The Kitchen Sisters Present · The Kitchen Sisters & Radiotopia

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

September 2, 2025·28 min·2 clips

At WSPA's closing ceremony, every attendee received a hand-crafted piece of a Russian nesting doll with the message: 'We will never be whole until we are all back together again.'

A choice opens the story. One woman is ready to quit architecture if feminist politics has to stay outside the work. Then the question gets bigger: did women have anything to do with the built environment, and could a school take that seriously? A conference plan changes. Instead of heading to a NOW gathering in Houston, she hears from graduate women who are on their own and want a group for women in architecture. The courses come from appetite, not departmental habit. Each founder asks what she most wants to teach. Phyllis and the speaker choose Women's Environmental Fantasy. Ellen takes on architectural journalism. Bobbi Sue turns to radical planning and its effects. Katrine brings the tool bench. She is a master carpenter with an architectural degree from Germany and a beautiful crate of planes, chisels, hammers, saws, and layout tools she has never been allowed to use. Her class is called Demystification of Tools. It is practical and a little blunt: wood, hand tools, mistakes, small wins, and learning the material by putting hands on it. The campuses stay plain on purpose. In Biddeford, Bristol, and Colorado, the school avoids high-style architectural rooms because the women want to change the rooms themselves. Walls become displays and message boards. Models, class materials, chairs, tables, and bodies in space all become part of the lesson. The school feels temporary, but not casual. Its archive is now at Smith College Special Collections, with New Angle Voice and the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation helping the story travel. What lasts is the sound of women treating architecture as something they can enter, argue with, rebuild, and make their own.

As heard by us

A school built from what its founders actually knew how to teach, in their own words.

The Women's School of Planning and Architecture came out of what its founders actually had to teach -- women who met in St. Louis and built it around that.

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Why you'd press play

Katrine's box of German carpentry tools crossed the Atlantic for a school that women in architecture invented themselves.

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