It is but granted that the current expanses of our man-made environment are largely imagined at the drafting tables of men. Save for a few women at the helm of things, and even fewer we now know of as part of a revisionist history gaining traction in discourse, can we name other designers, activists, patrons and critics whose contributions affected the built environments that, in turn, shape us today? As architectural historian Alice T Friedman points out in her book, Women and the Making of the Modern House (1998), the formal expression of modernism's break with tradition was actually more likely to be freely expressed in atypical projects—such as those by women architects or commissioned by female clients—and parts of society considered outside the norm. This radical redefinition of normative means of occupying space, a challenge to the ways in which our man-made environment orders us, is significant. What would it mean, for instance, if architecture were more typically based on women’s lived experiences? It was this question that formed the central enquiry of the life and work of Phyllis Birkby, a New York-based architect practising in the 1970s. Her work, teachings and significantly, her notion of fantasy and its role in rethinking conventional architectural paradigms, is currently the subject of an exhibition at the Center for Architecture in New York, Fantasizing Design: Phyllis Birkby Builds Lesbian Feminist Architecture.

Curated by architectural scholars Stephen Vider and M.C. Overholt, the showcase, on view till September 2, 2025, explores Birkby's life and her design philosophies through an extensive archive preserved by the Smith College. Following Birkby's life from architecture school to her practice and later activism and teaching, the display brings together over 80 photographs, drawings, personal letters and films – "the largest show of her work to date", as the press release states. The feminist, lesbian activist and educator's life was dedicated to understanding and critiquing the limits of conventional practice, which at the time, and even today, privileges male bodies. Instead, Birkby hoped to conceive of an architecture that prioritised women, LGBTQIA+ communities, the elderly and people with disabilities. "The question of feminist architecture is ultimately not just about designing for women," the curators note in conversation with STIR. "It’s about how thinking from a feminist lens can help us critique how the built environment currently oppresses people."

Discovering Birkby's work through an illuminating conversation with the curators was an exciting revelation for me, especially considering how she, apart from critiquing gendered architecture, hoped to reveal how spatial design orders us—categorises and surveils us—and redefine this through a queer lens. “Is there a woman’s aesthetic? Do women design differently than men? If so, is it a biological fact or rather a culturally induced phenomenon? How much does ‘myth’ play a part in woman’s own conditioning? In a man’s conditioning?” Birkby would write in her notebook. Questioning what was being presented as a necessary and unyielding status quo, she continued, “Does the term ‘man-made environment’ do anything to you? Would you ever say ‘woman-made environment?”

There are several instances in her life that feel all too real to my (and certainly most women’s) experiences of the discipline. My research into Birkby’s history reveals how she was discouraged from studying architecture because she was a woman, but still ended up graduating from Cooper Union’s architecture program. She went on to complete a Master's program at Yale, where she was one of only six women in a class of 200. This ratio of women enrolled in architecture is far more skewed towards a majority today, but is, however, still not reflected equally in practice. We do not quite hear of an abundance of women in independent practices, or conversely, having an independent women-led practice is still hailed as almost extraordinary. Birkby’s work hoped to—at the very least—find avenues for engagement with architecture that included everyone.

The historical period in which Birkby was asking these questions is also relevant in understanding the themes underpinned by the show. The radical feminist movement of the 1970s emphasised a reevaluation of women’s relationships with the built environment. During this time, periodicals like Country Women were similarly encouraging women to build new spaces designed to suit their needs. Birkby herself participated in several demonstrations, organising communes and taking over an empty building in the East Village, establishing a women’s centre there. She would also tour the United States with her colleagues, documenting instances of women building vernacular structures. In 1972, when she attended an event on “Women in Architecture" (taken aback by the inherent performative nature of the term), she described the event as “a bizarre gathering of architectural females of varying levels of consciousness.” It was allegedly here, as she continues in her letter, that she decided she would "make a gay architecture”.

