelve of the founders and their wives together for the group’s second meeting. Starting then, the wives would play a crucial role in running the organization through their support of their husbands’ assignments.

A few weeks later, a third meeting convened in Chicago. It was there that the membership voted to accept the organization’s constitution as drawn up by Harold Williams and Jeh Johnson. These African American architects wanted black design professionals to work together to fight discriminatory policies that limited or barred minority architects from participating in design and construction programs.

At early meetings, the members discussed topics like how to lobby Washington representatives to get black architects included in new legislation concerning work on federal projects, how to get AIA recognition for those most prominent among them (i.e. Paul Williams and Howard Mackey), and how to create their own design awards.  

That was the beginning of the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA), an increasingly influential voice promoting the quality and excellence of minority design professionals. There are NOMA Chapters in all parts of the country, increasing recognition on colleges and university campuses and providing greater access to government policy makers.

The first NOMA president was Wendell Campbell, followed by several of the other founders. Some who were not president, such as Robert Coles, who started the organization’s newsletter, served as vice president or in other offices. Over time, some of the NOMA founders and officers also served in AIA positions.

In 1996, Cheryl McAfee of Atlanta, Georgia, became the first female president, followed by Roberta Washington, from New York, in 1997. From 2013–14, NOMA ran under the leadership of its third female president, Kathy Dixon.

NOMA today champions diversity within the design professions by promoting the excellence, community engagement, and professional development of its members. It thrives only when voluntary members contribute their time and resources to furthering the organization’s mission—to build a strong national organization, strong chapters, and strong members to minimize the effect of racism in the profession. Strength in NOMA is built through unity in the cause that created the organization.

Through its publications and conferences, NOMA demonstrates that minority professionals have the talent and capabilities to perform in design and construction with any other group. By building strong chapters of design professionals whose sensibilities and interests include promotion of urban communities, NOMA is able to respond to the concerns that affect marginalized communities and people. Local chapters give members a base in which to become involved in politics, to visit schools and reach out to children, to conduct community and civic forums, and to responsibly practice in our professional capacities.

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Pascale Sablan, AIA, NOMA, LEED AP, is a Senior Associate at S9 ARCHITECTURE, the 2017–18 historian for the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA), and the NOMA Northeast Now What!? Exhibition Planning Grant 18 Regional Vice President for 2018–19. Pascale is past president of the New York Chapter of NOMA, serves the AIA National Planning Committee for the 2018 Design Justice Summit, and is a member of the AIA’s Diversity and Inclusion Committee. Pascale was selected as a 2018 AIA Young Architects Award Recipient and was featured in the CTBUH Research Paper: “Ratios - Voices of Women in the Tall Building World.” She was recently named Building Design + Construction 40 Under 40 and was featured on the cover of the September issue of their magazine. She has lectured at universities and colleges all over the US. In 2017 she curated the Say It Loud: Distinguished Black Designers of NYCOBA | NOMA exhibition at the Center for Architecture in New York City. She is the 315th African American female architect in the United States to attain her architectural license. As of 2017, there are only 400 women who hold this distinction.

Queer Space

Olivier Vallerand

Poster of Queer Space exhibition, 1994, at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York. Courtesy Storefront for Art and Architecture.

The emergence of queer theory and its challenges to normative understandings of sexual and gender categories has changed a wide number of disciplines, but its impact on architecture has been quite limited compared to other fields, such as art, art history, geography, or planning. Most queer scholarship in architecture appeared in the mid-1990s. It emerged from two different streams: feminist histories and critiques of the built environment and a larger interest in theory across architecture, including post-structuralist French theory, an important source in the development of queer theory. Building on these diverging sources, queer scholarship in architecture approached different themes with varying objectives.

An important number of these works focused on the issue of visibility, be it in contemporary representations or in architectural history. Aaron Betsky, in one of the most well-known books on the topic, presented a history of spaces designed or used by queer people—mostly gay white men—that he connected with his personal experience of clubs.¹ A similar impulse to make gay and lesbian people visible—a reclaiming of history that is also present in other disciplines—sustained, for example, Alice Friedman’s discussion of Philip Johnson’s Glass House or Katarina Bonnevier and Justine Rault’s analysis of Eileen Gray’s E.1027.² While most of these projects focused on domestic spaces, Maxine Wolfe’s article on lesbian bars, “Invisible Women in Invisible Places,” made clear that the issue of visibility also applied to spaces considered public. Other thinkers looked at how queer people were represented in the profession or in architecture magazines—in one instance, Henry Urbach showed how magazines such as Architectural Digest at once reveal and conceal queer couples by insisting on showing two separate bedrooms in their photographic features, among other strategies.³ Discussions of both historical and contemporary examples, however, often fell into the trap of focusing on privileged gay white males at the expense of more marginalized people (women, transgender people, and people of color being among them) or of trying to identify a “queer design aesthetic,” to use Jonathan Boorstein’s terms.⁴

The focus on visibility of much queer scholarship in architecture aligns itself more with earlier gay and lesbian studies than with the political challenge to categories that underlines queer theory, even if making marginalized people visible is itself a political endeavor. Some architects have, however, built on this political aspect. By the mid-1990s, feminist thinkers had already begun to challenge the gendered assumptions that supported the design and experience of the built environment by focusing on women’s place in it, both as designers and as users. Queer theory pushed for a further rethinking of the ways sexuality and gender intersect with space by questioning the role that architecture plays in the construction of male identity, as exemplified by the essays in the collection Stud: Architectures of Masculinity, edited by Joel Sanders. The political potential of queer space theory has also developed from the shifting focus of architectural history and theory through a discussion of minor architecture, as in John Paul Ricco’s analysis of sex spaces inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s theory of minor literature,⁵ or more broadly through an analysis of cruising spaces, bathhouses, and sexualized bars and clubs.⁶ Others have built from the performative aspect of queer theory to suggest that queer space is, in Christopher Reed’s words, “imminent, [. . .] in the process of, literally, taking place, of claiming territory.”⁷ Similarly, Henry Urbach discussed the ante-closet—the space created by the opening of a closet door—as an ephemeral space where “private and social realms interpenetrate” and as a space where the line between what one hides and what one shows breaks down.⁸ Bridging between disciplines, including architecture, the edited collection Queers in Space: Communities, Public Places, Sites of Resistance explored the interactions between queer identity, activism, and public spaces, underlining the relationship between physical spaces and the political potential of social visibility.⁹

In addition to more traditional essays, scholarship on queer space also materialized in exhibitions such as Queer Space, held at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York in 1994. Organized around the question, “What exactly is queer space?” the projects exemplified many of the approaches discussed here—highlighting the complexity of a concept like queer space but also the importance of thinking about space as layered in a way that acknowledges the diverging political and social implications that different people will experience.

Most of the queer scholarship in architecture has focused on gay men and, more marginally, lesbian women. Only recently have trans people become subjects of discussion, as in Joel Sanders and Susan Stryker’s “Stalled.” Issues surrounding trans people have been much more present in planning discussions, such as in the work of Petra Doan,¹⁰ but they seem to have triggered a renewed interest in architectural discussions after a period of limited visibility in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Sanders has discussed this shift in his own thinking in a recent article published in a special 2017 issue of Log, one of the few architecture journals to devote special issues to the relation of gender, sexuality, and the built environment.¹¹ This interest also aligns with a similar renewed interest in feminist issues. Like earlier scholarship, these new projects present a broad range of interpretations of what queer space can mean, highlighting its potential for rethinking both the practice and study of architecture. The projects return to a socially informed practice of architecture that had been erased in the early years of the twenty-first century by an overwhelming stream of digital experimentations and formal or projective approaches to design. Hopefully, this renewed interest will be sustained as the complex challenges posed by queer theory to architectural practice—particularly the translation of discursive practices into design and construction—call for a sophisticated understanding of the connection between gender, sexuality, and the built environment—something that can only appear with time and careful experimentation.

¹ Aaron Betsky, Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire (New York: William Morrow, 1997).

