Not Only Survive, but Flourish: The Story of WSPA

Hello, this is New Angle: Voice, the podcast about Pioneering Women in American Architecture brought to you by the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation. I’m your new host, Alexandra Lange.

Our latest episode describes the creation and experience of the Women’s School of Planning and Architecture, popularly known as WSPA, which ran for four summers from 1974 to 1979.   It completes a trilogy of episodes, including previous ones on the fantasy environments of architect Phyllis Birkby and the first exhibition on Women in American Architecture at the Brooklyn Museum, that ask and answer the question, How did architecture meet the feminist movement in the 1970s?

WSPA was the brainchild of seven women, Leslie Kanes Weisman, Phyllis Birkby, Katrin Adam, Bobbie Sue Hood,  Ellen Perry Berkeley,  Marie Kennedy, and Joan Forrester Sprague. These women represented a mix of academic, professional, and practical experience. What they wanted to create was an educational curriculum, by women and for women, that freed architecture from the hierarchies of existing schools and practice. 

At their workshops, held on a succession of college campuses, starting with St. Joseph’s College in Biddeford, Maine, everyone was a student and everyone was a teacher. No one was passive. You could learn woodworking in the morning and feminist theory in the afternoon, and then let loose and make candy houses in the evening. Childcare was free, tuition was minimal, and the locations were scattered throughout the country, making it easy for interested parties to attend.

For many of the participants, it was their first experience of being the majority gender in a design classroom or architecture office. Even decades later, they remembered the experience with happy tears. 

As with many collaborative enterprises with shoestring budgets, WSPA eventually dissipated, but not before giving a generation of women architects the tools (sometimes literally) to imagine a more communitarian world.

It sounds like a club I would definitely have liked to be part of. Without further ado, here is “Not Only Survive, but Flourish: The Story of WSPA.”

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Special thanks in this episode to Leslie Kanes Wisemen, Katrin Adam, Cathy Simon, and Paulett Taggart.  And to the Smith College Special Collections, which houses all of the WSPA archives.  You can see some incredible photos from this collection, including the Building Charades and Architecture Cakes, on our Instagram page at NewAngleVoice

This podcast is brought to you by the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation and produced by Brandi Howell. 

You can find other episodes of New Angle: Voice wherever you find your podcasts.  And if you liked this episode, please leave a review and share with a friend.