On the occasion of the publication of Architectures lesbiennes (SHED Publishing, 2025), Shmorévaz invites author and researcher Milena Charbit to host a workshop inspired by pioneering feminist architectural practices.

Drawing from the Design Your Fantasy Environment Workshops initiated by Phyllis Birkby and Leslie Kanes Weisman — American feminist and lesbian architects and activists who, in the 1970s, invited women to dream up and draw their ideal spaces, far removed from the norms of the heterosexual household and that of patritecture. A communal room for love-making, another one designed for screaming, pools to drown one’s sorrow or domes filled with “hot fudge on demand” — these modular spaces would unfold following affective, psychological and social needs and desires.

Cabins, libraries, gardens, islands, beaches, caves, houses, apartments, patches of land: across centuries, a multitude of spaces have been imagined, inhabited, and shaped so that lesbian desires, loves, and lives could unfold. Hidden from view, occupying the in-between spaces, or emerging as acts of political visibility, these places tell an alternative story of architecture. Author and researcher Milena Charbit explores over a hundred of them — tangible or lost, built or imagined, reclaimed or transformed — by singles, lovers, comrades, couples, and lesbian communities. From Florentine Arcadia to lesbian lands, from remote cottages to the Lesbian Xanadu, Architectures Lesbiennes (SHED publishing, 2025) sheds light on the architectural and spatial tactics invented to bypass patriarchal systems and to experiment — not without conflict — with alternative social, economic, emotional, domestic, aesthetic, and ecological models. The author traces the architectural biographies of these spaces, unraveling their hertories through traces left by those who designed and/or inhabited them.

Architectures Lesbiennes
Milena Charbit
04.10.25