Not Only Survive, but Flourish: The Story of WSPA

WSPA 1975. (Courtesy Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College)

Our latest episode of the New Angle: Voice podcast 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.