Ilze Wolff

Ilze Wolff co-directs Wolff Architects with Heinrich Wolff, a practice concerned with an architecture of consequence. 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 space. For her work with Wolff she was shortlisted for the 2018 Architectural Review’s Moira Gemmil award for emerging architects. In 2017-2019 she was a research fellow at the University of the Western Cape’s, Centre for Humanities Research and she is the co-founder of the publication and research platform Pumflet: art, architecture and stuff which focuses on 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 Publishing Against the Grain. Ilze regularly presents her research practice in talks, essays and exhibitions in various forums across the world including most recently, an essay in the Architectural Review on gardens as sites of resistance; in e-flux architecture as part of a series on confinement and home and in African Mobilities 2.0 on musical influences on design practice.Through the practice and with her colleagues at Wolff, their space in Bo-Kaap has hosted exhibitions, interventions, publications and talks in collaboration with artists, activists and scholars and in that way developing an enduring public culture around the city, space and personhood.