² Alice T. Friedman, "People Who Live in Glass Houses: Edith Farnsworth, Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, and Philip Johnson," in Women and the Making of the Modern House : A Social and Architectural History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998); Katarina Bonnevier, "A Queer Analysis of Eileen Gray's E.1027," in Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture, ed. Hilde Heynen and Gulsum Baydar (London & New York: Routledge, 2005); Jasmine Rault, Eileen Gray and the Design of Sapphic Modernity: Staying In (Farnham, Surrey & Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011).

³ Henry Urbach, "Peeking at Gay Interiors," Design book review: DBR 25 (1992).

⁴ Jonathan Boorstein, "Queer Space," in Building Bridges: Diversity Connections: American Institute of Architects National Diversity Conference Proceedings (Washington, D.C.: American Institute of Architects, 1995).

⁵ John Paul Ricco, "Coming Together: Jack-Off Rooms as Minor Architecture," A/R/C, architecture, research, criticism 1, no. 5 (1994).

⁶ Henry Urbach, "Spatial Rubbing: The Zone," Sites, no. 25 (1993); Betsky; Ira Tattelman, "The Meaning at the Wall: Tracing the Gay Bathhouse," in Queers in Space: Communities | Public Places | Sites of Resistance, ed. Gordon Brent Ingram, Anne-Marie Bouthillette, and Yolanda Retter (Seattle: Bay Press, 1997); "Speaking to the Gay Bathhouse: Communicating in Sexually Charged Spaces," in Public Sex/Gay Space, ed. William Leap (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); "Presenting a Queer (Bath)House," in Queer Frontiers: Millennial Geographies, Genders, and Generations, ed. the Queer Frontiers Editorial Collective, et al. (Madison, WI: The University of Winsconsin Press, 2000); Henry Urbach, "Dark Lights, Contagious Space," in Intersections: Architectural Histories and Critical Theories, ed. Jane Rendell and Ian Borden (London and New York: Routledge, 2000).

⁷ Christopher Reed, "Imminent Domain: Queer Space in the Built Environment," Art Journal 55, no. 4 (1996): 64.

⁸ Henry Urbach, "Closets, Clothes, Disclosure," Assemblage, no. 30 (1996): 70.

⁹ Gordon Brent Ingram, Anne-Marie Bouthillette, and Yolanda Retter, eds. Queers in Space: Communities | Public Places | Sites of Resistance (Seattle: Bay Press, 1997).

¹⁰ Petra L. Doan, ed. Planning and Lgbtq Communities: The Need for Inclusive Queer Spaces (New York & London: Routledge, 2015); "Beyond Queer Space: Planning for Diverse and Dispersed Lgbtq Populations," in Planning and Lgbtq Communities: The Need for Inclusive Queer Spaces, ed. Petra L. Doan (New York & London: Routledge, 2015).

¹¹ See for example Log issue 41 (with a section titled “Working Queer”) or The Funambulist issue 13 (on “Queers, Feminists & Interiors”).

Reimagining Randolph: Randolph Career Tech Center

Imani Day, Gensler

Randolph Career Tech Center, Detroit, 2017. Courtesy Imani Day, Gensler.

Detroit public schools have been troubled for some time. Between massive depopulation, bankruptcy, and controversial policy about school choice, the degeneration of the city’s educational system was all but inevitable. Each of these challenges compounded the decline in state and federal funding for public school education. As the city of Detroit begins the long journey to resolve these complex concerns, instigative design and physical repair can be powerful tools to address the system’s problems. However, it will take a truly diverse team of activists to shift negative attitudes toward traditional public school environments.

Detroit is a city founded on the spirit of entrepreneurship and cultural innovation. From an automobile industry that mobilized the world to the birth of Motown and Techno, Detroit’s innovations have historically set cultural metronomes for people all over the world. We are now witnessing that innovation fuel the restructuring of the antiquated public school system. New educational perspectives and methodologies seek to teach young, bright students the value of their ideas, not only to their city, but also to the world.

Randolph Career Tech Center is a public vocational school that suffered for years from the economic downturn. It was built in the 1980s as a technology career program, but when the school failed to attract the number of students it needed to be viable, a traditional high school component was added in hopes of attracting more students. In 2016, enrollment hit a low of 167 (with 92 traditional high school students) in a facility built to serve 600 students. The facility was in desperate need of attention and repair, and the various curricula were not nearly as robust as they needed to be.

In late 2017, with revamped programs in plumbing and pipefitting, masonry, carpentry, HVAC, electrical, marketing, agricultural science and environmental technology, and computer-aided design, enrollment is at an all-time high of 310 students. That number will likely double as the school adds an adult night school for community members to learn skilled trades. In a city where nearly 40 percent of the population lives under the poverty line, these core skills are critical to empowering workers to earn livable wages, providing incomes high enough to lift families securely out of poverty, and put Detroit on the path to an educational comeback.

Fiscal pressures and a low population caused Detroit to hit a construction low in the ’90s and the first decade of the twenty-first century. Many architects, skilled contractors, and builders left the city (and the industry) in search of steady work. Recently, however, construction has increased, resulting in a gap between the supply and demand of skilled labor. Therefore, it is imperative that the city strengthen its career and technical education centers to replenish the supply of skilled workers to the construction unions and companies.

The city’s workforce development team has invested in the facilities and programs that will train this next generation of trade professionals. In the fall of 2016, Gensler began its partnership with Detroit Employment Solutions Corporation (DESC), DTE Energy, and Barton Malow to reimagine the future of vocational education in Detroit. Careers in construction are some of the most lucrative for young people in Detroit; many trained professionals go on to start their own companies.

The redesign of Randolph inspires pride within the youth of the city and creates a learning environment to stimulate and motivate this entrepreneurial spirit. The changes incorporate evidence showing that physical environments in which students learn can either optimize or derail their odds of academic achievement and lifelong success. Through a complete rebranding of school graphics to reflect a technical focus, Randolph will communicate itself as a credible educational resource in the construction community. In an effort to increase school pride and enrollment, vibrant environmental graphics were introduced in the central communal areas to reinforce the raised levels of expectation and encouragement for students to not only graduate, but to continue their careers through the program’s job placement initiatives and apprenticeships. In each room, specific trade logos adjacent to the entry indicate individual programs, their respective importance, and the school’s pride in the city’s revitalized built environment.

As the school continues to grow, the need for a central hub where the entire student body can assemble is increasingly apparent. By combining two classrooms, the “heart” of the school functions as an open, multi-purpose room for lunch periods, assemblies, and workshops. Decades ago, students painted murals of piping and tools around the school to convey the technical focus; today, Gensler reveals the technical nature of the trades in a more literal sense. By exposing ductwork and conduits in the corridors and entryways, students see their education directly reflected in their learning spaces. New lighting strategies brighten the space and highlight the newly exposed systems and branding. Local metal workers, graphic designers, and community members used raw materials and equipment to embody the technical focus. Licensed contractors and volunteer union workers, many of whom were Randolph graduates, helped to actualize the vision for the future of the school.

Randolph’s full revitalization was realized through $10,000,000 in raised funds and in-kind donations of time, design, labor, and materials. Several companies and aligned groups have come together to maximize the school’s full potential. Design is a mode of problem solving; in the case of Randolph, disrepair has played a significant role in fostering creativity and enthusiasm around a learning space. Through the intentional collaboration of policy, design, and advocacy, we can utilize the public school systems to support and empower Detroit’s next generation of leaders.

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Imani Day is a designer with Gensler and an adjunct professor of design at the University of Detroit Mercy. She is also an editorial fellow with the Avery Review. Passionate about educational spaces and cultural work, Day moved to Detroit in 2015 to focus on community-oriented design projects.

Equity by Design: The Evolution of a Movement

Rosa Sheng, AIA & Annelise Pitts, AIA

Findings from the AIA San Francisco’s Equity by Design (AIASF’s EQxD) committee 2016 Equity in Architecture Survey. Design by Atelier Cho Thompson. Courtesy AIA San Francisco Equity by Design Committee.

Why Equity Matters for Everyone

“Equity” and “equality” have long been used interchangeably, but the terms do not mean the same thing. While the focus of equality is framed with sameness being the end goal, equity may be defined as a state in which all people, regardless of their socioeconomic, racial, or ethnic grouping, have fair and just access to the resources and opportunities necessary to thrive. Beyond equity’s newer association with pluralism, it has long been connected to financial capital, as well as to collective ownership, vested interest, and a sense of value or self-worth.