Central to this reconceptualisation—as the exhibition also spotlights—were a series of workshops she and her chosen family of colleagues and friends conducted. These were part of feminist activist and teaching demonstrations conducted with women from different backgrounds as exercises to imagine and draw “fantasy environments” – the domestic and community spaces they would like to occupy. Birkby described the project's focus on fantasy, writing, "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." By focusing on the liberating notion of women's fantasies, Birkby concluded that architectural education might be able to do away with "male-defined processes in a male-dominated atmosphere." She would conduct these workshops with nearly everyone, inviting "older women, housewives, female kids, nuns, career women, lesbians, straights, writers, painters, doctors, secretaries, factory workers, mothers, daughters, sisters, grandmas"; also revealing her central concern in conceiving the activity: "Because no one ever asked us”, she writes.

On display in the exhibition space in New York are several of these wonderfully imaginative architectural drawings. In the eponymously titled section, sketches depict different women's desire for their own worlds. Expansive spaces, domes made of jell-o, descriptions of a place where everyone can live together and spaces that allow for total privacy are almost overwhelming yet incredible to encounter. The prevalence of domes in several of these works is perhaps a nod to their ultimately utopian conception (drawing on the futuristic work of Buckminster Fuller), but the imagination of a different way of living, of what is and isn’t possible for queer communities, especially in conceiving domestic life remains relevant to this day.

Apart from the use of speculation and fictional architecture as a tool to construct a more forbearing environment, Birkby would also go on to co-found the Women’s School of Planning and Architecture, vying to come up with alternatives to traditional uses for and organisation of space. Apart from drawings and letters, the exhibition also includes some of her architectural commissions from the time she worked as a senior designer at Davis Brody and Associates. She describes one of her projects as designed "more as a fabric than as a building”. The metaphors of weaving and knitting are scattered throughout her writing—a clue to the notion that the soft structures conceived through weaving (seen as ‘women’s work’) could be a way to convey an alternative form of architecture.

The use of textile in Birkby’s work is also highlighted by one of the two specially commissioned projects on display in Fantasizing Design. In the Fantasy, I am Already There, conceived by LJ Roberts as a queer, chaotic and exuberant collage of Birkby’s archive, employs quilted textiles, wheatpasted posters and a series of neon signs. By juxtaposing Birkby’s blueprints and love letters, manifestos and mementos, Robert’s work highlights the entanglements between her personal relationships, activism and critical practice. How do we think about our everyday life in political terms? When talking about domesticity and conceptions of lived experience that deviate from the norm, we must acknowledge the entanglement of the personal and the political.

The second installation, You can't criminalize a fantasy built by hand, is an interactive artwork by a collective of artists, Rehearsing. It foregrounds the experiences of migrant Asian massage and sex workers in Queens by creating a makeshift massage parlour within the gallery. By using ephemeral material like tape and cellophane, it creates a transparency to the space, emphasising the labour of repair these women carry out within their realms, and the transience of their domestic experience. Moreover, the curators invite visitors to take part and create their own fantasy worlds with a giant roll of butcher paper on one of the gallery's walls. The exhibition makes a valiant attempt at unravelling how Birkby's project of questioning conventional systems of architecture is significant today. The emphasis on radical feminist ideas on community, care, inclusivity and solidarity are particularly germane, especially in the context of a state that increasingly polices female and queer bodies.

To return to our precursive question: what would it look like if architectural paradigms were based on bodies other than male—what if they were conceptualised with the needs of women in mind, what if they derived their ontologies from the queer body? Alternatively, what role can fantasy play in addressing issues of the tangible built environment?

In Birkby's work, particularly her 'fantasy environments', there is a glimpse of a more considerate futurity. “The question of how many people who are marginalised in different ways by heteronormative systems of care can use fantasy as a tool to imagine otherwise, and what the complexities of that fantasy look like [are what we hope to highlight],” the curators note. Continuing about the relevance of fantasy for the times we live in today, especially for communities whose lived realities are denied, Overholt emphatically underscores, “We have to have fantasy, we have to have that horizon, to have something to fight for, and I think that's what I'm excited to see people interact with in the exhibition.”

In line with Margaret Atwood's question, Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Birkby's fantasies are a disavowal of man-made environments, showing us the possibility of a different way of being, by embracing the messiness of life.

Fantasizing Design: Phyllis Birkby Builds Lesbian Feminist Architecture is on display at the the Center for Architecture in New York until September 2, 2025.