Fantasy is the Beginning of Creation
The following essay is adapted from Stephen Vider’s new book, The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity.
In November 1971, thirty-eight-year-old architect Phyllis Birkby was surprised to find herself pictured in the pages of the radical magazine Ramparts, accompanying an article on gay liberation. The photograph had been taken at the gay pride march in Manhattan that June and captured Birkby embracing another woman. Birkby had pursued romantic and sexual relationships with other women from the time she was in college in the 1950s, but, by her own account, the rise of gay liberation and lesbian feminism in the late 1960s and early 1970s represented, for her, a reawakening.
Nevertheless, Birkby struggled to define herself at a moment when the world of architecture and design was almost entirely dominated by men and the women’s movement was still led largely by straight women. In 1972, she attended an event on “Women in Architecture.” In a letter to her lover at the time, novelist Bertha Harris, she described the event as “a bizarre gathering of architectural females of varying levels of consciousness.” “CHRIST IT WAS PAINFUL,” Birkby wrote. “Coming out is not always the breeze one wishes it to be.” When the time came for her to speak, Birkby wrote, she “looked down and found such unfriendly territory, I rocked back into my spare closet and felt a failure, why the hell can’t I fly?” Birkby thought the Ramparts article would have done the coming out for her, but apparently, Birkby reasoned, “architects don’t read Ramparts.” Birkby’s most radical suggestion was that women first needed to figure out “what we all mean by the absurd term Women in Architecture,” and do so away from “Them”—that is, away from men. The experience provoked Birkby to make a promise to Harris: “I am going to make a gay architecture, a lesbian architecture, and I am going to give it to you.”
Figure 1. Phyllis Birkby filming at artist Caroling’s stained glass Wholeo Dome in Monte Rio, California, February 1978. Noel Phyllis Birkby Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass.
For Birkby the tasks of understanding what it meant to be a woman in architecture and what a lesbian architecture might look like were intimately intertwined and would guide much of her work over the next decade. At the core of both questions was home itself. Since the late eighteenth century, American understandings of gender, sexuality, and the built environment were tightly bound: private domestic space was frequently understood to define, confine, and protect the feminine body and female sexuality. Yet home was also a site of principal contradiction—it was defined as “female space,” yet still determined, controlled, and largely designed by men. Birkby argued that reimagining private space was an important step in remaking women’s lives and identities.
Birkby’s call for a lesbian architecture stemmed from a longer thread of second-wave feminist thought and activism that targeted postwar domestic norms as sites of social and psychological oppression. Yet while many feminist thinkers critiqued the conventional American household, Birkby was among the first to locate women’s oppression in the built environment itself. In 1973, Birkby began running a series of workshops—what she called the “environmental fantasy” project—in which she asked women to imagine and draw their ideal living spaces, free of any pragmatic constraints. As Birkby wrote, “All we had around us was originally fantasized by men since they were the ones, I too acutely felt, that dominated the very processes that controlled and led to [the] physical form[s] that shaped our very existence.” Birkby believed only through fantasy could women shake off their psychological conditioning and begin to imagine new spaces.
Figure 2. “My Block by Joan (Lavender Lane) in the City of Sisterly Love,” was one of the earliest fantasy environment drawings collected by Birkby, c. 1974. Noel Phyllis Birkby Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass.
Birkby ran her earliest workshops in 1973, among small groups of women she knew through feminist, art, and literary circles in New York—nearly all of them identifying as lesbians. It’s unclear exactly how Birkby prompted the conversation, but most participants imagined women-only environments, where women could connect with each other socially and sexually.
During a workshop at their apartment, sculptor Ann Pollon and her partner, Gail, imagined a communal women’s home with one large bed where everyone could sleep together. It would be ideal, they agreed, “if you were the right kind of woman.” Another early participant named Joan reenvisioned a city block with rowhouses connected by bridges and basement passageways—she called it “Lavender Lane” (figure 2). It included a large shared kitchen; a “big party space” with a “dance floor with bars and mirrors,” a “superstereo,” and movie screen; a recording studio, dark room, and art studio; plus a “soundproof scream room.”
Birkby published her first article about the environmental fantasy project in the lesbian feminist magazine Cowrie in April 1974, under the title “Amazon Architecture.” The article was based on a workshop with the magazine’s editor, artist Liza Cowan, and two of her friends, Mary and Cheryl—both of them carpenters. Birkby’s article largely quoted from the conversations, stringing lines together like a poem: “Turn off the power and the World Trade Center will crumble in 20 years. . . . ,” “Relearn how to live from the ground up. . . . We are faced with the problem of how the changes in our internal lives can have effect on our work, our loving, our living arrangements, our shelter, spaces, environment.” The article, and the issue cover, featured a drawing by Birkby, trying to visualize this new community: an Amazonian network, circular, organic bubbles streaming between the decaying urban centers, represented by dense, linear grids.