Equity has strong potential as a new paradigm and social construct to succeed on multiple levels—equity in education, equitable practice in the workplace, and social equity in access to basic life resources, healthy and safe communities, and public space in our urban centers. The equity-focused value proposition at all these levels is rooted in transparency, education, collaboration, and trust.

The lack of equity in architectural practice and allied professions has made these fields prone to lose talent to other, more lucrative career paths due to multiple factors that challenge retention: long hours, low pay, lack of transparency for promotion, and work that is misaligned with professional goals. In order to have justice and equity in the built environment, the architecture, engineering, and construction design workforce needs not only diverse representation that reflects the rapidly changing demographics that we serve, but also diversity of thinking influenced by empathy and emotional and social intelligence. Often the public does not fully understand the value of what architects and allied professionals bring to the table in terms of the social impact of design that can inform equitable, just, and sustainable public and private spaces.
 

Origins: The Missing 32 Percent

In the United States, women represent slightly less than 50 percent of the students graduating from accredited architecture programs. The percentage of women who are American Institute of Architects members, licensed architects, and senior leaders varies between 15 to 18 percent of the total. While the exact percentages are in constant flux, the challenge of losing a large pool of architectural talent remains the constant. Statistics released by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, “Where are the women in Architecture,” coupled with the momentum behind the Denise Scott Brown Pritzker Prize Petition, The He for She campaign by the United Nations, Lean In by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and similar conversations about solidarity against gender inequity, catalyzed the conversation.

The Missing 32 Percent project resulted from an incubator event conceived and produced in 2011 by the AIA San Francisco (AIASF) Communications Committee. In turn, Ladies (and Gents) Who Lunch with Architect Barbie was inspired by a partnership between AIA National and Mattel on “Architect Barbie,” whose place on the toy manufacturer’s lineup was insured by Despina Stratigakos and her colleague, architect Kelly Hayes McAlonie. At the event, fellow practitioners Dr. Ila Berman; Cathy Simon, FAIA; Anne M. Torney, AIA; and EB Min, AIA, came together for a provocative panel discussion on the state of women’s participation in the profession, including the impact of “Architect Barbie”.

The popularity of that event fostered the first Missing 32 Percent Symposium on October 12, 2012. A broad range of speakers representing different career paths in the profession ranging from those working for large firms—such as Marianne O'Brien, AIA, and Caroline Kiernat, AIA—as well as sole practitioners and small firms including Anne Fougeron, FAIA, and Eliza Hart, AIA. Panels and breakout sessions highlighted statistics that detail the current leadership structure of architecture firms and discussion on the following: What defines leadership? Who are the leaders within your firms? Who wants to be a leader? And how can men and women work together to increase their value as architects and retain talent in the profession?

The conversation about women's roles in architectural practice coupled with overall challenges for equitable practice and professional satisfaction drove a call to action after the second symposium. The impetus came from the dire need in the profession to go beyond discussion and focus on tangible results to change workplace policy and culture. In July of 2013, less than a month following the second Missing 32 Percent Symposium, an AIASF committee was born from the Building Communication and Negotiation Skills to Fit Your Audience panel (Rosa Sheng, AIA; Saskia Dennis-van Dijl; Trudi Hummel, AIA; and Laurie Dreyer). The charge was to drive additional discussion, research, and publication of best practice guidelines to preserve the profession's best talent.
 

2014–15: From The Missing 32 Percent to Equity by Design

In early 2014, the group conducted its first national survey on equity in architecture and talent retention. The survey received 2,289 responses from across the United States. The Equity by Design committee hosted its third sold-out symposium, titled Equity by Design: Knowledge, Discussion, Action! on October 18, 2014. In total, 250 attendees traveled from across the United States for the launch of key findings from the Equity in Architecture Survey. They participated in interactive breakout sessions in the three major knowledge areas: hiring and retention, growth and development, and meaning and influence. The group received overwhelming support from firm sponsorship, AIASF, and AIA National as well as positive press coverage including The Wall Street Journal, Architect Magazine, Architectural Record, and Contract Magazine.

In May 2015, during the AIA National Convention in Atlanta, the AIASF committee changed its name from The Missing 32 Percent to Equity by Design to better reflect the mission to address equitable practice for those still in the profession and to expand the outreach of the movement beyond gender. The group designed a half-day workshop as part of the preconvention program: WE310 Equity by Design: Knowledge, Discussion, Action! Hackathon and Happy Hour to expand the awareness and discussion of challenges of talent retention in architecture. A video documenting the EQxD Hackathon by ARCHITECT Magazine highlights the positive reception of the event. The lessons have been captured and shared with a larger audience on this site. The full report of the Equity in Architecture Survey results was issued online on May 13 as a resource to the profession for further the conversation. Concurrently, on May 15, 2015, 4,117 delegates passed Equity in Architecture Resolution 15-1, authored by Rosa Sheng, AIA; Julia Donoho, AIA; and Francis Pitts, FAIA, and cosponsored by the AIASF and American Institute of Architects, California Council, in an overwhelming majority at the AIA National Convention Business Meeting.These events signify a major milestone for equity since the committee's inception. Outreach continued with presentations at TEDxPhiladelphia on June 11, 2015, KQED Forum, and several Keynote opportunities for the duration of 2015.

2016-17: Metrics, Meanings, and Matrices

In 2016, Equity by Design launched the second Equity in Architecture Survey in collaboration with the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture. As the largest and most comprehensive study launched nationally to date on the topic of talent retention within architecture, the 2016 survey resulted in analysis of 8,664 completed responses to over 120 questions with the potential to impact architectural practice nationwide and establish a legacy dataset over subsequent years’ studies. Concurrently, the group hosted the fourth sold-out symposium of 250 national attendees with the theme Equity by Design: Metrics, Meaning & Matrices. As a result of strong sponsorship, the group was able to produce an outreach video and the Matrices exhibition, an installation that grew throughout the symposium to encompass highlights of the group’s mission and history as well as symposium highlights as part of the day’s interactive event.

Equity by Design continued to grow nationally and internationally in 2017, and various initiatives expanded upon the research findings with quarterly focus topics, survey metrics, and deep dives on the topics of pay equity, work-life navigation, and ways to affect advocacy through #EQxDActions.

Strategies for Change

In order to make progress beyond the original conversations, the core group (Rosa Sheng, Annelise Pitts, Lilian Asperin, Julia Mandell, and Saskia Dennis van Dijl) determined early on that evolving missions with ambitious goals were key in connecting equitable practice theory to impact design and built outcomes. Additionally, Equity by Design saw the need to build alliances with industry partnerships and expand the umbrella of conversation and participation to the built environment.

The group has adopted a three-pronged approach for implementing change, which includes the following:

1. Develop knowledge resources through research data and other studies and reference articles to identify challenging topic areas and expose the factors and complexities of each topic area.

2. Foster discussion, critique, and debate about the research results and various points of view on the challenges from each individual’s background within practice.

3. Promote action through design thinking on policy and culture changes, skill-building workshops for developing leadership, and initiatives in problem solving.

2018 and Beyond    

In marking the five-year anniversary celebrating the group’s work, Equity by Design conducted its third national survey. A national group of volunteers will developed survey goals for capturing career experiences of architectural school graduates from accredited programs (regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, licensure status, or practice status.)

Building upon lessons learned in 2014 and 2016, the survey successfully collected over 14,000 responses from architectural graduates and professionals across the nation. Equity by Design intends to release the key findings of the 2018 survey at #EQxDV: Voices, Values, Vision on November 3, 2018 at the San Francisco Art Institute.

F-Architecture

Sarah Rafson

Self-Examination Chair, Post-Fordist Hymen Factory. Feminist Architecture Collaborative, 2017. Courtesy f-architecture.

