"I have not by any means been a linear oriented professional person." --Noel Phyllis Birkby

Noel Phyllis Birkby was born on December 16, 1932 in Nutley, New Jersey, to Harold S. and Alice Green Birkby. As a child, she showed an interest in architecture and environmental design making drawings of cities and towns and constructing them in miniature in her mother's garden. When she was in high school, career counselors discouraged her desire to study architecture while noting her aptitude for that pursuit, "Well, Miss Birkby, it appears that if you were a man, you should be studying architecture." As a 16 year old in 1949, she "swallowed the implication that there just weren't any women architects" and elected to study art instead, entering the Women's College of the University of North Carolina in 1950.

In college she earned the reputation of rabble rouser and was expelled in her senior year after an incident involving beer drinking. By this time, Birkby had come to see herself as bisexual. Though drinking was the official reason given for the expulsion, Birkby believed that was an excuse to rid the college of a student who too publicly showed her love for a classmate. "I wasn't hiding my love for another woman, didn't think there was anything 'wrong' with it."

After a brief time at home in New Jersey in "numbing misery," Birkby went to New York City where she worked as a technical illustrator and "carried on in the bars." She went to Mexico in 1955 with the American Friends Service Committee where she worked on development projects with the Otomi people. She returned to New York in 1956.

In 1958, a chance meeting with a woman architect convinced Birkby that she could indeed pursue her chosen profession. The next five years were spent studying architecture at night at Cooper Union and working in the offices of architects Henry L. Horowitz (1960-61) and Seth Hiller (1961-63). After earning her certificate in architecture in 1963, Birkby, tired of being relegated to secretarial duties, moved on to graduate work at Yale University.

One of only six women in a student body of about 200, Birkby struggled to "rise above the female role" and prove her capabilities. "[M]y solutions were individual...to be as good or better than the men." She completed a Masters in Architecture in 1966.

From 1966 to 1972 Birkby worked as a designer for the growing New York architectural firm Davis Brody and Associates, where she gained experience in all aspects of design. Two of the most prominent projects she helped to design and see through construction were Waterside Houses, a residential development on the Hudson River, and the Long Island University Library-Learning Center in Brooklyn.

Despite professional success, Birkby was unhappy living a closeted bisexual existence and sank into depression in the years following graduate school. Though she had been introduced to the ideas behind the emerging women's movement, she had dismissed their relevance for her as a professional woman, believing the movement was "mostly about housewives in the suburbs." In May 1970, her lover returned from the Second Congress to Unite Women with a report of how a group of lesbian feminists called the Lavender Menace had disrupted the Congress with a presentation about discrimination against lesbians in the women's movement. "Finally feminism had some meaning for me. I was no longer invisible. I was part of a bona fide feminist issue."

Birkby, who now saw a connection between her life and the movement, joined a consciousness raising group and began reading everything she could find on women's liberation. She came to define herself as a lesbian and was invited to join a lesbian consciousness raising group, known as CR Group One, made up of influential feminist theorists and writers. In the company of Kate Millett, Sidney Abbott, Barbara Love, Alma Routsong (better known by her pseudonym Isabel Miller), and others, Birkby found herself in the thick of the movement.

By 1972, Birkby felt that her work life was at too great a variance with the rest of her life. Her training had been "male defined and dominated." She came out publicly, quit her job with Davis Brody, and started on a variety of pursuits including teaching, private architectural practice, writing, and documenting the thriving women's culture of the 1970s through film, video, photography, oral history, and the collection and preservation of pamphlets, posters, manifestos, clippings, and memorabilia.

In a range of architectural projects taken on privately and in collaboration with other firms, Birkby emphasized the needs and wants of the user. She designed private residences, an artist's studio, retrospective conversions of a variety of facilities for the disabled, low-income housing units, and community residences for patients after hospitalization. In 1973, she went to Vietnam with a team from the firm Dober, Paddock & Upton to devise a reconstruction plan for Thu Duc Polytechnic University in Bien Hoa. In the late 1970s, Birkby worked with Gary Scherquist and Roland Tso in California. Back in New York in the early 1980s, she worked with the Gruzen Partnership and Lloyd Goldfarb.

Birkby taught at a variety of institutions in the early 1970s, notably architectural design courses at the Pratt Institute School of Architecture and City College of New York. Later that decade, she taught various architectural and environmental design courses at Southern California Institute of Architecture, California State Polytechnic, and the University of Southern California. In the 1980s, she taught design fundamentals, building construction, and architectural design at the New York Institute of Technology.

