Designing Between Worlds : Motherhood & Space

This graduation project investigates how architecture can respond to the spatial exclusion of breastfeeding and maternal care within academic environments, using the UBC campus, and particularly the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at Lasserre, as its point of departure. Emerging from lived experience as a student mother returning to school after maternity leave, the project identifies a broader institutional failure: campuses are typically organized around productivity, efficiency, and uninterrupted movement, while caregiving, lactation, and bodily dependency remain unsupported, hidden, or treated as private inconvenience. In response, the project proposes a distributed architectural network of “nursing nests” that repositions breastfeeding as a public, spatial, and infrastructural concern rather than a marginal or medicalized need. Rather than designing a single universal lactation room, the project develops four distinct yet related typologies — Solace, Loom, Kin, and Village — each calibrated to different degrees of privacy, social visibility, and familial occupation. Together, these typologies form a gradient from intimate retreat to collective care landscape, allowing maternal support to exist across a variety of campus conditions. The design draws from feminist critiques of reproductive labour and public space, arguing that care work is foundational to institutional life and must therefore be materially embedded within it. Formally, the nests are conceived as a modular kit-of-parts system using cedar wood members and custom powder-coated steel key joinery, enabling demountability, adaptability, maintenance, and repetition across multiple sites. This construction logic allows the project to operate not as a singular object, but as an expandable system of care infrastructure integrated into existing campus routes and landscapes. By situating the four typologies at strategic locations across UBC, the proposal demonstrates how architectural design can make maternal care visible, dignified, and permanent within public academic life. Ultimately, the project argues that universities must not merely accommodate motherhood, but spatially acknowledge care as a fundamental condition of collective life.