The Feminist Architecture Collaborative—f-architecture for short—is a group of three New York-based women who are testing the boundaries of architecture, using the discipline’s tools as a means of resistance. The Trump presidency has given architects new urgency to their activism, but for decades, feminist architects in the United States have grappled with how to decouple the profession from its affiliation with wealth, power, and privilege while claiming space for the female body in the “man-made” environment.

Gabrielle Printz, Virginia Black, and Rosana Elkhatib, who operate from the New Museum’s NewINC collaborative workspace, have shaped, in their words, an “architectural research enterprise aimed at disentangling the contemporary spatial politics and technological appearances of bodies, intimately and globally.” The f in their name stands as much for feminism—which “has been a consistent pejorative within the discipline,” says Printz—as it does for fund, free, fuck, fake, fix, found, and a number of other f-words that show how this practice is anything but conventional.

Sarah Rafson: You’ve described the process of founding the Feminist Architecture Collaborative as “a strange project in itself.” So can you tell me more about that project? Where did it begin?

Gabrielle Printz: It started when we all fell in love with each other and each other’s work at Columbia [University, in New York]. In our last year in the Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture Program we got so entangled in each other’s thesis projects. We could see a hundred ways to collaborate. I think that we just wanted to stay entangled in that same way after graduation. Every effort to make f-architecture is to actualize this thing that we weren’t totally sure was possible but was born out of our friendship.

Virginia Black: Yes, I was doing work in Ecuador, where I had started to borrow methodology from anthropology, and Gabby had a really strong background in looking at bodies and subjects as the most important part of architecture, and Rosana was organizing a performance of feminist and queer bodies in the streets of Amman. Our projects just started to weave together in interesting ways because we had similar interests.

Rosana Elkhatib: For me the moment of “we’re going to be collaborators for life” was when we were eating salad on the stairs of Butler Library and talking about artificial hymens. I was like, “Oh, this is happening."

How did hymens come up?

RE: So there are artificial hymens, often sold as suppositories, primarily to Middle Eastern markets by Chinese manufacturers on Alibaba.com. We just kept looking into it, because it reflects the fixation on and the commodification of the woman’s body. Or the idea that a woman’s worth relies on the hymen, and that a prosthetic is needed to secure that value.

So how are you intervening?

GP: We’re interested in this product because it serves a very particular function, but the function is never for the benefit or pleasure of the wearer, the woman who inserts it. We are interested in this prosthetic artifact taking on different forms and functions and public presentations, things that become separable from the body, but still register it. We made a cosmology of hymen artifacts, or hymen-adjacent artifacts, which exists as a 3D digital model. There are patent drawings of objects from late nineteenth century catamenial garments—early pads, rigged like harnesses, lingerie items that were predominantly designed by men, to make menstrual blood invisible or more pleasant to deal with. We also include different implements for sex that alter the body to enhance men’s pleasure, devices that amplify scrutiny of the body and intact hymen, all the way up to the evidence that is produced to testify to one’s virginity or proper bodily form. That would include things like the virginity covenant (a document signed by a girl and her father or some religious “father”) and medical reports that testify to one’s virginity.

A new phase of the research, which we’ve just finished a proposal for, examines the space of the clinic, where the body is resecured as an ideal entity and where the concept of virginity is reinforced within the social imaginary.

How does this translate into your project “Representative Bodies,” in Ecuador with the Achimamas of Amupakin?

VB: A lot of these projects involve trying to figure out how to represent women within spaces that are highly controlled and also to represent other ways of making space. Much of the research for “Representative Bodies” came out of the relationship that I had with women in the Ecuadorian Amazon I was working with for my thesis, research I had done about UN Habitat and indigenous rights. Because of Gabby’s experience in publications, and Rosana’s experience with performance, we started to broaden the forms of intervention that f-architecture would take on. So we made a publication, Representative Bodies: A Critical Agenda for Habitats Beyond the Urban. We wanted to have a guerrilla publication in the “urban library” at UN Habitat because in order to apply you had to show you were an established organization.

GP: We had space alongside governments, and the World Bank, and institutions like Columbia. It was just Feminist Architectural Collaborative, with a booth that in the end we didn’t even use because we couldn’t pay for it. So we ended up establishing a delegation of women, who were never invited in the first place, to speak on issues that directly impact them, and bringing them into the diplomatic space of UN Habitat.

Do you ever see this as creating a new space in feminism in architecture, too? Or would you rather not even be defined in those terms?

GP: I think architecture’s feminism today so resembles the kind of Sheryl Sandbergian corporate feminism that only benefits a certain demographic. What we’re doing is trying to make architecture’s feminism more intersectional and really apply it as a form of practice. As often as we assert ourselves as architects, even as people who aren’t practicing conventionally, we also endow so many others with the title ‘architect’ by examining their work in that way, and I think that is one important method of making architecture more expansive.

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Sarah Rafson is Ann Kalla Visiting Professor at the Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture. She is an architectural editor, curator, and researcher and the founder of Point Line Projects, an editorial and curatorial agency for architecture and design. Rafson won the Buell Center Oral History Prize for her master’s thesis from Columbia University. She is a board member of ArchiteXX and editor of sub_teXXt, their online journal. She was a curatorial assistant for Bernard Tschumi’s 2014 retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, editorial assistant at the Museum of Modern Art, and editor of two recent books, Parc de La Villette (Artifice, 2014) and Builders, Housewives, and the Construction of Modern Athens (Artifice, 2017).

Open Design Office

Andrea J. Merrett

In April of 1972, several participants in the Boston-based professional group Women Architects, Landscape Architects, and Planners (WALAP) met to discuss starting a feminist practice. They were interested in answering the question, “How would an office of women professionals differ from the traditional (men’s) office?”¹ They agreed that the practice would be a nonprofit enterprise that would “seek commissions for work with some social significance”—for example daycares and housing. Among their goals were: “[to] establish credibility for women, ... [to] provide a model for a new kind of office, ... [and to] research and support research on women’s activities in the profession.”² Six women, Emilie Turano, Joan Sprague, Gwen Noyes Rono, Youngbin Yim, Magda Brosio, and Lois Golden Stern, went on to launch the Open Design Office (ODO).³ They also established a nonprofit organization, the Women’s Design Center, to focus on research and public education on women and the build environment.⁴

Although they did not officially define the procedures for the ODO until the end of the first year, the members agreed on three principles. The first was that all profits would remain within the firm. The members of the ODO believed the structure of most offices was a corporate model in which profit motivated senior partners to exploit employees. In contrast, the ODO sought to treat all its members equally and fairly. After they paid themselves, the members agreed to use any profits earned to subsidize research or community projects. The second principle was that working hours would be completely flexible.⁵ As long as members met deadlines and kept each other informed of their schedules, they could determine their own schedules. The ODO would hold regular meetings to discuss projects and management issues. The third principle was the elimination of an office hierarchy. All members of the office were to reach management decisions together by consensus. Each member was expected to take full responsibility for her projects, and the office would only accept projects on which everyone agreed.

In rejecting a hierarchical structure, the founders of the ODO were responding to an office culture that glorified the myth of the individual creator over the reality that most projects require a team of people. Many offices also excluded women from advancement. In their emphasis on equality, the founders of ODO embraced one of the tenets of radical feminists who rejected hierarchies and what they thought of as “male” leadership qualities such as assertion, domination, and independence. Women’s liberation groups tried to operate without any leaders, giving every member equal say in decision-making through a consensus process. Sprague described this method of working as “affiliative” and compared it to women preparing a meal together: “No one defines who is in charge.”⁶

Whatever the aspirations of the office, a de facto hierarchy did develop.⁷ Sprague was the most experienced member. She had graduated from Cornell in 1953 and practiced for almost twenty years, including a decade as partner in a firm with her then-husband, Chester Sprague. She was also the only registered architect in the office and brought in most of the work.⁸ For some members, the office did not live up to the promise of equality.⁹ Others soon realized that they prefered the security of working as employees. After the first year, four of the six members left the firm and were replaced by new members. For the two women who stayed with the office the longest, Magda Brosio and Marie Kennedy, Sprague’s leadership role was not a problem. She invited Brosio to join the office while Brosio was still a student at the Turin Politecnico in Italy.¹⁰ She had been in the US briefly to marry and returned to the ODO after completing her degree. For her, the office offered an empowering environment despite her youth and inexperience.¹¹ Kennedy graduated from the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1969 and had worked at Urban Planning Aid for two years before joining the ODO in 1973. The office appealed to her because Urban Planning Aid had also been experimenting with a nonhierarchical structure in which all responsibilities, including janitorial work, were shared, and pay was based on need rather than experience.¹² Although the ODO did not go that far in its policies, it promised a supportive environment.

