and environmental design at Southern California Institute of Architecture, California State Polytechnic and University of Southern California. Throughout the 1970s, Ms. Birkby engaged and documented the significance of The Feminist Art Movement, including its slogan "the personal is political." Returning to New York in the early 1980s, Ms. Birkby worked for Gruzen and Partners (later renamed Gruzen Sampton), from 1973 to 1981, and the architect Lloyd Goldfarb. Throughout the 1980s, Ms. Birkby taught building construction, design fundamentals, and architectural design at New York Institute of Technology. Together with Leslie Kanes Weisman, Noel Phyllis Birkby coauthored the essays "A Women-Built Environment: Constructive Fantasies" (1975), "Women's Fantasy Environment: notes on a project in process" (1977), and "The Women's School of Planning and Architecture" (1983). Ms. Birkby described her methods of teaching in terms of "environmental activism" or the integration of environmentalism and architecture in a manner in which she learned at Yale University from Professor Serge Chermayeff, the author of several books, including Community and Privacy with Christopher Alexander (1964) and The Shape of Community with Alexander Tzonis (1971). Ms. Birkby taught her students practical techniques, such as a "bug listing" to denote the frustrating aspects of an environment, and also conceptual strategies like fantasy projection to encourage a thorough investigation into the social implications of form and design. Activism, architecture, and feminism For Ms. Birkby, professional success required her to live a closeted life. After graduate school, she suffered from depression. During the late 1960s, she was introduced to feminism, which she had thought was "mostly about housewives in the suburbs." In this attitude, Ms. Birkby was like many bisexual and lesbian women of the period yet to find signs of a visible social justice movement, and put off by the mainstream women's movement. However, eventually she and Sidney Abbott, Kate Millett, Alma Routsong, and Artemis March were among the members of CR One, the first lesbian-feminist consciousness-raising group. Beginning in 1971, Ms. Birkby became active in professional organizations for women in architecture and urban planning. Ms. Birkby also began documenting the women's movement in film, photography, oral history, and collected posters, manifestos, clippings, and memorabilia. After resigning from Davis Brody Associates, and coming out as a gay woman, Ms. Birkby opened her own private architecture practice and taught architecture design. In 1973, Ms. Birkby began to explore feminist theory in the context of contemporary architecture and teaching practices, and for