'Zaha Hadid couldn’t stand being called a woman architect - I’ve never given a damn'

What do The Caprice (Princess Diana's favourite restaurant), JW Anderson's Soho store and the Cohen Quad at Exeter College have in common? They were all designed by women architects. The days of the boy's club are over - and these six women have broken major new ground. 

Eva Jiřičná CBE

“Zaha couldn’t stand being called a woman architect. I’ve never given a damn”

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Eva Jiřičná's elegant apartment in Maida Vale is an exercise in what could be described as 80s Art Deco. “I haven’t touched it since 1985,” she says, dressed in her customary black. “And yesterday I came into the room and this table had just fallen apart.”

The pieces of a four-part glass coffee table are stacked up against the wall, but it doesn’t diminish the harmony of the room with its glass brick wall and endless divan upholstered in sand-coloured silk. The walls, in a similar colour, are finished in a hand-applied textured plaster. 

Jiřičná, now 81, is best known for her dramatic interiors and extraordinary staircases, often in glass (though the most recent is a swirling spiral in Somerset House, where her choice of a pure-looking cutting-edge concrete perfectly complements the Palladian surroundings).

She set up her first self-titled studio in London in 1982, and one of her earliest clients was the fashion retailer Joseph Ettedgui, with whom she created stores and restaurants that changed the very look of shopping and eating, replacing the customary dark woods and fabrics with chrome, rubber, matte black and glass or Perspex for walls and fittings.

The Caprice restaurant had exotic inky black tiles on the floor and deep black carpet on the stairs; at Legends nightclub she used the materials of industrial buildings – aluminium and steel – to create a space that felt like a glittering version of the near future.  

Steve Jobs – “a mad man,” she says – approached her for his initial Apple stores in the late 1990s. “He’d come to meetings barefoot, not because he was a hippy, but because he wanted to make people uncomfortable.” He was after Jiřičná for her glass staircases, but was determined to put his products on wooden tables. “A glass staircase in a wooden shop!” she exclaims in horror, her voice still marked by Czech pronunciation even after so many years in the UK. 

Jiřičná grew up in Zlin, where her father was the in-house architect for the Bata shoe company and her mother translated medical documents. She hadn’t planned on staying in London when she came to the city to do a stint with the Greater London Council in 1968. But when the communists took over her country, her passport was withdrawn.

“I’d joined the Society of Human Rights in Prague,” she explains, “and that apparently made me persona non grata.” She had been briefly married aged 23, but her longest relationship was with fellow Czech Jan Kaplicky whom she met in London in 1969. The couple stayed together till 1980, “but I didn’t want to marry, then divorce again,” she says. (Kaplicky was known to be highly creative and madly difficult.) “And I couldn’t have children anyway, after an ectopic pregnancy.”

Not returning to Prague until 1989, she instead embedded herself in London’s architectural scene, with an expanding repertoire of projects from the radical open-plan interiors of Lloyds of London (designed by Richard Rogers) in the early 80s to the bus station at Canada Water in London in the late 1990s. 

One of a handful of women architects running a studio in the 80s and 90s, she was close to the trailblazing Iranian-born Zaha Hadid until her early death in 2016. “Zaha was bothered about being called a ‘woman architect’,” she says.

“I didn’t give a damn, but I’ve always tried my best to help female students and colleagues, or anyone who’s not being given a fair chance. I get more bothered about messing up my work, not doing a perfect job, than anything.”

Jiřičná’s main office, called IA-Design and co-directed by Petr Wanger, is now in Prague, so work has been carried out mostly remotely since last March, with Jiřičná Zooming in daily from Maida Vale. “My team there are really young, and we’re having fun.”

Projects include two hotels in the city centre, and a 100 metre tower on its outskirts. “If we get planning permission, it will be the tallest building in Prague,” she says. “Not tall for the sake of it, but because it’s for housing and it needs density, while that part of town also needs public space which a carpet development wouldn’t provide.” She clearly has no plans to slow down.

“It takes such a long time to learn all this,” she says. “And once you do, you never want to stop.”

Farshid Moussavi 0BE

“Architecture is collaborative. The idea that any practice is marked by one woman, or one man, is a discussion to be overcome”

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Farshid Moussavi knows how to rock a Richard Malone corset jacket or a Daniel Fletcher man’s shirt (worn as dress) in her vertiginous wedges. She once commissioned a bespoke hat from Hussein Chalayan, with sunglasses embedded in the brim, all the better to enjoy the sun-drenched opening days of the Venice Architecture Biennale. But even with these fashion credentials, she is more substance than style. 

