Time to reflect on remarkable women for International Women’s Day
As we approach International Women’s Day 2025, it is a time to reflect on the remarkable women who inspire us and to highlight the ongoing fight against gender discrimination.
The ML team are taking the week to honour and celebrate the women who have helped shaped our worlds as we continue to pave the way for a more gender equal future. Here is a glimpse of those women we want to celebrate,
Ilze Wolff from Urban Designer Lesego Bantsheng, Rotterdam
A woman who inspires me is South African architect Ilze Wolff. A Cape Town-bred urbanist, her work is pure star quality – brilliant yet deeply humane. She has an incredible way of relating to people, a quality I first experienced as an Architect student at the University of Cape Town when I visited her studio in Bo-Kaap. She was generous with her time and thoughts, offering a presence that was both sharp and kind. Meeting her was a refreshing contradiction to the saying never meet your heroes– she proved to be an extension of her architecture: sensitive, local, and deeply rooted in care.
One of my favourite things about Ilze is her admiration for jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim and how she has managed to use this as Architectural pedagogy. She approaches design like jazz improvisation – fluid, conversational, and deeply rooted in historical resonance. Her ability to seamlessly span practice and academia while maintaining a family-focused private life is something I truly admire. Through Wolff Architects, she integrates research into practice, perhaps because, for her, architecture isn’t just about buildings – it’s about people, memory, and the rhythms that shape our cities. What I find most striking is how she holds space for radical thought without arrogance. She teaches with a generosity that acknowledges both the weight of history and the potential of the present. Her work engages deeply with Cape Town’s social and cultural fabric, ensuring that memory and heritage are not just archived but actively shape contemporary spatial practice. Ilze Wolff reminds me that architecture is as much about the stories we tell as it is about the spaces we build – never static, always in motion, much like the music that inspires her. Her way of working pushes me to see design as an evolving dialogue rather than a fixed answer – something that breathes, adapts, and listens.
The Pankhurst Centre by Architect Millie Evans, London.
Over the past decade, many women have inspired my architectural journey. While universities now maintain a roughly equal gender split among students, far fewer women go on to qualify and advance into senior roles within the profession. It is the knowledgeable, supportive women I’ve met along the way who have encouraged me to persist. When I first began my architectural studies, I struggled with the pressures of coursework and found it difficult to connect with the curriculum. It wasn’t until my final year—when I was tutored by a woman who also led the department—that something finally clicked. Under her guidance, my understanding deepened, and my confidence in my own work began to develop. I believe this was credit to her empathetic leadership and ability to tap into different ways of thinking.
In my first professional position as a Part I, I was fortunate to be part of a team led by the office’s only female associate, in a female majority team. Working alongside them shaped my work ethic in ways that still influence me today. Witnessing female representation in senior roles enabled me to see where I could progress to in the future. During my postgraduate degree, my chosen studio (PRAXXIS at Manchester School of Architecture) explored societal inequalities through a feminist lens and examined their impact on the built environment. The atelier was led by a team of women who encouraged us to question the status quo and engage in difficult but necessary conversations. Our first project had us designing intersectional housing on the site of the Pankhurst Centre. The building was home to Emmeline Pankhurst, activist and leader of the suffragette movement, and has been preserved as a museum to tell the story of the fight for women’s right to vote in Great Britain and Ireland. It is important to recognise the women who sacrificed to allow us to live how we do today, although much is still to be done across the world.
In my role at Maccreanor Lavington, I continue to be inspired by my female peers daily and am grateful for their mentorship. I look up to those who break the norms of the profession, leading by example. To all the incredible women who have contributed to my journey so far—thank you.
My mother from Office Manager, Sophia Gunkel, Rotterdam.
Throughout my life, I’ve been inspired by many women, but none has had a greater impact on me than my mother. She embodies love in its purest form—fierce, unconditional, and unwavering. Her strength, along with her thirst for life and adventure, has always been a force of nature—one that continues to shape me in ways I’m still discovering. She studied law in Malaysia, but when she moved to Germany with my dad, she shifted focus to raising my sister and me. Later, in yet another country, she rebuilt her career from the ground up, launching her own business—a testament to her determination and resilience.
But it isn’t just her hard work that inspires me, it’s her warmth and optimism. She has an amazing ability to make me laugh until my stomach hurts, and her curiosity about the world is contagious. While most people focus on what’s impossible, my mother shows you all the ways it is possible. She also has this remarkable gift for connecting with others, making anyone feel seen, heard, and at home—whether it’s a lifelong friend or an encounter with a stranger. As a child, I marvelled at how effortlessly she could put on lipstick—so skilled she could do it with her eyes closed. Even today, I’m still fascinated by it. It’s a small thing, but somehow, it perfectly captures her grace, confidence, and elegant power. In our family, we always joke that there’s never a dull moment with her. Her eternal optimism and kind heart always bring colour, warmth, and a little bit of magic wherever she goes—and for that, I am forever grateful.