For the first few years, the practice thrived—and even turned a profit.¹³ The busiest years were 1974 and 1975, when the office had commissions for several large projects as well as some smaller projects and consultation jobs. The type of client and the way that the ODO worked with them was very important to the office members. In fact, the ODO turned down at least one project because the client wanted to give them free reign, which would not provide the architect-client interaction the firm sought to cultivate. ODO aspired to work for underserved populations, especially women and children, and it wanted its clients to be full participants in the design process.

One of the most important projects for the ODO was the Roxbury neighborhood rehabilitation. In the late ’60s, Harvard purchased about thirty properties in the largely African American area southwest of downtown Boston, all of which it planned to demolish to expand its hospital. With help from some Harvard students on strike at the time, the affected tenants organized a tenants’ rights association.¹⁴ After contentious negotiations, Harvard agreed to renovate the properties and hired the ODO. The budget did not allow for a full historic restoration, and rapid inflation curtailed the budget even further, forcing the designers to be creative.¹⁵ However, the ODO saw the opportunity to not only provide design solutions, but also to redesign the process. Tenants worked with the ODO from the beginning, and they had a say in the compromises necessary to meet the project constraints. The ODO selected aluminum siding for its economy and availability in many colors. The tenants then chose the colors for siding, trim, accent, and roofing. At the tenants’ request, most of the porches that ODO planned to remove were preserved. The most innovative aspect of the project was the construction documentation. In order to economize on time, the ODO used photographs instead of working drawings to communicate with the contractor. The photographs were also easier for the tenants to read, enabling them to understand exactly what was happening to their homes.

By 1976, the economic downturn threatened the livelihood of the office. The members agreed to give up their rented space and work from home.¹⁶ Because of the ODO’s office structure, the practice had amassed no profit surplus to see it through a recession. Several members left to seek employment elsewhere. The office officially closed by 1978; however it’s legacy continued through the work of Sprague, who went on to co-found the Women’s Development Corporation in 1979, and the Women’s Institute for Housing and Economic Development in 1981.

¹ Open Design Office, “Open Design Office ... A Working Alternative,” Joan Forrester Sprague Papers, Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, MA.

² Ibid.

³ Eleanor Roberts, “Six women partners provide ... A new dimension in architecture,” Sunday Herald Traveler, Section 5, December 3, 1972: 11. After the first year, Rono and Yim left the office and Olga Kahn, Lucille Roseman, Kathryn Allott, Mary Murtagh, and Marie Kennedy joined.

⁴ Roberts, 11.

⁵ WALAP, “The Case for Flexible Work Schedules,” Architectural Forum 137 no. 2 (1972): 53, 66-67.

⁶ Joan Forrester Sprague, “Between Commune and Corporation,” unpublished paper, February 1976, Sprague Papers. Sprague wrote the paper as part of her M.Ed.

⁷ Joan Rothschild and Gerri Traina noted this in a study they did on women’s enterprises, which included the ODO. Joan Rothschild and Gerri Traina, “Women’s Self-Managed Enterprises, A Pilot Study,” July 1976, unpublished study, Sprague Papers.

⁸ Olga Kahn, phone conversation with author, October 19, 2017.

⁹ Olga Kahn, who was with the office in 1974, was disappointed that it did not operate as a true collective.

¹⁰ Magda Brosio, phone conversation with author, October 9, 2017.

¹¹ Magda Brosio, email to author, October 21, 2017.

¹² Marie Kennedy, interview with author, February 24, 2013.

¹³ Rothschild and Traina.

¹⁴ http://www.missionpark.com/history.htm.

¹⁵ Joan Sprague, “A New Kind of Historic Preservation” Neighborhood Rehabilitation for the Roxbury Tenants of Harvard,” unpublished draft, September 1976, Sprague Papers.

¹⁶ William Ronco, “Reshaping the Office,” c.1976, Sprague Papers.

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Andrea J. Merrett is a PhD candidate in architecture at Columbia University writing her dissertation on the history of feminism in American architecture. Her research has received support through a Buell Center Oral History Prize, a Schlesinger Library Oral History Grant, and the Milka Bliznakov Prize from the International Archive of Women in Architecture. Recently she has coedited an issue on women and architecture for the journal de-arq: Journal of Architecture (2017), Universidad de Los Andes, and presented her dissertation research nationally and internationally in New York, Stockholm, and London.

Susana Torre, Feminist in Architectural Education, 1979-91

Brian McGrath

This essay briefly reflects on the period in the 1980s between two of my academic encounters with Susana Torre. The first took place in 1979, when I was a student, at the beginning of her teaching career; and the second, in 1991, as a new faculty member, when Torre became the first chair of the Department of Architecture at Parsons School of Design. This personal perspective is formed within a specific window into an important generational shift in architectural education. I was born at the tail end of the baby boom, caught between the ideals of the ’60s boomers and the realities of the neoliberal world order introduced at the end of the 1970s. My age group directly experienced the cognitive dissonance that resulted from the abrupt shift to a return to “autonomy” of the discipline of architecture from the progressive social and environmental concerns brought to the academy since the ’60s. Torre served as an effective bridge over this paradigmatic chasm, as she taught and practiced the integration of architectural design and progressive social change, a message crucial for the restoration of the ethics by Generation X.

January, 1979

During the winter break of 1979, five classmates and I traveled to midtown Manhattan before our final semester of the Bachelor of Architecture program at Syracuse University. Our goal was to convince Susana Torre, who would be a visiting critic assigned to a third-year studio at Syracuse that semester, to take us on as well. I don’t remember having any socially progressive motivation to seek out design instruction from the only women in five years of architectural design studios. But for all of us, in a holding pattern at Syracuse ready to enter the professional world of New York, a successful young architect in Manhattan seemed like a viable stepping stone. I had recently completed a semester at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies on West Fortieth Street and was not ready to go back to the old school. The visit only strengthened our resolve to work with Torre as we talked to in her studio facing the MoMA garden.

With Dean Werner Seligman’s consent, the studio was quickly reconfigured into a vertical format where teams of third- and fifth-year students worked on a complex housing program for a large vacant lot in downtown Syracuse, with a distinctly feminist twist. Torre’s brief for the studio was largely drawn from an August 1978 special issue of Ms. magazine,  entitled “Who is the Real American Family?” The cover dramatically unmasked the myth of the American family by showing that the working dad/stay-at-home mom structure applied to only 16 percent of families in the United States. The studio integrated three aspects of feminist thought into a complex architectural design problem: a women-centered focus on labor and space, a critique of the American suburb, and a feminist focus on domesticity.

The studio program began with a description of an employed woman’s day in 1979: raising the family in the morning and setting them out for the day; balancing a professional job with shuttling kids, food shopping and preparing meals, and getting everyone to bed. Torre’s brief connected this problem to the design of American suburbs and housing and the dichotomy between public and private, paid and unpaid, arising from structural spatial and economic separations. The only other solutions offered in the neoliberal economy are private, commercial, for-profit childcare, homecare, food, and transportation services. The rise of fast food and commercial day care and their low-paying jobs are complicit with this regime. How do these workers, in fact, take care of their own children?

The studio proposed the design of an experimental residential center that was based in the remaining low-interest Housing and Urban Development cooperative loan programs available at that time. The site was two large vacant blocks in an urban renewal area along an elevated interstate highway separating the university from downtown Syracuse. The studio also analyzed experimental social housing of the past, such as Karl Marx Hof in Vienna, where architectural design and economic organization transcend old descriptions of the home. The program specified a great variety of housing types, reflecting not only the family diversity in the Ms. magazine cover story but also shared amenities, as well as income and job-generating services such as day care, laundry, cooking and dining, co-op food store, elderly services, and public and private outdoor space. The topic was not just an academic exercise, as at the time, Architectural Record held a roundtable on the issue and published an article on the student projects.

