Long Island University’s Library Learning Center: Noel Phyllis Birkby’s Anti-Ableist Activism in the 1970s

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ABSTRACT: In 1968, the architect and filmmaker Noel Phyllis Birkby (1932–1994) spearheaded the redevelopment of Long Island University’s Library Learning Center in Brooklyn, New York. The university’s mission was to retrofit a collection of buildings to create an accessible and equitable campus layout. The original design for the library complex featured a hierarchical ensemble of disconnected buildings. To serve the university’s mission, Birkby steered the revisions of the master plan in 1970 in ways that represented her understanding of disability as a social construct. Influenced by environmental design, Birkby transformed the built environment so as to address the compounding impacts of exclusionary practices in architecture. Environmental design was an emerging discipline that examined the human-built environment relationship at the intersection of architecture, social and behavioral sciences, and political action. Birkby’s spatial strategies of accessibility, interconnectedness, and transparency uncovered the socio-political power imbalances embedded within the ideological program of environmental design as a field of knowledge. Her work situates a critique of socio-spatial hierarchies within broader feminist conceptualizations of discrimination in design. The analysis of Birkby’s project—its original design and redesign—foregrounds her subsequent political activism and feminist design experimentations with fantasy drawings.