Desire for Community: WIP's Founder Lindsay Harkema on Supportive Peer Networks, Feminist Principles, and Platforms for Collaboration
Portrait by David Ader.
By Julia Gamolina
Lindsay Harkema is a licensed architect, educator, founder of WIP: Work In Progress | Women In Practice, and founding member of WIP Collaborative, a shared feminist practice of independent design professionals based in NYC. WIP Collaborative is the recipient of the 2023 AIANY New Perspectives Award that celebrates unique, critical positions that contribute to the broader understanding of architecture. Their recent built works include the public streetscape installation Restorative Ground, a public space installation called Tidal Shift on the outdoor plaza at the Shed, an indoor climbable structure entitled All-In for the recent "Shared Space--Collective Practices" exhibition at Art Omi, and a flexible backyard seating installation for Little Egg restaurant in Brooklyn.
Her design, research, and teaching projects center equity in the public realm and engage spaces that deviate from their surroundings, creating opportunities for positive change. She teaches at Cornell University, The City College of New York and Barnard College. In her interview with Julia Gamolina, Lindsay talks about developing a deeply sensitive body of work and fostering community and collaboration in parallel, advising those just starting their careers to develop their collaboration and communication skills.
JG: Tell me about your foundational years — where did you grow up and what did you like to do as a kid?
LH: I lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico until I was nine and then moved to Michigan, closer to extended family and where my parents grew up. As I child I was really into imaginative play — dress up, make believe, dolls, building with legos, writing stories. My sister and I built meticulous homes for our Barbie dolls. I could spend hours imagining different scenarios for these made-up people’s domestic lives.
I also took ballet classes for several years and later in middle school started to run track and cross-country. It turned out that I was a strong distance runner, so I continued running competitively through college and for several years after.
How did you choose where you studied architecture? What differentiated that school?
When I applied to college, I knew I wanted to study architecture and compete in college athletics — not the easiest combination of things — so that drove my decision. I chose to attend Washington University in St. Louis, and joined the cross-country and track teams.
In one of my first architecture classes, the professor led us on a walking tour through St. Louis that helped us gain awareness of the lasting effects of redlining, urban blight, and public housing failures on the urban fabric, as well as how community-led initiatives were enacting transformative justice. It made an impact on my understanding of architecture — how inequality shapes the built environment, and how communities can rise up and create change — long before I understood how buildings were made.
Aerial image of Restorative Ground by WIP Collaborative, 2021, Photo courtesy of Hudson Square Properties.
Barnard Architecture + Design Summer Institute final exhibition, co-curated with Elsa Mäki. Photo by Lindsay Harkema.
Where did you go to graduate school?
After college I went straight to grad school at Rice University and in Houston was again exposed to a new built environment, the sprawling suburban megacity. During my second year I received an award that enabled me to travel in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe before my graduate thesis semester. I was exploring ideas that I’m still working on now, about spaces of exception that deviate from their immediate contexts administratively, formally, politically, socially, and how they become grounds for transformation and alternative futures.
At Rice, there were women faculty members who had the greatest impact on my sense of the discipline and how I could contribute to it. They encouraged me to develop my own voice rather than subscribe to pre-existing ideologies or disciplinary canons. A favorite piece of advice from one of them is to “keep it in your pocket” — let ideas develop over time, come back to them as you gain more awareness and experience. It’s something I continue to need as a reminder — you don’t have to figure it out all at once.
Tell me about your career path prior to founding WIP.
After grad school I moved to New York. It was just a couple of years post-recession and the job market was not great. I worked unpaid for an office for three months, helped them win a competition, and got hired. What I enjoyed about my employment in various offices over the next several years was the opportunity to work on a range of local and international projects at different stages of design and construction. What I found frustrating were the ways that I observed women’s career trajectories often differing from the men’s.
How so?
Women were often encouraged and promoted as project managers, technical leads, and senior administrators, but rarely as design leaders. Having children seemed to be more constraining for women’s career trajectories than for men’s. Strong-willed women seemed to be perceived as problematic, while men with the same personality traits were liked and respected. Eventually, I stepped away from professional practice to pursue teaching and reconnect with the academic ideas I had been so passionate about while in school.
