On the 30th anniversary of the groundbreaking book Discrimination by Design: A Feminist Critique of the Man-Made Environment (UI Press, 1992), it’s important to consider the work of its author Leslie Kanes Weisman, a pioneering feminist architecture educator, activist, and zoning board official on Long Island. Not only was Weisman a founding faculty member and former associate dean of the New Jersey Institute of Technology School of Architecture in New Jersey, she also helped found in 1974 the Women’s School of Planning and Architecture—an educational program for women, by women, interested in architecture, planning, and environmental design.
As an educator and planner, she’s been instrumental in promoting universal and inclusive design as integral to design practice and as a model for teaching. Over her career, she often highlighted the work of other feminist practitioners who were focused on building communities that went beyond the Modernist glass box—readapting buildings and transforming underutilized spaces into women’s shelters, day care centers, or community gardens.
Discrimination by Design explores the complex social processes and power struggles in building and controlling space, while also offering a better way of building, by understanding the spatial dimensions of gender, race, and class. The arguments she developed over 40 years ago around issues of institutionalism, classicism, racism, and gender inequity are still relevant today.
Throughout her book she offers innovative examples of the built environment. Take a look at the work of Kimi Gray, a public housing advocate who fought fiercely for policies to convert inner-city public housing projects into resident-owned and -managed properties, such as Kenilworth-Parkside projects in Washington, D.C. Or there’s the concept of Ena Dubnoff and Dolores Hayden for Willowbrook Green Apartments in South Central Los Angeles that was eventually built as a housing development where the program included child care, intergenerational living, and on-site tutoring.
As we ask ourselves how to design better cities, workplaces, and housing, we must remember that Weisman’s feminist spatial consciousness and the work of the pioneering design advocates she highlighted can guide the quest to achieve social justice and environmental sustainability, serving as models for building healthier communities.
This article appeared in the March 2022 issue of ARCHITECT.
