LJ Roberts | Fantasizing Design: Phyllis Birkby Builds Lesbian Feminist Architecture at Center for Architecture

Opening Thursday, May 8 in New York, LJ Roberts will debut new work in Fantasizing Design: Phyllis Birkby Builds Lesbian Feminist Architecture, at Center for Architecture, New York.

Reception Thursday, May 8, 6-8pm
AIA New York | Center for Architecture
536 LaGuardia Place, New York, NY 10012

 

Fantasizing Design: Phyllis Birkby Builds Lesbian Feminist Architecture traces the life, work, and networks of lesbian feminist architect Phyllis Birkby (1932–1994), who pushed 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 co-founded the Women’s School of Planning and Architecture. Her most groundbreaking intervention, however, was a series of workshops that 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.

LJ Roberts has been commissioned to create a mixed media installation for the front gallery of the Center for Architecture. Quilted textiles, wheatpasted posters, and a series of neon signs drawing from the Birkby archive collages elements of her intimate life, activism, architectural accomplishments, and fantasy drawing practice. Roberts’ installation intertwines Birkby’s blueprints and love letters, manifestos and mementos, and drawings and documents, to build a richly textured non-linear mosaic of Birkby’s life, friendships, entanglements, and desire.