Then in 2018, I had a baby. At the time I worried, significantly, that my choice to become a parent had stalled my career and I wouldn’t be able to achieve the things I’d hoped for in teaching and practice. This wasn’t because it actually had, but rather because I had absorbed that mentality from the discipline itself. I started talking to and seeking advice from other women–friends, collaborators, mentors, colleagues–who were at the same time building their own independent and alternative practices. Through those conversations I noticed that we shared similar feelings of uncertainty and a desire for community and collaboration, as well as the sense that we could learn a lot from each other and enjoy doing it.
“ A favorite piece of advice...is to ‘keep it in your pocket’ — let ideas develop over time, come back to them as you gain more awareness and experience.”
Now tell me about WIP — how you started, how it evolved, and what you're focused on these days.
In early February 2020, I invited a couple dozen of those women in practice over to my apartment for a Community Brunch. I called it “WIP: Work In Progress | Women in Practice”. Over quiche we discussed ideas for what that group could become as a professional community, a supportive peer network, and as a platform for future collaboration. We thought we would keep having those kinds of informal discussions, but a few weeks later the pandemic hit and we couldn’t gather anymore. We pivoted to meeting digitally, and over the next few months organized virtual practice shares and happy hours to keep the conversation going.
Then, an RFP came out that resonated with several of us and we formed a working group to create a proposal. We were thinking about the anxiety in public space during the pandemic and the different environmental sensitivities that people have, and started conducting zoom interviews with mental health experts, neurodivergent self-advocates, and family members of children with autism about their experiences and environmental preferences. The RFP ended up being put on hold, but another one was announced around the same time — the Urban Design Forum’s “Care for Hudson Square”. It called for ideas to reimagine NYC’s public space through a built installation in Lower Manhattan. Our existing WIP working group was joined by a couple of others, and we continued to apply the ideas we had learned.
We created a design proposal for an installation called Restorative Ground, which was built in 2021. This was the foundation of WIP Collaborative, which is now a shared feminist practice of independent design professionals working in NYC on projects that engage communities and the public realm. The co-founding team of seven — myself, Bryony Roberts, Sonya Gimon, Sera Ghadaki, Ryan Brooke Thomas, Elsa Ponce, and Abby Coover — have continued to work together on several research and design projects and have also been joined by other designers, like Sasha Topolnytska, and collaborative partners for specific works.
Bodies of Womxn, WIP Community happening, May 2022, Photo by Ilana Kohn.
WIP Community Brunch, 2020, Photo by Lindsay Harkema.
Looking back at it all, what have been the biggest challenges? How did you both manage through perceived disappointments or setbacks?
The biggest challenges I’ve experienced in relation to my career experience stem from architecture’s pervasive scarcity mindset, the idea that there is not and could never be enough for everyone — from jobs to budgets to materials and so on. In the broadest sense, it holds back disciplinary progress and prevents necessary adaptation of conventional spatial practices. It reinforces biases that diminish the contributions, values, and experiences of underrepresented groups, and a structural rigidity that makes alternative and collective practices more difficult and vulnerable.
On an individual level, that scarcity mindset fuels unhealthy competition, anxiety, and a toxic culture of undervalued labor. It discourages so many from participating in the practices and process that appropriate built environments. Compounding numerous other crises — climate change, worsening social inequity, political turmoil, failures of capitalism — the scarcity mindset compels us, collectively and individually, to be continuously stuck in fight or flight mode. What if instead we operated from a core belief that there actually could be enough for everyone? That hearing multiple voices does not threaten but enriches the necessity of each.
Over the years I’ve started to be more attentive to that anxiety in my personal life and career. I’m working on instilling a more mindful but less self-doubting way of being in this discipline — stepping back to consider the interrelationships of various factors at play in different situations. This is a core feminist principle, understanding individual realities within their specific contexts and how they are both distinct and mutually shared. It’s important to trust your gut, and to assume good intentions of others rather than to be quick to judge. When I’ve been successful at this, it's been easier to notice the silver linings within disappointments, and to remember that it’s not all a loss — you can keep things in your pocket.
What have you also learned in the last six months?