Birkby used her teaching as a form of "environmental activism" combining the concept of consciousness raising with an approach to architecture learned in a course with Serge Chermayeff at Yale. Creative teaching techniques such as "buglisting" (making lists of aspects of an environment that are annoying), conceptual blockbusting, and fantasy projection were used to emphasize the "social implications of building form" and to focus her students' attention on the user.

In 1973, as a way to discover the unique perspective women could bring to the built environment, Birkby initiated a program of environmental fantasy workshops held with women of diverse backgrounds across the country. She was later joined in this work by Leslie Kanes Weisman. In the workshops, women were asked to imagine their ideal living environment by abandoning all constraints and preconceptions. Birkby and Weisman published a number of articles on feminist fantasy architecture in the mid 1970s.

Birkby followed the fantasy project with research on women's vernacular architecture. She visited communities and structures built by women who were not trained as architects or builders to document the connections between women's fantasies and the actual form of their creations.

Birkby was a founding member in 1972 of the New York organization for women architects, the Alliance of Women in Architecture and an early participant in the Archive of Women in Architecture. In 1974 she was a co-founder (with Katrin Adam, Ellen Perry Berkeley, Bobbie Sue Hood, Marie I. Kennedy, Joan Forrester Sprague, and Leslie Kanes Weisman) of the Women's School of Planning and Architecture (WSPA), an influential experimental summer school for women in environmental design professions and trades.

As the 1970s came to an end, the great flourishing of women's culture slowed and Birkby, along with many other activists became personally burned out. Her unorthodox career path and radical politics combined with the economic and political realities of the 1980s, caused her struggle for economic survival to consume increasing amounts of her time and energy. Her teaching positions were always "adjunct," WSPA folded, her private practice was part-time and less than fulfilling, she was unable to find a publisher for her research, and she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

In her last months, a group of friends from the early years of the women's movement, lovingly dubbed the SOB (Sisters of Birkby), banded together to care for Birkby who had moved to Great Barrington, MA. Noel Phyllis Birkby died of cancer on April 13, 1994 at age 61.

For more information see the file of materials from the 1997 Sophia Smith Collection exhibit "'Amazonian Activity': The Life and Work of Noel Phyllis Birkby, 1932-94".

The Noel Phyllis Birkby Papers consist of 50 linear feet of correspondence, films, memorabilia, photographs, sketchbooks, research files, subject files, videotapes, and writings. They date from 1932 to 1994 with the bulk of the material dating from the mid 1960s to Birkby's death in 1994. The papers provide significant information about Birkby's life and work, the women's movement and lesbian feminism in New York City in the 1970s and 80s, New York City lesbian culture from the 1950s to 1990s, and the establishment of a number of organizations of women architects.

Throughout the papers, there is more visual than written documentation. Nearly half of the total footage is made up of photographs, films, and videotapes. Birkby described herself as "always more interested in pictures than words." In addition, much of Birkby's research and documentation did not result in finished products leaving the Papers rich in raw materials that were not extensively sifted and digested.

Information about Birkby's personal life is available in SERIES I. BIOGRAPHICAL AND FINANCIAL MATERIAL, which contains general biographical materials particularly about her education and finances. The autobiographical writings (1970s- ) in SERIES IV. RESEARCH, SPEAKING, AND WRITING are a rich source for reflections on both her personal and professional life. Tape recordings and transcriptions of Consciousness Raising Group One sessions in SERIES VI. SUBJECT FILES (transcriptions) and SERIES IX. TAPE RECORDINGS contain a wealth of personal anecdotes. The tape recorded therapy sessions in the latter series are restricted until January 1, 2033.

Throughout her life, Birkby used a variety of visual and verbal media to express herself artistically. Drawings, prints, and paintings are located in SERIES I. BIOGRAPHICAL AND FINANCIAL MATERIAL; artistic photographs and films are housed in SERIES VII. PHOTOGRAPHS and SERIES VIII. FILMS AND VIDEOTAPES; and a few poems and other written pieces are filed in SERIES I and SERIES IV. RESEARCH, SPEAKING, AND WRITING.

Birkby's work as an architect is well-documented through Project Files in SERIES III: ARCHITECTURE which contains drawings, elevations, plans, sections, renderings, correspondence with clients, and job meeting minutes. These materials are more extensive for projects she designed in private practice (1972- ) and particularly for projects undertaken in the 1980s and 1990s for the New York State Facilities Development Corporation. Extensive files on one FDC project, the Pilgrim Psychiatric Center's community residence at 3531 Oceanside Drive, were retained as a sample of the extensive paperwork maintained on such projects. Other FDC project files were weeded to leave only those materials which directly reflect Birkby's contributions to the project. Sketchbooks in SERIES I. BIOGRAPHICAL AND FINANCIAL MATERIAL contain early sketches of architectural projects intermingled with all manner of notes and sketches such as journal entries, creative writing, artistic sketches, personal notes, lists, etc. The professional portfolio materials in SERIES I also document Birkby's architectural projects. Buildings designed by her are documented visually in SERIES VII. PHOTOGRAPHS.

