M.C. Overholt, Architecture PhD Candidate, and Stephen Vider (Bryn Mawr) awarded Graham Foundation Organizational Grant for Fantasizing Design: Phyllis Birkby Builds Lesbian Feminist Architecture (Center for Architecture, Summer 2025)

Architecture PhD Candidate M.C. Overholt and Stephen Vider (Bryn Mawr) are excited to announce that their Summer 2025 exhibition at the Center for Architecture (New York) has been awarded a 2024 organization grant by the Graham Foundation. Titled Fantasizing Design: Phyllis Birkby Builds Lesbian Feminist Architecture, the exhibition traces the life, work, and networks of lesbian feminist architect 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 co-founded the Women’s School of Planning and Architecture. Her most groundbreaking intervention, however, was the series of workshops she began encouraging 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.

Through her role as exhibition co-curator, M.C. hopes to explore her interest in queer and feminist architectural histories beyond her dissertation and the space of the classroom, bringing such histories to a broader architectural and LGBTQIA+ audience at the Center for Architecture.