Freedom Forms

Spaces, like bodies, is one of those words that—when it appears in the context of cultural institutions or academia—has a terrible tendency to obscure more than it reveals, transforming alive and vital ideas into cold and inert objects. An architecture show titled Spatializing Reproductive Justice might be presumed, at first blush, to be just another abstract repackaging and deradicalization of a topic that happens to be of real, bloody importance to actual human beings. But architecture, as a field, is quite literally concerned with spaces and bodies, and at their best, architectural visions of the future consider how people actually live in and move through the built areas of the world. Spatializing Reproductive Justice constituted an example of the field operating on its best principles.

This small exhibition was an attempt to explore reproductive care in the United States as it is and as it could be. A joint production of student architecture studios led by Lori Brown of Syracuse University, Lindsay Harkema of the Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York, Bryony Roberts of Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and FLUFFFF Studio, it was tucked into the drab basement of the Center for Architecture. The setting sort of fit, in that the show began with a depressing (if effective) set of visualizations describing the state of abortion access in the US since the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade. Maps and graphs showed the demarcation of one’s ability to access abortion by state, by race, by class, and other constructed lines drawn in the human sand. The overall effect of these infographics somewhat evoked Charles Joseph Minard’s 1869 graph of Napoleon’s defeat in Russia, capturing the advance and retreat of reproductive rights across the country, with a few struggling states still holding on. I couldn’t help but pay special attention to places I’m connected to personally. New York, still colored light pink and free; Michigan, where I’m from, medium pink, half on one side of the partisan divide and half on the other; Louisiana, where a friend of mine had to risk felony charges to order mifepristone from India, awash in dark red. The difference of a boundary—a couple inches of dirt, a couple inches of space—can mean the difference between having control over one’s own reproductive organs and not. Hop over the line from Oregon to Idaho and, just like that, lose your personhood.

After making it clear how dire the state of abortion rights has become, most of Spatializing Reproductive Justice was concerned with how previous activists have created bubbles of reproductive autonomy and what more could be done. The Jane Collective, a bulwark of the reproductive justice movement in the early 1970s, received special attention: A blueprint of the typical, modest house in which the collective performed abortions was laid out in all its mundane detail, indicating where patients waited, where they received services, where people cooked, and where they used the bathroom. The use of a private house wasn’t just a tactic to conceal the act of getting an abortion, which until 1973 could be done illegally and terrifyingly in a number of places. It was also a means of reclaiming domestic space as a site of autonomy and power for women, rather than one of repression and subordination. Moreover, running a clinic in a home endeavored to make receiving health services an approachable experience, instead of the impersonal nightmare that it still usually is.

What if getting health care weren’t a physically horrific and alienating ordeal? Much of Spatializing Reproductive Justice was devoted to asking this simple, even remedial, question. Answers were ventured through speculative proposals for what the exhibition calls “interventions”: physical structures where people can go to receive reproductive care. There were blueprints for “airport interventions” and “rest stop interventions” intended for travelers from states that have banned abortion. These weren’t, as one might imagine, crude or merely functional structures, basements or back rooms constructed in the interest of expediency. They had recovery rooms for aftercare, including some intended for longer-term stays, featuring cozy beds and large windows. Many of the show’s more permanent proposals for clinics and other facilities were elaborate and even beautiful, complete with interior courtyards and galleries, meditation rooms, and recovery centers that include childcare. The purpose of many of these “hybrid programs,” according to the accompanying text, isn’t just to provide basic services like abortion, but to offer more holistic help. Reproductive justice is an expansive framework, described by the exhibition organizers as “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.”

This holistic approach to human health and happiness seems of especial importance right now, when there’s a loneliness epidemic and many people don’t have a “third place” to go to outside of home and work. A health care center wouldn’t seem, at first blush, to represent a viable third place. Most people absolutely hate going to the doctor. But a hybrid reproductive justice center, where a person can hang out, help out, and receive services, rather than just pay for an appointment and leave, represents a potentially radical and even utopian vision of social organization. It also offers a forward-thinking vision of the role of architecture, one in which buildings aren’t merely plopped down to serve a discrete purpose, but operate like nodes in a planned network.

That being said, not all of the proposals in Spatializing Reproductive Justice leaned toward the utopian. The many contributors to the exhibition were aware that reproductive justice remains a contested and often vicious battleground. Certain interventions recommended building abortion clinics on federal land and in other “liminal places”—any bit of ground where abortion might be legal, or at least not illegal yet. Some were intended to stand defiantly in plain sight, while others would remain hidden. Still others would be woven into the fabric of ordinary life. One low-cost intervention took the form of mobile health units that could drive around to serve many communities while also, presumably, helping workers escape dangerous situations. There was an apocalyptic side to some of these scrappier plans, an awareness that reproductive politics is already a dystopian scenario in many parts of the country. The show’s few audiovisual sections included the upsetting “Abort Game,” designed by Lisa Maillard while she was a graduate student in research architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. The point of the Abort Game is to find a way to access abortion, which, depending on your randomized start, is either a minor aggravation or a Mad Max–level crusade. Your only salvation might be to flag down a future mobile health clinic speeding down the road.

The show ended not with what might lie ahead, however, but with the present. There are already, of course, many interventions in the US and all over the world. We already have reproductive health centers, even if they don’t achieve full reproductive justice or hook into the nerve clusters of the community in the organic way that we might like. Planned Parenthood’s Peoria Health Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was particularly beautiful to see: Photos in the exhibition displayed its rather vaginal cutout, which allows light into a lovely interior garden. Completed in 2021 by Script Architecture principal Deborah Richards, the center is modern and peaceful, a building that looks as though it breathes. But the most extraordinary clinics on display at the end of Spatializing Reproductive Justice are both in Africa. The Panzi Hospital Mother-Baby Unit in Bukavu, Congo (a 2018 proposal by White Arkitekter), envisages a complex of lacy walls and light. The Maternity and Pediatric Hospital in Tambacounda, Senegal (Manuel Herz Architects, 2021), features perforated brick and an extraordinary outdoor spiral staircase. These projects appeared to represent, at least in the images on view, a much friendlier form of health care than we usually experience in the US, designed to facilitate rest and recovery. What the accompanying text left out, however, is that while Congo expanded abortion access in 2018, such care remains almost totally banned in Senegal. Beauty and restfulness are perfectly lovely qualities, but if reproductive autonomy is unavailable, whether by de jure law or de facto access, then the prettiest hospital room in the world is still a space of oppression.

Political art so often feels like a wish; Spatializing Reproductive Justice, however, represented something like a real plan. Most of the proposed interventions in the show could be built tomorrow for relatively low cost, in parts of the country where it would be legal, or at least legally gray, to attempt them. The exhibition insisted on the power and responsibility that architects have to “design and advocate for built environments to support and protect [reproductive] freedoms.” It’s easy to imagine that the structures we have today are all the structures that can be, and the only change left is the continued elaboration on the kinds of built environments we already know (and often dislike). But architects can rethink the way humans move about the world, the way the world can be refashioned to accommodate healthier rhythms of life and reproduction. They quite literally decide where the lines are drawn.