The Women's School of Planning and Architecture: Not Only Survive but Flourish

The Women’s School of Planning and Architecture, popularly known as WSPA, ran for four summers from 1974 to 1979.    
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.

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. 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.

Produced by Brandi Howell with host Alexandra Lange for New Angle: Voice, the podcast about Pioneering Women in American Architecture brought to you by the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation.  

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.  Visit NewAngleVoice instagram page to see some incredible photos from this collection, including the Building Charades and Architecture Cakes. Visit New Angle: Voice wherever you find your podcasts.  

The Kitchen Sisters Present is produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva) with Brandi Howell and Nathan Dalton. We're part of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of curated podcasts created by independent producers. Visit kitchensisters.org for more stories and info about our projects and public events.