This research project interprets the architectural, activist, and artistic production of transgender designer Roberta Dickinson (1916–1982) as a way to reread architectural history, connecting it to radical political practice and trans history and theory. Working in Los Angeles and Philadelphia, Dickinson’s architectural career was shaped by her Quaker values and anti-war activism. In addition to several built projects, Dickinson’s most groundbreaking work was a series of charcoal drawings, watercolor landscapes, and self-portraits documenting both her transition and Philadelphia’s changing landscapes. The works are among the earliest representations of gender transition by a trans subject, capturing corporeal transformation alongside the transformation of Philadelphia itself, in a moment marked by urban renewal and the rise of radical movements for social and environmental justice. Trans Reconstruction explores these works, as well as Dickinson’s architectural output, as a critical origin point for refiguring the relationship between trans*ness and architecture.

Adrienne Economos-Miller is a builder, writer, and teacher working with trash, ruins, transfemininity, and other obscene matters. Her writing brings together labor histories, cultural and literary studies, and embodied action in order to explore methods of practice that exist outside of architecture’s historically constructed design/construction binary. She received her MArch from the Yale School of Architecture in 2020 and she was the 2022–23 Schidlowski Emerging Faculty Fellow at Kent State University with the exhibition Refuse//Repose. Her recent writing includes “Obscene Matter” (Journal of Architecture Education, 2025); “Refuse//Repose: Framing Three Scenes” (Perspecta 56, 2024); and “Transsexual Ruin” (Pidgin, 2025). Her work has been featured in exhibitions at A83, Craft Contemporary, and the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art. She is currently an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee creating collective labor structures and thinking through trans* architecture. Economos Miller is a co-organizer, researcher, and author for Trans Reconstruction.

M.C. Overholt is a visiting lecturer at Bryn Mawr College and PhD candidate in the History and Theory of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design. Her scholarly work—which has appeared in venues including Public Culture, Platform, and the collection In the Daylight of Our Existence: Architectural History and the Promise of Queer Theory (gta Verlag, 2025)—uses queer and feminist-of-color analytical frameworks to reread interlocking histories of modern architecture and the sciences. She is the cocurator, with Stephen Vider, of Fantasizing Design: Phyllis Birkby Builds Lesbian Feminist Architecture, at the Center for Architecture New York, and is a coeditor for Perspecta 57. Overholt is a co-organizer, researcher, and author for Trans Reconstruction.