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 <title>Women's Fantasy Environments: Notes on a Project in Process</title>
 <author>Noel Phyllis Birkby and Leslie Kanes Weisman</author>
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 <funder>Bucknell University Humanities Center</funder>
 <funder>Bucknell University Office of Undergraduate Research</funder>
 <funder>The Mellon Foundation</funder>
 <funder>National Endowment for the Humanities</funder>
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 <licence>Bucknell Heresies Project: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0
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 <licence>Heresies journal: © Heresies Collective</licence>
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 <title>Patterns of Communicating and Space Among Women</title>
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 <publisher>HERESIES: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics</publisher>
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 <div type="essay">
 <pb facs="https://leaf.bucknell.edu/sites/default/files/2025-02/heresies02_116_0.jpg" n="116"/>
 <head>Women's Fantasy Environments: Notes on a Project in Process</head>
 <byline>Noel Phyllis Birkby</byline>
 <byline>Leslie Kanes Weisman</byline>

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.
 <pb facs="https://leaf.bucknell.edu/sites/default/files/2025-02/heresies02_117_0.jpg" n="117"/>
 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
 </div>
 </body>
 <back>
 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. 
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