Moussavi landed her first big commission at the age of 30 – a huge ferry terminal in Yokahama – with her then husband and work partner Alejandro Zaela-Polo. Since setting up her own practice in 2011, projects have included a series of beautifully designed residential towers across France and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland Ohio, a dazzling mirrored six-sided box that she calls “a living room for the city, an informal, rather than institutional, space”. She is a professor at Harvard, of which she is also an alumna, and the university has published her deep research into issues of Ornament, Form and Style in architecture.

Moussavi was born in Iran in 1965 to parents who were academics and lived there until the age of 14. But while on a family holiday in the UK, the revolution erupted, and she was sent to a British boarding school instead of risking returning home. “It was an abrupt introduction to English life,” she says, “and not at all planned.”

Revisiting Iran for the first time in 2010, cab drivers would ask where she was from, and she says she felt strangely lost in a country that she had thought of as her own. “Women in Iran are able to do anything they want professionally,” she says. “But there’s nothing like living in London where everything hits you in the face the minute you walk out the door.”

Moussavi lives in Pimlico with her daughter Mina (19) from her marriage, in a building which once housed the office of Thomas Cubbit, who designed the entire district. Her own office is in Fenchurch Street, though her 10-strong team have worked at home since last March.

“It feels like a leveller, that we’re all the same now we don’t go to the office,” she says, “but if you’ve got children and a small house, it’s got to be hard. This year has certainly clarified that we need to rethink the way buildings work. Look at the classic Haussmanian block in Paris – it will contain apartments and offices and doctors’ surgeries. They don’t need to be one thing or another. We need to get away from this idea of zoning.”

The studio is currently working on an Ismaili Centre, a meeting place for Ismaili muslims, in Houston, Texas – the third and largest to date. For Moussavi it’s a project of real social importance, where people from all sorts of communities can come together, in one of America’s most diverse cities. But you can easily visit her work in London, once conditions allow.

There is the wonder of the Toy Department in Harrods, eight brilliantly coloured rooms accessed from a technicolour tunnel that’s like Alice’s 21st Century rabbit hole; and a new arcade in the store’s lower ground floor inspired by the circles and soft edges of London buses and bright red pillar boxes. There is, too, the Victoria Beckham store in Dover Street, where the interior architecture, at least, is an infinitely flexible tour de force.

Jee Liu

“I’m not interested in references. I’ve always wanted to develop my own language”

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When Jee Liu arrived in London from eastern China in 2009, the first thing she discovered was the potential of a London travel pass. “You could click in once, and travel round the city in the front seat of the bus all day,” she says. “I did that a lot.”

It offered some respite from the frustrations of starting a demanding course in a second language at London’s prestigious The Bartlett, the architectural department of University College London. 

“Architecture studies are very presentation-heavy,” says Liu, who turns 36 in March and is now fluent in English, with a distinctly London accent. “I looked much younger than I was, and I couldn’t really say what I wanted. I probably seemed a bit naïve, and people weren’t that patient.”

Having developed her communication skills by “getting drunk with European students in the pub”, her cohort must have been shocked to find how much they’d under-estimated a star student. Back in China she had been mentored by Liu KeCheng, one of the country’s most important conservationists. 

In 2014 Liu established a studio with her life and work partner Jamie Wallace. They specialise in the creative re-use of existing buildings and landscapes. In 2019, they turned a former steel plant in Chongqing (opened by Mao Tse-tung in 1951) into the Chongqinq Industrial Museum, surrounding the whole building with a carapace of folded, perforated steel.

In the same city, they brought life back to a series of wide sidewalks along Yannan Road that Liu says “was like Finchley Road in London. Long and boring, with no loveliness.” Now it’s a string of park-like spaces. 

Jee Liu was born in 1985 in Yantai, an old port on the Korean peninsula, whose beach has become a chic holiday spot. “It was a quiet place when I grew up, but it’s grown into a very smart place – and very spread-out city. We call it ‘big pancake action’ in China.” 

Liu was keen to study fine art, but even 25 years ago, that was seen as a leisure pursuit or for the rich. Instead she studied architecture in Xi-an (the Terracotta Army was discovered on its outskirts) – a training that’s even longer and deeper than that in the UK.

“It’s so serious and rigorous, from very small scale work to urban planning, for a country that’s growing so much. We were being trained for real jobs,” she says. “But I wanted to learn my own [architectural] language, so I came to The Bartlett to unlearn some of what had been drummed into me in Xi-an.”

Liu’s training shines through, however, in her analysis and attention to detail. “My real joy is to touch on colour and materials,” she says. “Jamie is interested in the bigger stuff, in strategy. And since we spend so much time together, we bring a lot of complexity to our work.”