This summer I co-taught a pre-college program for high school womxn at Barnard with Elsa Mäki. We spent three weeks with a group of students ages 15-18 exploring how design and architecture shape the built environment in Harlem and elsewhere in New York City through walking tours, hands-on creative projects, field trips, and opportunities to meet designers and practitioners involved in this work around the city. Even though we were the instructors, we learned just as much from the students. They were thoughtful, curious, and confident. They brought their own forms of expertise — as New Yorkers, as young women and gender expansive individuals, and as youth who are less interested in why things are wrong than imagining how they could be different. Their spirit conveyed the critical truth that confidence is not something one needs to earn.
“...the scarcity mindset compels us, collectively and individually, to be continuously stuck in fight or flight mode. What if instead we operated from a core belief that there actually could be enough for everyone? That hearing multiple voices does not threaten but enriches the necessity of each.”
What are you most excited about right now?
With WIP we have been working for some time on design research to better support neurodiversity in the public realm. Neurodiversity refers to the range of neurocognitive functioning across the human population — we all process the world around us in different ways — including conditions like autism or ADHD that are sometimes diagnosed, as well as other kinds of sensory sensitivity, anxiety, or trauma. We’ve interviewed self-advocates to learn about environmental characteristics that feel inviting or pleasant, as well as those that feel uncomfortable or hostile.
This has and continues to inform the design of projects we have created in public spaces. We are engaged in a long term design research project on this topic with the Design Trust for Public Space and Verona Carpenter Architects to build on this work, in partnership with local organizations and self-advocate communities. Through all of this, I’ve learned so much from the fields of disability studies, transformative justice, and feminist ethics of care. It’s shaped my approach to design and teaching. This semester I’m excited to teach a studio called “Affirmative Architectures” focused on designing for the specific needs of particular groups or identities as a means to create a more vibrant and inclusive public realm for everyone, and I’ll be giving a lecture about this topic at Cornell in September.
Who are you admiring now and why?
I’m fortunate to work every day with people who I admire and am inspired by — my WIP collaborators, my colleagues at the institutions where I teach, and the wonderful community of creative practitioners here in NYC. I’m excited about the community-led initiatives that the Urban Design Forum is coordinating with multidisciplinary design teams and local partners in neighborhoods across the city. I’m inspired by the Dreaming Different podcast about world building and neurodiversity by Jezz Chung and Deem Journal. I admire the mission, methodology, and cross-institutional framework of Dark Matter U. Beyond architecture and the built environment, I’m currently in awe of: Fani Willis. Gretchen Whitmer. Padma Lakshmi. Lynsey Addario. Emily Oster. Jia Tolentino. Rihanna.
All-In by WIP Collaborative, Art Omi, 2023, Photo by Lindsay Harkema.
Tidal Shift by WIP Collaborative, 2022, Photo by Michael Vahrenwald.
What is the impact you’d like to have on the world? What is your core mission? And, what does success in that look like to you?
In “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” Audre Lorde wrote, “The aim of each thing which we do is to make our lives and the lives of our children more possible and more rich.” Her feminism was rooted in self-empowerment and embracing the multifaceted nature of individual identity, recognizing differences and fostering solidarity through intersectionality. Society often celebrates women for their sacrifices. But women do not need to be selfless in order to succeed professionally, to make an impact, or to take care of their families.
I’d like to continue putting myself and my values out into the world through the work I create and co-create, through my teaching, the way I parent my kids, my relationships with others, my own self-expression. What my career will look like in 5, 10, or 20 years I’m not sure. I hope to continue to build on the work we’re doing as WIP Collaborative. I hope to continue to develop my academic career, and have opportunities to pursue the scholarship I’m passionate about. I’d like to publish a book. Amidst all the uncertainty and toxicity in the world, I would like to do what I can to make space for joy, affection, community, softness, healing, and mutual support.
Finally, what advice do you have for those starting their career? Would your advice be any different for women?
Follow your gut, and don’t overthink each opportunity. Your career won’t be defined by the firms you work for or even the project types, but rather the values and intentions you bring to your work. Focus on learning, developing your collaboration skills, and finding and expressing what you feel is important. Very few benefit from the “singular genius” patriarchal ideology that has dominated architecture for so long — we don’t need it.