Exhibition Tours

Join curators Stephen Vider and M.C. Overholt for a special LGBTQ+ Pride Month tour of Fantasizing Design: Phyllis Birkby Builds Lesbian Feminist Architecture. Curators will explore Birkby’s life and career as a lens on lesbian, feminist, and queer liberation.

Fantasizing Design: Phyllis Birkby Builds Lesbian Feminist Architecture (open through September 2, 2025) 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.

Speakers:
Stephen Vider, co-curator, Fantasizing Design: Phyllis Birkby Builds Lesbian Feminist Architecture
M.C. Overholt, co-curator, Fantasizing Design: Phyllis Birkby Builds Lesbian Feminist Architecture

About the Speakers:
Stephen Vider is associate professor of history and co-director of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Bryn Mawr College. His first book, The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity (University of Chicago Press, 2021), received honorable mention for the American Studies Association’s 2022 John Hope Franklin Prize for best book in American studies and was one of six finalists for the Huntington Library’s 2023 Shapiro Prize for outstanding first scholarly book in American history. In 2017, he curated the exhibition AIDS at Home: Art and Everyday Activism for the Museum of the City of New York. He was also co-curator of the exhibition Gay Gotham: Art and Underground Culture in New York (Museum of the City of New York, 2016–17) and co-author of the accompanying book.

M.C. Overholt is a PhD candidate in the History and Theory of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design and a graduate of the Master of Environmental Design (M.E.D.) program at the Yale School of Architecture. Her scholarly work—which has appeared in venues including Public Culture, Platform, and the forthcoming collection In the Daylight of Our Existence: Architectural History and the Promise of Queer Theory (edited by S.E. Eisterer)—uses queer and feminist-of-color analytical frameworks to reread interlocking histories of modern architecture and the sciences. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute, Visiting Lecturer at Bryn Mawr College, and a co-editor of Perspecta 57, the oldest student-edited architectural journal in the United States.

In conjunction with the New Practices New York 2025: Voice exhibition, the AIANY New Practices Committee is hosting a three-part event series, featuring the six winning firms of this year’s New Practices New York: Voice competition. A biennial competition since 2006, New Practices New York serves as New York City’s pre-eminent platform to recognize and promote new and innovative architecture and design firms. Each event in the series will feature a lecture by two winning firms followed by a moderated discussion that will highlight their range of work and approach to this year’s theme, Voice.

Firm Presentations:
Ted Baab, AIA, Principal, BAAB
Lindsay Wikstrom, Founding Principal, Mattaforma

Moderator:
Tal Schori, RA, LEED AP, Partner, GRT Architects LLP

About the Firms:
BAAB is a practice focused on houses and housing. They are interested in the ways everyday spaces can be rethought to invent new possibilities of living, through form and geometry as instigators of plan and organization. Their work on multi-family housing in complex urban contexts looks for inventive ways to use site and zoning limits to challenge current models of living together in cities. They are also interested in the re-imagination of existing structures, playing off past building types and found conditions to prompt new relationships of space and ideas of living. They believe in buildings as sites of conversation, for those who live, work, learn, and play

Mattaforma is an award-winning design studio specializing in projects that conceive of the built environment as an actionable medium towards a more equitable planet. Committed to investigating design in the broadest sense, we realize built commissions from concept to construction alongside research, writing, and speaking engagements. Our goal is to work with clients and experts to jointly imagine opportunities for improving forms of wellness and expanding the types of spaces we enjoy spending time in. This includes our homes, schools, retreats, restaurants, and more. Founded by Lindsey Wikstrom, Mattaforma believes that shaping the next generation of buildings in our built environment requires an ethical underpinning, a new perspective towards resources. Wikstrom’s extensive research and writing on renewable and reclaimed materials informs her belief that material choice is one of the greatest levers we have in this regard; it is the moment we actively eliminate carbon from our palette.

More Events in the Series:
May 14: New Practices in Conversation: AUR & IGG with Nahyun Hwang
June 9: New Practices in Conversation: A+A+A & aanda with Koray Duman