Please join us for the opening night celebration for three exhibitions—Fantasizing Design: Phyllis Birkby Builds Lesbian Feminist Architecture, AIANY Design Awards 2025, and New Practices New York 2025: Voice—that will be on view at the Center for Architecture from May 8–September 2, 2025. The evening will include remarks from each exhibition team as well as mingling and light refreshments!
About the exhibitions
Fantasizing Design: Phyllis Birkby Builds Lesbian Feminist Architecture 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.
Curators: Stephen Vider and M.C. Overholt
Graphic Designer: Marissa Martonyi
Exhibition Designer: Xiaoxiao Guo
AIANY Design Awards 2025 features Honor, Merit, and Citation award recipients in the categories of Architecture, Interiors, Projects, and Urban Design. The selected projects and the architecture firms that designed them represent the exceptional work by AIA New York members and architects practicing in New York City. All 23 winning projects were chosen for their design quality, response to context and community, program resolution, innovation, thoughtfulness, and technique. To be eligible, projects had to be completed by AIANY members or architects/designers practicing in New York or be New York projects designed by architects/designers based elsewhere.
Graphic Designer: Studio Lin
New Practices New York 2025: Voice will showcase the winners of the latest New Practices New York competition, organized by the AIANY New Practices Committee since 2006. The competition’s goal is to recognize and promote architecture and design firms founded in New York City within the last 12 years. Through juried portfolio review, we’ll honor unique and innovative strategies to establish VOICE through practice and projects. The winning firms are A+A+A, Aanda, AUR, BAAB, IGG, and Mattaforma.
Graphic Designer: New Information
Center for Architecture
