1995-1996 George A. Miller Endowment Professor
Leslie Kanes Weisman is professor and former associate dean of the School of Architecture at New Jersey Institute of Technology, which she joined as a founding faculty member in 1975. She was the 1995-1996 George A. Miller Endowment Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and has taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brooklyn College and the University of Detroit where she held appointments in architecture, planning, and women’s studies. Included in her pioneering work in design education is the co-founding of Sheltering Ourselves: A Women’s Learning Exchange, an international educational forum on housing and economic development for low-income women and their families, on-going since 1987, and The Women’s School of Planning and Architecture (1974-1981), a national summer program for women in the environmental design professions and trades.
Professor Weisman serves on the National Architectural Accrediting Board Schools Visitation Teams, and is an expert panelist on universal design for the National Endowment for the Arts. She has received numerous awards for public service and teaching excellence, including the 1994 Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture National Creative Achievement Award. She is a member of the founding advisory boards of Design Matters, the first internet catalog of outstanding affordable housing design, and Architectural Theory Review, an international peer reviewed journal. She is the author of Discrimination by Design: A Feminist Critique of the Man-Made Environment, selected as "One of the Best Academic Books of 1993," as "An Outstanding Contribution to Human Rights in the United States" in 1994, and published in a Chinese language edition in 1997. She is co-editor of The Sex of Architecture, which received an American Institute of Architects International Book Publishing Award for Excellence in Design Theory in 1997, and has published more than 40 other texts that include book chapters, scholarly papers, articles, and book reviews. Her work has been widely discussed and cited in newspapers, magazines and journals such as US News and World Report, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The London Daily Telegraph, Designer/builder, Harvard Design Magazine, Metropolis, Architecture, Architectural Record, Progressive Architecture, Interiors & Sources, The Stanford Law Review, Women’s Studies International Forum, Places-A Quarterly Journal of Environmental Design, Urban Geography, and The Journals of Architectural Education, Architectural and Planning Research, the Society of Architectural Historians, the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, and the American Planning Association.
A sought-after speaker, Professor Weisman has delivered keynote addresses and featured speeches at conferences of the American Institute of Architects, The Royal Australian Institute of Architects, The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, The American Society of Landscape Architects, The American Planning Association, and the National Women’s Studies Association, among others, and has lectured at more than 50 universities throughout North America, Great Britain, Europe, and Australia.
For thirty years, Leslie Kanes Weisman has dedicated herself to defining and solving the social problems that plague society through socially responsible architectural education and community activism. Her teaching and scholarship offer insight as to how educators, design professionals, and concerned citizens can contribute to the making of a better most just society through reshaping the built and planned environment to foster relationships of human equity and environmental health and wholeness.
The Sex of Architecture, 1996, Harry N. Abrams, Inc. brings together twenty-four provocative texts that collectively express the power and diversity of women’s views on architecture today. Edited by Diana Agrest, Patricia Conway, and Leslie Kanes Weisman, three leaders in the field, this volume presents a dialogue among women historians, practitioners, theorists, and educators concerned with critical issues in architecture and urbanism. In their insightful essays, the authors explore history, public space and the city, housing, consumerism, and discourse itself. They reexamine some long suspect "truths" - that man builds and woman inhabits; that man is outside and woman is inside; that man is public and woman is private; that culture is male and nature is female. In 1996, The Sex of Architecture received an American Institute of Architects International Book Publishing Award for Excellence in Design Theory.
Discrimination by Design, A Feminist Critique of the Man-Made Environment, 1992, University of Illinois Press, is a fascinating account of the complex social processes and power struggles involved in building and controlling space. Leslie Kanes Weisman offers a new framework for understanding the spatial dimensions of gender and race, as well as class. In vivid and thoroughly readable prose she documents how the office tower, maternity hospital, department store, shopping mall, nuclear family dream house, and public housing high rise, along with public parks and streets, embodies and transmits the privileges and penalties of social caste. Required reading by all who are interested in understanding how the built environment shapes the experiences of their daily lives and the cultural assumptions in which they are immersed. In 1993, Discrimination by Design received the Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in the United States Award, and was selected for inclusion on the Outstanding Academic Books List.
Back to distinguished prfoessors list
