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Graham Foundation Awards $10,000 Grant Supporting Center for Architecture’s 2025 Phyllis Birkby Exhibition

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September 11, 2024
by Center for Architecture
A black and white image of Phyllis Birkby, a woman with short hair and glasses, looking through a film camera. The background is a geometric tile pattern.
Phyllis Birkby filming at Caroling’s stained glass Wholeo Dome in Monte Rio, California, February 1978. Photograph. Noel Phyllis Birkby Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA. Photo: Unknown.
A black and white image of someone kneeling as they draw a sketch on a large piece of paper the ground.
Participant in fantasy environment exercise in Phyllis Birkby and Leslie Kanes Weisman’s course “Women and the Built Environment: Personal, Social, and Professional Perceptions,” at the first session of the Women's School of Planning and Architecture, Biddeford, Maine, August 1975. Photograph. Women's School of Planning and Architecture Records, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA. Photo: Unknown.
A drawing of a "fantasy environment" displays colorful scribbles and illustrations of trees and water.
Fantasy environment drawing from 1975 session of the Women’s School of Planning and Architecture. Drawing on paper. Noel Phyllis Birkby Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
Five women with short brown hair sit around a table with papers and coffee mugs. A lamp hangs above them.
Women’s School of Planning and Architecture coordinator planning meeting at the home of Ellen Perry Berkeley, 1975, featuring (left to right) Katrin Adam, Phyllis Birkby, Marie Kennedy, Ellen Perry Berkeley, and Leslie Kanes Weisman. Photograph. Women's School of Planning and Architecture Records, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA. Photo: Joan Sprague.
A black and white photo of a large sculpture studio with large glass windows above. A man stands at the desk, writing something.
David Jacobs sculpture studio, Sea Cliff, Long Island, New York, designed by Phyllis Birkby, 1973. Photograph. Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA, with permission of Joan Jacobs. Photo: Phyllis Birkby.

The Center for Architecture is pleased to announce that we have been approved for a $10,000 grant from the Graham Foundation to support our Summer 2025 exhibition, Fantasizing Design: Phyllis Birkby Builds Lesbian Feminist Architecture.

Fantasizing Design traces the life, work, and networks of lesbian feminist architect, filmmaker, activist, and teacher Phyllis Birkby (1932–1994), who inspired design professionals and the public to imagine a built environment beyond the confines of existing male-dominated forms. Inspired by the women’s movement and gay liberation, she joined one of the first lesbian feminist consciousness-raising groups, staged a feminist building occupation, and cofounded the Women’s School of Planning and Architecture. Her most groundbreaking intervention, however, was the series of workshops she began where she encouraged women to imagine and draw their “fantasy environments”—the home and community spaces they would like to inhabit. Fantasizing Design takes Birkby and her circle of friends, lovers, and collaborators as a lens on the broader ways feminists and lesbian feminists have worked to remake architectural practice, domestic space, and the broader built environment through rare archival materials from Birkby’s extensive personal and professional archive at the Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History at Smith College. Her papers provide significant documentation of the women’s movement, gay and lesbian activism, and lesbian culture in New York City, circa 1970s to 1990s, in her photographs, audio and video recordings, and over 150 films. Birkby’s films also document architecture (including her own designs); her personal life in home movies; and travel.

This year’s list of grants to organizations from the Graham Foundation includes 33 projects worth $390,000 that will foster an exchange of ideas about architecture and the areas of culture affected by it in unison with the Chicago-based Foundation’s organizing mission. A total of 12 exhibitions, 13 publications, 5 public programs, and 3 film/video productions were selected. The Foundation has awarded some $44 million since the program was founded in 1956. See the list of other awarded projects here.

Stay tuned for the opening date and more information around Fantasizing Design at the Center for Architecture!

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