In addition to the Marxist-inflected focus on labor and the political economy, the design studio also incorporated a remarkable experiment in architectural space. As Torre would later publish in Heresies Issue 11, Making Room: Women in Architecture, (Vol 3 No 3, 1981), her proposition was “Space as Matrix”. She argued  that both Victorian spatial arrangement of enclosed rooms and corridors and modernist open plan were inadequate for contemporary life. The architectural design of an experimental residential center focused on flexible and complex room arrangements, connections between indoor and outdoor spaces; open kitchens, laundry, and play areas, as well as cooperative cooking and homework. “Space as Matrix” proposes breaking down the conventions of public and private in favor of spatial continuity, hierarchy, and multi-functionality in order to accommodate changing and temporary patterns. Remaking the closed kitchen into a common shared space was central to the interior aspect of the program.

The Ms. Magazine cover for August 1978 provided inspiration for the spring 1979 architectural design studio taught by Susana Torre at Syracuse University. The program called for not only a greater variety of spatial variety in house units, but also shared space for day care, elderly care, common kitchens, and laundries.

1991

In 1991, Torre was appointed as the first chair of the new Department of Architecture at Parsons School of Design, and she invited me to join the faculty. A hundred-year-old art and design college, Parsons became part of The New School for Social Research in 1970, at a time when design education was being radically redefined toward more socially progressive goals. This was especially true of interior design at Parsons, which was renamed Environmental Design. There could have been no better choice to bring the progressive ideas to architectural education to Parsons and The New School  than the leadership of Torre. Torre transformed the single-degree undergraduate program in environmental design, incorporating a professional Masters of Architecture degree and a BFA in Architectural Design, as well as reinstituting the BFA in Interior Design.

As a kind of rehearsal to the new architectural school at Parsons, Torre organized a major conference at The New School just before her appointment in association with Architects Designers and Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR). The conference, "Social Responsibility and the Design Professions” was provocatively subtitled, “A Forum to revive a long-silenced discourse and to re-engage the design professions in the processes of cultural and institutional change in America." Panels included Public Space and the Challenge of Cultural Diversity with Saskia Sassen, Janet Abu-Lughod, and Marshall Berman; Changes in Demography, Economics, and Communications and Their Impacts on Urban and building form, with Christine Boyer and Susan Siebert; urban development and the natural Environment with Robert Yaro and Diana Balmori; and Ethics and Aesthetics in the Discourse on Design with Zeynep Celik and Max Bond.

Torre asked me to develop analysis and representation courses and studios for both the undergraduate and new graduate students as well as develop a new course, Theory of Urban Form, to complement Peggy Deamer’s course, Theory of Architecture Form. The graduate analysis and representation courses covered two semesters that coordinated with the theory courses—one on building analysis and a second on urban analysis. In preparation for this teaching in August, 1991, Torre arranged for a young undergraduate student to give me a crash course on the beta version of a new 3D modeling software, formZ, in order to begin incorporating digital technology into the architectural curriculum.

In addition to the remarkable curricular innovations Torre brought to Parsons, she introduced a creative culture and public life to the school that put into action the social and spatial ideas already a  part of her design studio program at Syracuse. Notable were the exhibitions, conferences, lectures, and school-wide charrettes, such as for the memorial for the uncovered African American Burial Ground in 1992. Notable was the commissioning of Allan Wexler’s Mobile Kitchen, located outside the departmental offices and connected to the design studios in the school’s cast iron loft building on Thirteenth Street. The kitchen folded into a useless nook behind the elevator, but unfolded for exhibitions, reviews and lecture events, temporarily transforming offices and studios into a home.

Caption: Torre commissioned Allan Wexler to design a portable kitchen that could be tucked away in leftover space beside the elevator on the second floor of 23 East 13th Street. The project brought some of the feminist goals of the architectural studio to an institutional setting and has been the social heart of the School of Constructed Environments for two decades.

My own rehearsal for teaching at Parsons included working at Jim Polshek’s office on Union Square and teaching at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark. I settled into my new home in Alphabet City in Manhattan’s East Village in June 1981—the same month that the New York Stock Exchange changed from paper to electronic trading a decade before architecture education adopted the computer. The challenges of housing and urbanism that Torre presented in the undergraduate studio at Syracuse violently played out in my neighborhood. Over the course of that decade, I had numerous opportunities to work with Torre on urban design topics for the American city—always collaborative interdisciplinary teams, planners, landscape architecture, graphic designers, architects, urban designers. My neighborhood and teaching came together when ADPSR organized a design competition for Alphabet City in 1990 called Houses and Gardens on the Lower East Side: Can We Have Both?

The Lower East Side studio served as a template for the larger vision Torre had for making an activist architectural department—one that would engage in the housing and urban issues of our city. Janet Abu-Lughod’s longitudinal fieldwork in the East Village served as a foundation for Parsons to become a partner in the neighborhood’s future. The signature design studio for the new graduate program was a community design and housing project. Torre directed a partnership for the students to collaboratively design a mixed-needs institution that provided housing for low-income disabled people. The project sat on an irregular grouping of vacant lots facing Tenth and Eleventh Streets and Avenue C with Community Access, Inc. and included rental housing with studio and two-bedroom apartments, community laundry rooms, tenant meeting rooms, and offices for counselors. Sandro Marpillero and Silvia Smith from Fox and Fowle were the architects of record.

2018

Walking through Parsons School of Constructed Environment’s (SCE) new offices and studios on the twelfth floor of 2 West Thirteenth Street, one can experience the power of Torre’s “Space as Matrix” model. Designed by Rice+Lipka Architects, the SCE hub is a suite of open spaces and closed rooms with no wall impeding the 350-degree view over Fifth Avenue and Greenwich Village. A common kitchen is located between administrative and faculty offices and studios and lecture rooms. Torre’s legacy is also reflected in the growth of the student body and number of programs. SCE now includes undergraduate and graduate degrees in architecture, interior design, and lighting design, as well as in product and industrial design. It is also home to the country’s signature urban design-build program, the Design Workshop, which continues to serve in the graduate architecture program. Undergraduate students in the program annually construct a temporary outdoor public space as part of the city’s Street Seats program on the corner of Fifteenth Street and Fifth Avenue, a living room for a department that now occupies two buildings on either side of the intersection—as a reminder to New York, Parsons, and The New School of SCE’s feminist legacy.

Caption: The new twelfth-floor hub for the School of Constructed Environments at 2 West Thirteenth Street employs the architectural concept described in  “Space as Matrix.” The design, by Rice+Lipka Architects, deftly balances semi-enclosed shared space for faculty and administrators, open studio space, private meeting and seminar rooms, and a common eat-in kitchen without blocking more than forty windows with views of Midtown and Lower Manhattan.

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Brian McGrath’s books include: Urban Design Ecologies (2012), Resilience in Ecology and Urban Design (2012), Digital Modeling for Urban Design (2008), Cinemetrics (2007), and Transparent Cities (1994). He is a professor of urban design and a principle investigator in the Baltimore Ecosystem Study. He also served as a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Thailand, and an India China Institute Fellow.

The Accidental Advocate

Larry Paschall

Chamber and SBA MOU signing at the Business Equality Conference. Courtesy of Larry Paschall.

Advocacy, much like charity, starts at home. Except that wasn’t the plan. I just wanted to be an architect.

Over twenty years of practice, I’ve worked for various firms. I’ve helped create a new practice with two other partners and eventually ventured out on my own. Somewhere along the way, perhaps as I stood in front of 100+ architects at American Institute of Architects (AIA) Minnesota in 2010, poised to give my first public presentation, I took my first step on the path toward advocacy.

And I didn’t even know it.

My partners and I joined the North Texas Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender (GLBT) Chamber of Commerce in 2010 with one goal in mind—visibility. We were a new firm in a poor economy. No one knew who we were, and we needed business. We would be the only architecture firm in the Chamber.

Soon after joining, I began to volunteer in the Chamber, and soon enough I had spent almost two years serving as the chairman of the Board of Directors. The more involved I became with the Chamber, the more connected I felt to the LGBTQ community. My sense of identity enhanced as a gay man.