Their home is in London’s Alexandra Road Estate – social housing built in the late 60s in a brutalist style, once derided and now adored by designers and sold through the Modern House agency. Liu’s fashion taste is equally geared to vintage. “The best places are Berlin and Tokyo,” she says. “because the condition of old clothing is so good there, better than anywhere else. I like a structured winter jacket.”

While the pair worked in China for several years, since 2017, they have been back in London, though Liu’s homeland beckons. They hope to be back at the Chongqing steel works again, this time consulting on its extension into a ground-breaking creative campus. In reality, both countries need them. 

Stephanie Macdonald OBE

“Every space can be a background. He shot Virgil Abloh in the sauna”

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It was a close-run thing, but the new JW Anderson store in Soho opened its doors just days before the lockdown brought the UK to halt in March last year. “It’s always a relief to have that first opening party, to declare a project truly finished,” says Stephanie Macdonald, one half of 6a Architects, which designed the flagship project. “Architecture is for people, you need to see them in it.”

Macdonald, with her life and work partner Tom Emerson, had already worked with Anderson on an exhibition the fashion designer had curated with Andrew Bonacina at the Hepworth Art Gallery in Wakefield.

“There’d been some good discussions over bottles of wine,” says Macdonald. “Jonathan’s take on gender really interested us, and his idea of Soho as a community, his respect for its naughtiness and insouciance.” The store is furnished with formica, neon and shelves made of sheet steel, while panels of cheap fluted aluminium frame the door outside. In the basement, though, thick carpets and leather-covered rails are reminders that this is high fashion.

It is this ability to bond and respond to both clients and context that has given 6a its reputation as the fashion and art world’s architects of choice. The couple have worked with Paul Smith and the esoteric fashion hub, Blue Mountain School, in East London, while projects from the last couple of years include a stunning revival and extension of the Milton Keynes Art Gallery and a bravura extension at the South London Gallery in a former fire station over the road from the mothership.

“We like to uncover the original narrative of a place, and make new connections while still allowing people to feel what it once was,” says Macdonald. Photographer Juergen Teller, gallerist Sadie Coles and artist Fiona Banner and are among their clients – and friends. 

“English houses can be a bit box-like,” says Stephanie, “but ours tend to be sequences of spaces, each one connected to nature.” For a work in progress in north London for Frieze-cofounder Matthew Slotover and his wife, the curator Emily King, they had to build around the huge root balls of mature trees. “It’s like a chequer board of rooms, interspersed with gardens,” she says.

At the London studio they designed for Teller in 2016 – a sequence of buildings and courtyards – the flow of light through every part of the interior has led the photographer to work not just in the designated studio, but everywhere else too.. “He shot Joaquin Phoenix in a courtyard, and Virgil Abloh in the sauna,” says Macdonald. 

Macdonald (54) grew up on the outskirts of London as one of 12 children, and left home in her teens, working in a bank then in an insurance company. Finding her way first to Croydon College of Art, where she worked night shifts in Sainsburys to pay her bills, she went on to study architecture at the Mackintosh in Glasgow, the Royal College of Art (where she met Emerson) and North London University.

In 1999, just before the pair set up a practice together, and while living in an unheated shed in Bloomsbury with an outdoor toilet, they had a child, Laurie. “Obviously it felt like terrible timing, but turned out to be the best ever,’ says Macdonald. 

6a recently completed two mixed-use towers in Hamburg, whose varied dark-brick facades recall the area's industrial associations. They are now working on an entire city block in Melbourne. “We’re trying to make it not a silo but new buildings that connect back into the existing city,” says Macdonald.  Then there is an 800-house development in Haringey. The practice now employs around 40 staff, many of whom have been working remotely from countries including Korea, Poland and Spain.

“The purpose of the office has changed,” says Stephanie of their light-filled studio in Bloomsbury (they live opposite). “Now it has become a calm and stable place, but not one where people are obliged to come to. All our team are independent and talented. They don’t need to see me and Tom every day.”

Sadie Morgan OBE

“My focus comes from my upbringing in a commune that my grandfather started”

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“I loved designing and I was good at it. I’m good at planning, and texture and colour, and proportionality – I have a feel for things. I’m interested in beautiful spaces, but I’ve learnt  that my real talent is in connecting things,” says Sadie Morgan. Her other forte is convincing powerful people to change their thinking.

Morgan, who turned 50 last year, is a co-founder of the influential, off-beat, architecture firm dRMM (they like designing in wood). She is a professor at the University of Westminster. She chairs the Independent Design Panel for HS2 (note that “independent” should you decide to have a go at her). She is a mayoral Design Advocate at the Greater London Council. A few years ago, she cycled from Bilbao to Madrid, climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and has sailed with the GB team in the Commodores Cup. 