Birkby's introduction to consciousness raising in 1970 brought about changes in every facet of her life. Changes in the nature of her architectural work can be seen in the different types of buildings she designed, most on a smaller scale. Materials about her various projects aimed at documenting and articulating the unique perspective women could bring to the built environment are available in SERIES IV. RESEARCH, SPEAKING, AND WRITING and in the related photographs, slides, and tape recordings.

Other professional interests are reflected in materials related to Birkby's work for the Two Bridges Neighborhood Council (in SERIES III) and her research and teaching related to housing for the elderly (in SERIES IV and SERIES V), particularly notes and photographs from a research trip to Scandinavia in 1981, and Pratt Institute student projects. Other materials on Birkby's educational techniques can be found in SERIES V, in the portfolio materials in SERIES I, in SERIES VII. PHOTOGRAPHS, SERIES VIII. FILMS AND VIDEOTAPES, and in the tape recordings of workshops in SERIES IX.

Birkby began to use film as a tool in architecture in the early 1960s because it allowed three- dimensional documentation of the built environment. Enamored of the medium, she soon came to use film to create "a notebook of events around me--a kind of journal," initially documenting the private activities of friends and family. These private films are peopled with the lesbian feminist theorists and activists who were Birkby's friends. Once she became involved in the women's movement, she also used film, audiotape, and still photography to document political actions and demonstrations.

Materials which document lesbian culture in 1950s and 1960s New York are available in the correspondence and in some of the earlier personal films. Autobiographical writings and consciousness raising group transcripts offer a retrospective view of the period.

In addition to her active visual and audio recording of events, Birkby documented the 1970s Women's Movement, lesbian feminism, and the flourishing women's culture by collecting written materials and memorabilia at meetings, rallies, conferences, etc., and by saving articles and issues of periodicals that were of interest to her. Most of these materials are filed in SERIES VI. SUBJECT FILES. Organized primarily by subject, the lively contents of these files vary widely, showing, among other things, the humor, energy, and optimism of the times.

In the late 1970s, Birkby began work toward a film on the "second wave" of the women's movement. She planned to use footage shot in the early 1970s combined with later interviews of leading figures in the movement such as June Arnold, Charlotte Bunch, and Robin Morgan. Tapes and transcripts of these interviews survive in SERIES VIII. FILMS AND VIDEOTAPES and SERIES IX. TAPE RECORDINGS. The film footage and oral history interviews provide rich documentation of early 1970s activities as well as the lives of the interviewees before the advent of the movement.

Personal reflection about her status as a woman in a male-dominated field led Birkby to join with other women architects in forming the Alliance of Women in Architecture in New York City to participate in the Archive of Women in Architecture at the Architectural League of New York, as well as the Association of Women Architects, the Organization of Women Architects, and the Union Internationale des Femmes Architectes. Materials about the founding and growing pains of these organizations are in SERIES III. ARCHITECTURE. Alliance of Women in Architecture materials include videotapes of members recounting the early history of the group as well as consciousness raising groups with women architects (in SERIES VIII. FILMS AND VIDEOTAPES). Birkby's own perspective on women in architecture can be found in the texts and slides (in SERIES IV. RESEARCH, SPEAKING, AND WRITING and SERIES VII. PHOTOGRAPHS) from presentations she gave on the subject.

Related materials in the Sophia Smith Collection are in the records of the Women's School of Planning and Architecture, the Women's Liberation Collection, the papers of various activists in Women's Liberation, and the oral histories and videotapes of participants in "'Amazonian Activity': A Celebration of the Life of Noel Phyllis Birkby", held at the SSC in the fall of 1997. A number of Birkby's friends have committed to placing their papers in the SSC and some have begun to send materials. See the reference staff for more information.

This collection is organized into nine series:

• I. Biographical and Financial Material
• II. Correspondence
• III. Architecture
• IV. Research, Speaking, and Writing
• V. Teaching
• VI. Subject Files
• VII. Photographs
• VIII. Films and Video
• IX. Tape Recordings

Please use the following format when citing materials from this collection:

Noel Phyllis Birkby Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass.

The Noel Phyllis Birkby Papers papers were the gift of the estate of Noel Phyllis Birkby through co-executors Jan Roby and Jane O'Wyatt in 1994.

Processed by Maida Goodwin, 1998.