At that point, I did not foresee the advances the LGBTQ community would experience, such as the overturning of the Defense of Marriage Act (and by extension the validation of my own marriage).

Yet somehow, as the LGBTQ community continued to make strides toward equality, I was still the only architect in the Chamber. I simply began telling people, “I’m the only gay architect in Dallas.”

That statement wasn’t true. However, reality is often perception. And I knew my reality.

I was the only architect in the Chamber. The AIA did not have an LGBTQ-specific committee or group. And when I attended LGBTQ mixers at the annual AIA conferences, I was the only architect from Dallas, and sometimes the only architect from Texas.

Although I knew other gay architects, the more involved I became in the LGBTQ community, the stronger the idea that I was the only gay architect grew. I knew of others—I just never saw them.

At the same time, I was also busy developing my skills as a public speaker. Whether the idea was new marketing approaches for architecture firms or connecting public service to recognition of architects, I was traveling to various conferences and offering what I hoped were new ideas on how we approached the practice and business of architecture.

With each presentation, I shared personal aspects of my life to help tell the story and create a connection with my colleagues. I “came out” over and over as a gay architect. I was advocating without realizing it.

I left my firm in 2016. I could check the box that said “firm owner” and be proud of what we had accomplished. I was certainly not the same person, and I knew that there were other stops left to visit on my career path. There was more to do as an architect than just own a firm.

Perhaps driven by everything that had been happening in the LGBTQ community and by my time spent with the Chamber, I realized that the time had come to stop advocating as just an architect and business owner and start advocating within the profession from an LGBTQ perspective.

The AIA, after more than 100 years, has begun to recognize the diversity and inclusion issues within the organization and within the profession. Committees have been formed. Surveys done. Reports issued. Conferences held. Each one centering on two groups—women and minorities.

Yet when the 2016 Equity in Architecture survey asked respondents about their sexual orientation, the response was so low that the information was unable to be included in the final report. Other architecture organizations had no datasets available either. Had the question ever been asked before? Or are architects still reluctant to answer the question for fear of losing their jobs?

If the AIA wants to talk about diversity and inclusion, it must consider everyone. Diversity and inclusion cannot stop at just women and minorities. Poor survey responses do not mean that LGBTQ architects are not dealing with their own unique issues. We do not have another 100 years to wait for our turn.

As LGBTQ architects, if we want the AIA to start addressing our issues; if we want to be included in the discussions about diversity and inclusion; and if we want more than a cocktail reception at the annual conference; then LGBTQ architects must begin inserting ourselves into the conversation.

At the next conference of the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA) or at the next meeting about equity in architecture, someone needs to ask how the needs of LGBTQ architects are being addressed.

We must make sure we are counted, and we need to be doing this at local, state, and national levels. We must look at how we can create a presence for ourselves on social media.

I am not the only gay architect, as much as I may feel that way at times. If we do not want to stay the silent minority, then our voices must be heard. I insist we have a seat at the table.

More importantly, we must be ready to step up and answer when organizations call on us to do so. We cannot work to make ourselves part of the conversation and not be willing to step into a leadership role.

And should we find ourselves still sitting outside the AIA looking in, we should be prepared to create our own space. NOMA began in 1971 with twelve architects in Detroit.

Advocacy only takes one person—even if that person is the only gay architect in Dallas.

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Larry Paschall, AIA, is CEO of Spotted Dog Architecture, specializing in residential architecture. Mr. Paschall is a fervent advocate for his industry and the communities in which he both lives and serves. He is currently pursuing advocacy opportunities within the architecture and LGBTQ communities.

Liquid Incorporated

Gabrielle Printz

Liquid Incorporated, Headroom, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, 1995. Courtesy of Amy Landesberg and Lisa Quatrale.

Liquid Incorporated was a practice established in 1991 by architecture’s illegitimate daughters, Amy Landesberg and Lisa Quatrale—two women pursuing the liquefaction of a paternal profession they could never simply inherit. They were not legally incorporated (a joke or a dream or a precedent applied unscrupulously), but the corporate moniker came to define a collaborative entity that resisted the modern impulse to regenerate disciplinary concerns into a set of business protocols. Rather, in their corporate body, they attempted to dissolve the structural limits of architecture and its practice.

This wet and wild undoing of architectural subjectivity also extended to the disputed content of their domain: they embraced “merely mere” forms of architectural action through the expansion of ornament and in “minor” interior interventions. Exhibitions became an important vehicle for their work, and in the context of the gallery, their body-minded architectural gestures urged new intimacies between subjects and objects of design. The women of Liquid Inc embraced architecture in all its material possibility, privileging matter over concept while suffering no loss of the latter. It was the slippery stuff of architecture—plumbing and plaster and drapery—that attracted them. Inside wet walls and in newly conceived intimate spaces, they confronted the gendered dis-position of materials coded as feminine, inessential, unsightly, or excessive. Embracing Lilly Reich and Bruce Goff at the expense of Mies and Loos, they proceeded to indulge dissolution against canonization.

Landesberg and Quatrale formed Liquid Inc in the prescriptive disciplinary space of Yale, where they partnered as graduate students; they had both lost their mothers and grew closer around Amy’s young daughter. To the discomfort of some faculty and their peers, they banded together to elucidate a more fluid space of operation. Their (il)legitimate entity was formalized in their collaborative final project at Yale: see angel touch, a close examination of the cornice of angels on Louis Sullivan’s Bayard Building, as documented in the now twenty-year-old Architecture and Feminism anthology. Literally scanning Sullivan’s once-molten terracotta, a myopic view of thickened ornamental space, they found something they desired, “a superstitious space” in the company of angels.

After graduation, Landesberg and Quatrale went on to identify other opportunities for intervention in the marginal spaces of practice and in architecture’s marginal elements: cornices, door thresholds, modesty screens, weeping sections, expanding joints, collars for columns, desks for makeup and making up architecture, and other “incident[s] of furnishing in the unstable space.” These excesses, so called in their 1996 exhibition, were the superfluous matter arranged to loosely structure promiscuous relations between space, surface, and body. In Marilyn Kiang’s Atlanta gallery (“you know who she is”) and the private space of her office-cum-boudoir, excessive architectures take on subjective qualities, lives, ambitions, and ulterior motives of their own. Plexiglass is allowed to sink under its own gravity, and thresholds are outfitted with rubber gaskets and peacock feathers to catch passing bodies in an embrace. Their “modesty screen” reveals the body in its drawn and built states; it seems to sense, rather than simply show, what’s concealed. These exhibited designs anticipated other kinds of spatial occupations and perhaps also the unexpected content of one’s psyche, newly attuned to fluid spaces and fluid movements through them—a kind of derive in close quarters, over linoleum eskimo-kissed with eyelashes, toward a door that holds you like a keepsake.

But these were gestures with precise vocabularies. The deliberate use of text laminated into drawings and repeated in unison at lectures qualified the work and also their roles in producing it. Landesberg narrates a house—Adam’s Eye—to her daughter, and her reflections are incorporated into the narrative of the project as it’s published in ANY (No. 4, 1994). Drawings are text, annotations are structural. The scanned image performs as drawing, where section cuts open into photographs and technical details “present themselves as image,” as if of their own accord. They drew exclusively with ink on mylar, liquid on a surface that is translucent, but also reflective; it returns a gaze. Seeing these details “too close,” myopically, subverted a vision of architecture as necessarily whole, as in the humanistic tradition, and those details are recognized at points of vulnerability and instability.

In instances of building, which largely occured in the context of the gallery, they were also deliberate in their denial of structural efficiencies. Rather than performing the virtue of support, architectural objects are themselves held in a subjective embrace: there, a column is relieved of its duties and is instead held up by “a tight squeeze.” The same structural figure appears on mylar as a column of text, lived out through its own second-hand narrative. In the drawing, speculations about the columns’ gender question its classical applications: “they are usually girls, that is when ordered, well this one is pretty disorderly.”

Liquid Inc’s promiscuous architecture doesn’t reproduce feminine metaphors but instead exploits weaknesses in a discipline and profession so reliant on its preferences for masculine performance.

