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

The Kitchen Sisters Present

The Kitchen Sisters & Radiotopia

Society & Culture

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 2 September 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

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.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Radio Topia. Welcome to the Kitchen Sisters present. From PRX. We're the Kitchen Sisters,
0:07.2	Davia Nelson, and Nikki Silva. Hi, I've got another Radiotopia podcast I know you're going to like.
0:15.9	It's called Home Cooking. It was launched back in March 2020 at the start of the lockdown to help you figure
0:22.7	out what to cook. Well, it's back for a whole new season. It's co-hosted by chef and author of the
0:28.8	best-selling cookbook, Salt, Fat, Acid Heat. I'm sure you've seen that around or own a copy. It's
0:35.1	fantastic. And Rishi K. Shireway, host and creator of one of my favorite
0:40.0	Radiotopia podcast's Song Exploder. Listeners from around the world send them their cooking questions.
0:46.7	Their answers are informative and a lot of fun. Home cooking was named one of the 100 best
0:52.3	podcasts of all time by time. Their website, homecooking.
0:56.5	Show, has transcripts and recipes to go along with each episode. It's a podcast that'll
1:02.1	make you hungry and make you laugh. Go subscribe to home cooking. You're going to love these two.
1:07.9	They are a kick. I had to make a choice. I thought, if I can't figure out a way
1:18.4	to have my politics as a feminist resonate with my work in architecture, I'm going to quit the
1:25.0	field. I had to figure out if women had anything to do with the built environment.
1:30.3	At the time, I was supposed to go to a now conference in Houston.
1:35.3	Instead, some graduate women from University of Washington in St. Louis contacted me.
1:41.3	They were a few women in their mid-20s who were alone. They decided they
1:47.0	really wanted to put together a group that could talk about things that were of interest
1:52.0	to women and architecture. I was invited. So I went to St. Louis. And that really changed the course of my life.
2:00.0	And that Phyllis Burkby, Joan Sprague, and Bobby Sue Hood.
2:04.6	We went out to a bar afterwards. We were chatting away and we were so animated, so elated to have the same experiences.
2:13.6	Maybe I had one too many margaritas, but I just got up and said, this conversation can't stop tonight.
	...

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