Figure 3. Fantasy environment drawing by Liza Cowan, c. 1973, from one of Birkby’s earliest fantasy environment exercises. Noel Phyllis Birkby Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass., with permission of Liza Cowan.
Birkby’s work resonated with a larger conversation about women and architecture that was just beginning to take off. In September 1972, the magazine Architectural Forum ran a long report by senior editor Ellen Perry Berkeley, titled “Women in Architecture,” investigating the lack of opportunities for women in the field and the ongoing gender gap in architecture graduate programs and professional organizations. In May 1974, New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable wrote her own groundbreaking essay on women in architecture, “The Letterhead is Solidly Male,” reporting on the low number of women in the profession as well as discrimination those women faced. Huxtable also asked whether women design differently from men: “Is there, or isn’t there, then, a difference in sensibility between the male and the female designer? Do women perceive the environment differently from men?” The answer, Huxtable answered, was yes, but this was less innate than cultural—shaped by women’s traditional role in the home.
Figure 4. This fantasy environment drawing, c. 1974, included a dome that could be variably opened and closed, allowing friends in but keeping demands out. Noel Phyllis Birkby Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass.
Spring 1974 was a major moment of crossover for Birkby’s work. The journal Design & Environment published a special issue on “Women in Design,” featuring Birkby’s environmental fantasy project. Birkby’s description was reduced to a paragraph, but a full page was devoted to drawings from the project, including those by Cowan. That March, Birkby also presented the environmental fantasy project at one of the first conferences on architecture and gender, “The Women in Architecture Symposium,” organized by a group of graduate and undergraduate students at Washington University in St. Louis. The goal, the program explained, was “to explore the many concerns of professional women in architecture—role conflicts, professional attitudes and design capabilities.” The program indicated that Birkby would present a video depicting how the built environment was “disabling for a woman in NYC with three small children,” but she focused instead on the fantasy environment project.
“While many feminist thinkers critiqued the conventional American household, Birkby was among the first to locate women’s oppression in the built environment itself.”
Birkby’s earlier workshops had been primarily with feminists without professional training; this was the first time she was presenting the project to an audience of design professionals. She was terrified of rejection, she later reflected, but the response was overwhelmingly positive: “To my surprise and delight there were those who expressed joy and gratitude, feelings that spoke of repressed processes, of not having been ‘allowed.’” In a journal entry, she wrote, more emphatically, “Beautiful images today—showing the drawings of charleen, mandy, julia, frances, liza, ann, etc. where are the women who were my projections of love passion fantasy? fantasy is the beginning of creation I roared in my heart and spoke so softly and they responded with orgasmic output . . . orgasm is output not input after all. . . . I made love and they did it.” For Birkby, women’s environmental fantasy provided a deep sense of connection—it was erotic, bodily, and manifested the feeling of a utopian feminist space.
Figure 5. Birkby presented her own fantasy environment drawing at the Gay Academic Union conference in Fall 1974, featuring a monogamy dome, serial monogamy domes, and “multiple relationship domes.” Noel Phyllis Birkby Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass.
The conference also gave Birkby an opportunity to connect with other architects, scholars, and writers who shared her concerns and passions. Among the other presenters was Leslie Kanes Weisman, a professor at the University of Detroit and the only woman in the school’s architecture department. Like Birkby, Weisman was deeply interested in the impact of male-dominated architecture programs on women. Birkby and Weisman quickly developed a professional and romantic relationship.
Figure 6. Birkby and Leslie Kanes Weisman included the fantasy environment exercise in their core course, “Women and the Built Environment: Personal, Social, and Professional Perceptions,” at the first session of the Women's School of Planning and Architecture in Biddeford, Maine, August 1975. Women's School of Planning and Architecture Records, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass.
Over the next two years, Birkby and Weisman took the fantasy workshops to a broader public across the United States—from the second annual conference of the Gay Academic Union to a local chapter of the National Organization for Women in Westport, Connecticut. The environmental fantasy workshop also became one of the core programs in another of Birkby’s key collaborations: the Women’s School of Planning and Architecture, first convened over three weeks in summer 1975 in Biddeford, Maine.
Birkby and Weisman ultimately collected hundreds of drawings from a broad array of participants, as they later put it, “older women, housewives, female kids, nuns, career women, lesbians, straights, writers, painters, doctors, secretaries, factory workers, mothers, daughters, sisters, grandmas.” Most of the drawings, depicted women-only spaces—retreats from men—suggesting that if not all participants were ready to commit to living in a women-only, women-identified community, they were ready to fantasize about it.
Excerpt reprinted with permission from The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity after World War II by Stephen Vider, published by The University of Chicago Press. © 2021 by The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.
