This project is about the process of women giving birth to a new architecture. It emerged in 1973 as part of my search for a feminist consciousness and process of woman-identification. I had come to realize my own male-identification and conditioning — especially as an architect (registered, licensed, numbered, legitimatized by the patriarchy). What would a truly supportive environment be if women had their way? Would women design the world differently than men? I purposely began workshops with women not professionally involved with architecture to avoid the machismo conditioning the professional is subjected to. To some extent all women are conditioned by the dominant culture, but they usually do not see themselves as creators of the built environment. However, all women experience it, react to it, live and work in it, and are affected by it, consciously or not. I wanted to help lay a foundation for a new architecture based on the experience, consciousness and creative imagination of women in the process of self-definition. — NPB
In 1968 I began teaching architecture, including design "method ology," the process by which subjective experience and intuition are systematically objectified and rationalized. I was unaware of how one-dimensional this approach is and how it isolates mind from body, feeling from action, and divides people into male female, white/non-white, rich/poor, old/young. While objective description is important, it is incomplete. As I became involved in the women’s movement, I recognized the importance of listening to myself, of trusting my own experience. By 1974 I had taught hundreds of students, less than one percent of them women, and was still the only woman faculty member in the University of Detroit School of Architecture. Despite my strong connection to other feminists, I felt painfully fragmented and isolated. I urgent ly needed to explore many conflicts between my woman-identity, my teaching and the man-made environment, to discover and embrace the environmental sensibilities of other women. —LKW
We began collaborating in 1974, collecting women's drawings of their environmental fantasies in workshops conducted across the country, literally "from Maine to California." The women constituted a wide cultural cross-section — diverse in life style, age, experience and education.
A workshop participant notes, "Underlying the fantasies is a common kind of understanding. I know the sources from which these needs arise. I feel them too.... I can relate to the messages in these drawings because l’ve experienced so many of the same frustrations, needs and daydreams. They seem to reflect me in them too. It makes me feel really connected to other women.
Readily apparent is the intense hunger for a truly supportive environment. Although many drawings reveal humor, whimsy, imagination and complexities, there are frequently signs of neglected and unfulfilled needs. There are expressions of anger and rage, often convoluted into a light-hearted joke, a defense mechanism familiar to many women. The range of vision is characterized by women's multiple rhythms and experiences. There is no one dominant statement. Nevertheless, we have noticed patterns that speak of shared experiences and common aspirations.
AUTONOMY, CHOICE AND CONTROL. We see networks of accessibility, intricate support systems, a desire for greater mobility in limitless landscapes, a tremendous openness usually qualified by a definite need for protection, through either distance or symbolic, metaphysical barriers. Many women depict retreats, but most often with some connection to the public domain.
FLEXIBILITY, ADAPTABILITY AND CHANGE. The drawings relate the shifting of human mood to the shifting of environmental form over time. Architecture is not static and monolithic, but manipulable, expanding and contracting, organically evolving —stretchable nets, systems of attachment and separation, multiple purposes, recycleable forms.
LIFE AS A MOSAIC OF CONTINUOUS EXPERIENCE. Many drawings show a spatial organization that is multicentered, fluid, informal and non-linear. Time is perceived as a continuum, often embodied in swirling movement and spiraling forms.
INCLUSION OF THE HUMAN DIMENSION. The expression of physical and emotional intimacy is consistent. Although there are vast spaces and vertical forms, there is little abstraction or monumentality. Spaces are described directly in terms of human activity relaxing, dancing, working, screaming, lovemaking, eating.
INTEGRATION OF BODY/SENSUALITY AND MIND/ORDER. Sensory stimulation plays an important role — temperature and climate, surface textures, sounds, smells, the softening of hard-edged shapes into more fluid architectural forms. At the same time, work, technology, order, thought and access to information are included within these spaces. Water, plants, colored prisms, soft pillows and saunas coexist with libraries, toolshops, financial institutions and computers.
RECOGNITION OF LIFE’S COMPLEXITY AND AMBIGUITY. Forms are often open-ended and inclusive — tapestries of complication and detail, wheels within wheels of wavelike organization, inclusiveness within a private space that shows an awareness of multiple scales of experience and relations.
The physical world constitutes a necessary component in this program for change as women continue to sort out what they want and need for a new society. We know that through our condition ing we can adapt to all kinds of spaces, but we also know that space can dominate, inhibit, reinforce role patterns. It can remind us we are small or large, with or without will. Space itself can be receptive and intrusive, expansive and restrictive. In short, it can be a form of either social control or support. A supportive environment may be many things to different people. Its physical element is but one aspect of what women conceive of as a context in which self-actualization can be achieved. A truly supportive environment would consist of cooperative, non-competitive, dynamic, in/out interactions with each other, a lack of power over relationships and an economic system and atmosphere that encourage the development of feminist institutions housed in appropriate forms and spaces of our own making. Since this project began, there has been increasingly visible evidence of a new women’s culture. We are reclaiming language, poetry music, art, ritual, religion. Architecture, curiously referred to by our culture as the "mother of the arts," can be reclaimed too. We can learn much from our past, but there is an urgent need to listen to our own experience as women if we are to create the morphology of the future. —NPB
Architecture is rarely created in isolation. It must be evaluated and criticized within the semiological framework of history and culture. A closer look at the man-made environment from a feminist perspective reveals the iconography of the patriarchal culture in spatial metaphors. One of the most obvious is the ex treme bifurcation between public and domestic environments. The public world of events, "man's world," is associated with objectivity, individuality and rational functionalism. The private domain, the single-family detached house, "women's world," is associated with subjectivity, cooperation and nurturance. One of the most important responsibilities of architectural feminism is to heal this artificial spatial schism. We need to find a new morphology, a new architectural language in which the words, grammar and syntax synthesize work and play, intellect and feeling, action and compassion. This is not a particularly new insight, but I reiterate it here because so many women expressed the same vision in their environmental fantasy drawings. A feminist architecture will emerge only from a social and ecological evolution embodying feminist sensibilities and ideology. Architectural form making is a political act. We will not create a new and integrated environment until our society values those aspects of human experience that have been devalued through the oppression of women. And no one will ever convince me that we have a "revolution until I see feminism institutionalized in the nature and quality of the environments we build. — LKW
Noel Phyllis Birkby is a registered architect in New York and teaches architectural design at Pratt Institute. Leslie Kanes Weisman is a professor of Architecture and Environmental Design at New Jersey Institute of Tech nology. Both are long-time feminist activists and among the co-founders of the Women’s School of Planning and Architecture. They have written for many feminist and professional journals and hope to share their collection of drawings in book form.