Their labor of dissolution did not arrive at the point of conversion where critical work yields to the compromising positions taken to forge a sustainable architectural enterprise. That is to say, their “unfirm” did not survive in Atlanta, where they worked and taught. Excluded from the arena of profit-making architecture even as they reproduced its corporate guise, Landesberg and Quatrale practiced a kind of poetry against what they saw as a violent hegemony enacted in diffuse ways throughout the making of architecture.

What kind of practice are we? Illegitimate daughters illegitimately claiming paternity. Promiscuous daughters with multiple fathers. Seeking fathers—an inevitable course in the process of architectural re-generation. Such a paternalistic discipline. Should we kill them like our modernist fathers do? Or try to fill their shoes like our classical fathers do? How do daughters claim an inheritance? Where for god’s sake are our mothers?

But in moments of solubility, at the edges of the discipline, where ornament stretches into space, where the wetness is made to spill into dry zones, a liquid practice found expression.

Noel Phyllis Birkby

Stephanie Schroeder

“It appears that if you were a man, you should be studying architecture.”

With that dismissal, in 1948 Noel Phyllis Birkby’s suburban New Jersey high school career counselors crushed her aspirations. Based on their rigid notions of gender, they shunted her desire to build, guiding her into the more “feminine” study of art despite her aptitude for and interest in architectural and environmental design. Birkby’s career in architecture was almost derailed even before it began. When Birkby returned to New York City in the early 1950s after spending one year at the Women’s College of the University of North Carolina, she had a serendipitous encounter with a female architect who inspired her to pursue the profession.

She enrolled in Cooper Union’s architecture program in 1959, and for the next five years studied architecture at night while working in administrative positions in the offices of the architects Henry L. Horowitz and Seth Hiller. She earned her certificate in architecture in 1963 and completed a Masters in Architecture in 1966 at Yale, where she was one of only six women in a class of 200. At that time, there were about 1,500 registered female architects and roughly 35,000 male practitioners in the United States. Although Birkby’s entry into the world of architecture was delayed, she quickly made a name for herself as a visionary.

Birkby worked as a senior designer at Davis Brody and Associates from 1966 until 1972, when she opened her own practice. While at Davis Brody, she designed the Waterside Plaza that sits along the Hudson River in Manhattan and the Long Island University Library Learning Center in downtown Brooklyn. She described the latter as “designed more as a fabric than as a building.”

Waterside Plaza, New York, 1974, Davis Brody & Associates

Long Island University Library Learning Center, Brooklyn, 1975, Davis Brody & Associates.

The metaphor of weaving and knitting appears repeatedly in Birkby’s writings. It is not a coincidence that knitting and weaving are considered “women’s work” and therefore seen as ornamental or extraneous to architectural design. Women’s ideas for and concerns about the built environment are often considered irrelevant or unimportant by many architects, regardless of their gender. Once admitted to the field, Birkby continued to resist conforming to architecture’s masculine norms.

Birkby conceived of a gendered analysis of the built environment during the height of the women’s liberation movement in the early 1970s. She moved in circles with prominent feminists of the time. Along with Kate Millett, Barbara Love, Sydney Abbott, and other high-profile feminist activists, she took part in CR One, the earliest consciousness-raising group in New York City, which helped women more fully understand the systemic oppression and everyday sexism they encountered

Redefining and expanding environmental parameters was of the utmost concern to Birkby. Her research, teachings, and writings investigate the origin of design itself. What environments would women create, and how would women organize those environments if they had carte blanche to do so?

Design for and by women would be Birkby’s lifelong pursuit. “This ongoing project evolved from my participation in the design of a women’s commune in New England. Questions of appropriate forms, spaces and symbols were raised and we asked each other if women have unique sensibilities that they bring to the process of designing their own environments,” Birkby wrote in her notes for an article on the topic of women and the built environment. She indicated that this question had also recently been raised among design professionals in terms of “Do women design differently than men?” She concluded that whether or not they do, architectural education conditioned women to confine themselves to “male-defined processes in a male-dominated atmosphere and are apt to become male-identified in their approach to design problems.”

Photograph from a workshop at the Women’s School of Architecture + Planning, where Birkby integrated the fantasy workshops into the school’s curriculum. Work from an Environmental Fantasy Workshop. From the Phyllis Birkby Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Special Collections.

Participants in Birkby’s environmental fantasy workshops in the mid-1970s were asked to imagine their ideal living environments by abandoning all constraints and preconceptions. The workshops consisted of sharing and recording women’s fantasies, in drawn form, about how they wanted to live, eat, sleep, work, make love, make friends, spend time alone, learn, walk, garden, relax, think, and be. Birkby held her program of environmental fantasy workshops with women of diverse backgrounds. Deb Edel, a cofounder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, remembers attending an environmental fantasy workshop spanning several days in Birbky’s home sometime in the late ’70s: “About five or six women were in attendance and we discussed how we wanted to use (and reuse) the space in which we were currently living.” According to Edel, “Birkby tried to get across why we don’t have to hold space in traditional ways or in ways designed by men for us.”

An original outline of the Women’s Environmental Fantasies curriculum indicates those who would be participating were “older women, housewives, female kids, nuns, career women, lesbians, straights, writers, painters, doctors, secretaries, factory workers, mothers, daughters, sisters, grandmas.” The next section of the syllabus asks why these women’s ideas and opinions were important. The answer was, in short, “Because no one ever asked us.”

In another outline for the Women’s Environmental Fantasies workshop, Birkby indicates fantasy was also used as a consciousness-raising technique to address architectural education. “Not only is fantasy the beginning of creativity, but fantasy expression has been found useful by psychologists in helping people get in touch with their own experience, a problem we find relevant to the education of women architects,” she wrote. Her investigation into women’s environmental fantasies found a “striking aspect of many projections for the desire for expansive spaces very often combined with options for total privacy. The free choice of isolation is something many women have been denied.” Birkby used tools ranging from speculative renderings drawn by women to broad discussions of alternatives to traditional uses for and organization of space to interrogate the traditional foundational aspects of architecture.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Birkby also cobbled together a modest income through design commissions and teaching at a number of colleges and universities. Yet as the boom years of the 1980s turned into the conservative ’90s, Birkby, outspoken and unorthodox, wasn’t getting much work. She picked up one-off jobs through word of mouth within the lesbian-feminist community.

Work from an Environmental Fantasy Workshop. From the Phyllis Birkby Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Special Collections.

In 1992 Birkby began spending more time at her summer home in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The heady days of meaningful work and feminist activism had long passed. The AIDS crisis gripped the nation, and the continuing inaction of the US government around this epidemic engendered righteous anger and spawned massive protests within the LGBT community. Architecture and design were on the back burner as much lesbian activism, at least in NYC, focused on activity related to the devastation of the gay male population resulting from HIV.

Birkby died from breast cancer at sixty-one in 1994 in hospice at Fairview Hospital in Great Barrington. During her final months she was surrounded by her chosen family of friends and comrades. The late Sydney Abbott was the only person present when Birkby passed.

In 1997, the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College celebrated Birkby’s work in the exhibition Amazonian Activity: The Life and Work of Noel Phyllis Birkby, 1932-94. Attendees included Kate Millett, Sydney Abbott, and other lesbian-feminist activists who wanted to honor this radical American architect and activist who moved the profession forward by challenging its assumptions and rattling its underpinnings.

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Sources: Material for this article was found in the Noel Phyllis Birkby Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA; The Lesbian Herstory Archives, Brooklyn, NY; and Bertoli, Alberto and Phyllis Birkby. January 01, 1980. “Alberto Bertoli And Phyllis Birkby.” In SCI-Arc Media Archive. Southern California Institute of Architecture. http://sma.sciarc.edu/video/alberto-bertoli-and-noel-phyllis-birkby/.

Stephanie Schroeder is a New York City-based writer and activist with special interest in feminism(s), mental health, LGBTQ issues, design, creativity, and alternative economies. She is coeditor of HEADCASE: LGBTQ Writers & Artists on Mental Health and Wellness, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. www.stephanieschroederauthor.com