About this Event
Inaugural Lecture - Professor Ilze Wolff
^Achitecture as a liberation spatial practice^
Liverpool School of Architecture - Budden Lecture Theatre
November4 , 2026 - 6:30pm
We are delighted to welcome you to an inspiring evening with Professor Ilze Wolff.
This lecture will build on and echo the work of Mario Gooden, who professes that 'liberation is a spatial practice’ as much as it is a social practice.
Through a few key recent projects, it will illustrate how this statement has influenced Prof Wolff's thinking, doing, and teaching architecture.
Some ideas that have emerged while focusing on liberation and spatial practice include: the garden as a potential site of emancipation and Black feminist and queer spatialities; thinking freedom from the (modernist) ruin; and foregrounding sound as a method for architectural teaching. Black ecologies, liberation spatial tactics, and the politics of land are foundational themes in the discussion.
Ilze Wolff is a Professor of Practice at the Liverpool School of Architecture. She co-directs Wolff Architects, a Cape Town-based transdisciplinary design and research practice with Heinrich Wolff. She is the author of Unstitching Rex Trueform, the story of an African factory (2017), an interdisciplinary study of a modernist garment manufacturing factory in Salt River, Cape Town.
In 2024, she co-authored Tectonic Shifts: Reflections on our Practice. As part of her expanded architectural practice, Wolff founded 'pumflet: art architecture and stuff’, a publication probing Black social and spatial imaginaries. This project and her practice have appeared in numerous international exhibitions and biennales, including the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2019), São Paulo Art Bienal (2023), Venice Architecture Biennale (2023), Dakar Art Biennale (2024), and the Diriyah Art Biennale (2026).
Most recently, she co-directed the exhibition design for the 61st International Art Exhibition, In Minor Keys, curated by Koyo Kouoh at the La Biennale di Venezia 2026. Wolff’s main preoccupation as an architect is to reconstruct and seek out spatial practices of collective freedom.
The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception. All welcome.
Event venue & nearby stays
Budden Lecture Theatre - Liverpool School of Architecture, I Bedford Street North, Liverpool, United Kingdom
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