Ilze Wolff, Wolff Architects

A lecture by Ilze Wolff, a partner of Wolff Architects with Heinrich Wolff, co-founder of the transdisciplinary research practice Open House Architecture, and founder of the publication and research platform pumflet: art, architecture and stuff.

Response by Mario Gooden, Professor of Professional Practice and Director of the GSAPP MArch Program, and Lindy Roy, Adjunct Assistant Professor at GSAPP.

Ilze Wolff co-directs Wolff Architects with Heinrich Wolff, a practice concerned with an architecture of consequence. Their built work includes public infrastructure projects, cultural educational buildings, exhibition architecture and urban interventions of repair and restoration. Coupled with this, Wolff has developed an enduring yet critical public culture around architecture through initiating exhibitions, film projects, public interventions and publication. Her research is acclaimed and she is the author of the award winning 2017 book ‘Unstitching Rex Trueform, the story of an African factory’ a biography of a Cape Town modernist garment factory and its entanglements with societal constructions of race, gender and class. For her work she was shortlisted for the 2018 Architectural Review’s Moira Gemmil award for emerging architects and has been invited to deliver a Current Work Lecture hosted by the Architecture League of NY and The Cooper Union. She is the founder of the publication and research platform pumflet: art, architecture and stuff which focuses on the black social and spatial imaginaries. pumflet has featured in various local and international platforms such as the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2019), the Centre for the less Good Idea (2018), Chimurenga, Institute for Creative Arts UCT (2019), Performa NY (2020) and Luma Arles (2022). Wolff regularly presents her research practice in talks, essays and exhibitions in various forums globally including the Architectural Review, e-flux architecture and the Architectural Design. She has a passion for spatial practice and its potential as a site for emancipatory practices of care, embedded research and prophetic organization.

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