My grandmother Audrey Poxon by Architect Joanna Poxon, London
When I reflect on the women who have inspired me, my mind always returns to a photograph of my Grandma, Audrey. At eighteen, she’s sitting on her father’s horse after a day’s work on the family farm. From a young age, Audrey was deeply involved in farm life, and during the Second World War, she helped bring cows to the dairy sheds, sending milk and supplies to nearby towns. It was here she learned the values of hard work and responsibility, which stayed with her throughout her life.
As she grew older, Audrey made a difficult decision to leave the farm and pursue a career in law. She at first became a Justice of the Peace and later worked in fraudulent tax law, handling high-profile cases she was always passionate about. Alongside her career, she volunteered at the local hospital’s maternity ward and the Red Cross, offering support for doctors and nurses and care for those who needed it.
Audrey was also a mother of four, and I’ve always admired how she balanced work, volunteering, and family life. One of her proudest moments was organising a campervan trip around Norway for the family—a challenging but unforgettable adventure with four kids in tow! When my dad chose not to follow the family business, Audrey fully supported his dream of becoming an engineer, just as she had once followed her own path. As a grandmother, Audrey was always a source of warmth for me. I have fond memories of her taking my brother and I fruit picking, teaching us to bake crumble, and even attending her tennis matches with her, well into her late 80s!
My memory of my grandma is one of strength, compassion, and an unwavering commitment to family and community. If I could spend one more day with her, I would love to take a ride with her on her father’s horse through their old farm, listening to stories of her life’s memories and passions, and learn once more how to make her famous blackberry and apple crumble.
Lois Weaver from Urban Consultant Conor Moloney, London
Lois Weaver is the femme half of the performance duo Split Britches, which has been creating work from a feminist DIY aesthetic since the 1980s. I came to know Lois, and eventually study with her, after stumbling into a room at The Wellcome Collection on Euston Road where she happened to be hosting a ‘Long Table’. The Long Table is a dinner table conversation, only without the dinner. It is a method for staging public conversations which draws on the private domestic conventions of hospitality.
At the time, I was working on urban regeneration projects involving lots of community engagement and consultation, and was immediately flabbergasted at the effect of Lois’s staging. Too often, conversations at public consultation events are highly managed, responses encourage acquiesence, and consent is subtly or not-so-subtly manufactured. At the Long Table, by contrast, there is no facilitation or chairing. There is no recording, no ‘summing up’, no lessons learned nor commitments made. To do so would relieve the participants of the responsibility to listen, attend to and reflect on what is being said, and by whom.
The Long Table involves seating twelve people at a table and providing a fairly open topic to discuss over a few hours (say, ‘What is the meaning of architecture?’). The protocol is set out on a single page. Only those at the table may speak, but anyone is welcome to sit at the table provided a space is free. The table somehow provides for a diversity of voices to be heard without any being able to dominate. As Lois explains it, ‘the table moderates itself’. Through a simple arrangement of furniture that explicitly draws on the domestic sphere, Lois shows us how a queer feminist perspective can operate in substantive ways to expand the public sphere.
Arundhati Roy from Eva Barnett, Architect, London
I’m currently reading a book on Arundhati Roy, renowned author of The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Upmost Happiness. These books are fiction in a sense – heavily rooted in the realities of rural Indian life, they depict the humanity and bitterness of the caste system and lives of the people at the bottom of it.
Roy is a remarkable person for the quality of her writing and the global audience she has moved with it. Those at the bottom of Indian society are a group not seen by the corporations and politicians that run the country, and her books are a purposefully direct stance against the social system that degrades them. In writing, she makes the vital statement that they need to be heard and understood to an audience that would not otherwise hear it.
But beyond this, she is a remarkable woman – writing and taking on political action in a country where women’s rights are often degraded – often the focus of her books. The books are very personal, reflecting at times her own life, and they drive the delicate line between a great love for her country whilst exposing its deeply embedded social problems with care, sensitivity and strength.
The book I’m reading is “The Architecture of the Modern Empire”. It is a written record of a series of interviews between Roy and David Barsamian, and covers conversations over her essays, upbringing and the political ideas that run throughout her writing. What I hadn’t realised previously was that Roy is in fact a graduate of architecture school, moving into writing as she felt she couldn’t work designing exclusive buildings for the country’s rich. More than her fiction, she has been an active member of many political movements, arguing against issues like the Gujarat massacre and global corporations’ takeover of the Indian economy and natural resources through government dams. She has published many essays, been taken to court, was the centre of protests, and arrested. Still, she remains an inspirational voice – steadfast in fighting for what is right and showing the power of being an advocate for those you care about.
#IWD2025 #AccelerateAction
