Designing Sisterhood

Jos Boys is a co-founder of 1980s feminist architecture practice and research group Matrix Design Co-operative and co-author of their book, Making Space: Women and the Man-Made Environment (1984). She is currently Senior Lecturer in Environments for Learning at The Bartlett Faculty of Built Environment UCL, and is co-founder of The DisOrdinary Architecture Project which connects disabled artists with built environment practitioners, students and educators to co-develop new ways of designing from difference.

f-architecture, or feminist architecture collaborative, is an architectural research enterprise and shared alias of Rosana Elkhatib, Gabrielle Printz, and Virginia Black. With close attention to the body and its spatial politics, they produce research, writing, and design interventions that disentangle the global and intimate conditions of being, belonging, and resistance. They recently exhibited Passport, the outcome of their 2020 residency at Darat al Funun in Amman, at MAGAZIN in Vienna.

Zoë Berman is an architect, lecturer and Founder of Part W, an action group that campaigns for gender parity across the built environment. An advocate of design as a tool for positive change, Zoë is Director of the group Studio B, a network of designers and engineers, and established the annual community engagement week Rural Works. As a writer and visiting lecturer, she has extensively discussed design and equity across several publications and architecture schools.

Yẹmí Àlàdérun is an architect and major projects manager currently working for a housing association. She is a NED for Women’s Pioneer Housing association, co-founder of Paradigm Network and member of Part W. Yẹmí served as an elected national council member for Royal Institute of British Architects and sits on its Education committee. She is an advocate for education, income and housing equality and is passionate about social mobility and broadening access to the built environment.

Liza Fior is one of the founding partners of muf, an internationally recognised practice whose work is process-driven and experimental, a collaboration between art and architecture. Interested in the design of public spaces, and in making spaces public, muf engage with, and build on, the capacity of local communities to deliver high quality and sustainable outcomes. She is also a Professor of Architecture and Spatial Practice at Central Saint Martins and Mayor’s Design Advocate to Sadiq Khan.

Akua Danso is an architect from London who currently works at Shoreditch practice HUT Architecture. She co-founded Black Females in Architecture (BFA) in 2018 with Alisha Fisher, Neba Sere and Selasi Setufe to amplify the visibility of black and black mixed heritage women within the environmental field. BFA is a digital network where members benefit from shared knowledge, guidance, creative skilled workshops and access to job opportunities.

Rim Kalsoum is a British Syrian architectural designer based in London. Co-founder of Muslim Women in Architecture, Rim completed her PART II at the University of Westminster where she was Vice President of the Westminster Architecture Society and currently serves as Visiting Lecturer/Tutor. She also works for Architecture Doing Place and is a researcher for Palestine Regeneration Team (PART). Her work arches from examining methods of urban landscape annihilation in conflict areas to erosions of public spaces.

Zahra Mansoor, a co-founder of Muslim Women in Architecture, is an architectural designer and researcher based in Sharjah. During her term as president of the Westminster Architecture Society, she and co-founder Rim Kalsoum organised the AF Megacrit under the theme "Architecture and Power". Zahra is currently researching the influence of the Gulf on Kerala's urban landscape and the rise in fallow domestic houses alongside artist and designer Juneida Abdul Jabbar and architect Shahnaz Hashim.

Tahin Khan is a British Bangladeshi Part II Architectural Assistant at Architecture Doing Place, an architecture and urban design practice. Co-founder of Muslim Women in Architecture and FAME Collective, Tahin completed her Part I and II at the University of Westminster. Over the years, Tahin has worked with other architects on projects ranging from private residential and healthcare to the preliminary design for a town hall. She is currently working on social housing projects for London local authorities.

Shumi Bose is a teacher, curator and editor based in London. She is a senior lecturer in Contextual Studies in Architecture at Central Saint Martins, and visiting lecturer in Critical and Historical Studies at the Royal College of Art. She has also worked as a curator of exhibitions at the Royal Institute of British Architects.

Discover one of the great furniture designers and architects of the twentieth century whose work was often overshadowed by her male peers, such as Le Corbusier and Jean Prouvé.