Morgan grew up in a bohemian community in Kent started by her grandfather, a psychiatrist and progressive socialist. Sharing space and responsibility were key components. “It gave me confidence and self-belief,” she says. “When government work first came my way, my initial instinct was to turn it down, then my ‘you can do it’ side kicked in. And yes, I do still feel like a square peg in a round hole in some of those situations. Which can be an advantage.”

Five years ago, she joined the National Infrastructure Commission, set up by George Osborne on the back of a paper written by Ed Balls. “Long term infrastructure decisions – around energy resilience, and housing for example – have to be taken outside mainstream politics,” she says. 

Morgan studied interior design and then architecture, and set up a practice in 1995 with the man she was to marry and later divorce, Alex de Rijke (they have 2 daughters, 21 and 23), and their friend Philip Marsh. When British Vogue decided to feature the threesome early in their career, the stylist who came to the shoot obviously hadn’t thought women were architects.

“They just brought menswear,” she recalls, “So Alex and Philip got to wear Dries Van Noten and I was stuck wearing my own clothes. I refused to put on any make-up.” 

The first project she led – an ingenious concrete block containing 5 apartments in south London, 30cm from a railway viaduct – was long-listed for the Stirling Prize, UK architecture’s top accolade. More momentous, in a rather different way, was discovering she had breast cancer three years ago.

“I think that’s where the extreme sports came in,” she says. “When you’ve been faced with death, you want to prove you’re alive. You value everything in a different way.” She completed the Spanish cycling trip just months after her all-clear. 

Recently Morgan founded the Quality of Life Foundation, set up to counteract what she sees as our national inability to create long-lasting good-quality housing at scale. “Everyone loves a new home, but what happens five years down the line?” she says. “So we’re developing an app to track that.” She’s also tackling the urban landscape: “The great and good think they know what constitutes great place making, but no one asks the consumers. So that’s what we’re going to do: treat consumers like experts too.”

Alison Brooks

“I would never design anything I didn’t want to live in myself”

Cotton shirt, £330 Max Mara, Cotton coat, £1,310, Dries van Noten 

Last year Alison Brooks completed one of the UK’s most stunning private houses, on the highest point in the Wye Valley in Gloucestershire. She added a black clad extension to an 18th-century farmhouse and inside has created the ideal setting for her client’s huge collection of tribal artefacts.

“It’s been a ten-year project,” says Brooks. “It’s amazing to work so closely with a client, because you are telling their story. But I bring the same care and concern to the social housing I design. I’d never design anything I didn’t want to live in myself.” 

Brooks has built theatres, art galleries and was the first woman to design a major addition to an Oxford college. The Cohen Quad at Exeter College, completed in late 2018, is an extraordinary S-shaped building with internal cloisters composed of spruce-wood fins. With accommodation, kitchens, auditoria and leisure spaces within its walls, it is, says Brooks, “like an ideal city, a community of scholars and students.”

Canadian-born Brooks, 58, might stand out for her white-blonde bob and exacting taste in clothes (Rejina Pyo is a current favourite), but among her peers she is exceptional as a serial prize -winner (among them the Stirling Prize, RIBA award and Stephen Lawrence award) with her own name above the door. When she set up her studio in 1996, there were only a few others run by women.

“I did it because I was a foreigner and I didn’t have a network, and I realised it was important to be a woman running her practice on her own, because there simply weren’t enough of us. I’m just delighted that that’s finally beginning to seem less and less relevant.” 

Brooks came to London from Ontario, Canada, in 1988 on a two-year Commonwealth Visa, and met and then married fellow Canadian and architect Charles Walker, now a director at Zaha Hadid Associates. The pair have sons aged 21 and 24 and live in an arts-and-crafts house in Queens Park. “Of course, being architects ourselves, it’s taken us nine years just to do a loft conversion,” she sighs. “Though we did manage to put in a very nice cherry wood staircase.”

She cycles to her studio in Kentish Town, “though not on Zoom days. I’ve discovered that you can’t jump off your bike, take off a cycle helmet and do an online meeting. You’re a complete mess.”

While she completed a significant residential building in Kings Cross last year, and another is rising from the ground in Stratford, a far bigger project is finally taking Brooks back to Canada. “We’re doing a scheme of around a million sq ft, in a part of Vancouver called Surrey,” she says. “It’s a whole city block, an urban quarter, and will include 900 homes.”

As usual she will make sure that the housing will be better than most of what is currently on offer. “I believe in embedded generosity,” she says. This means high ceilings, spaces to work, and the sort of porticos and balconies that are often not in the brief, but improve the experience of those passing as well as those who live inside. “Architecture is about how much value you can add to people’s lives,” she says. “We care, that’s our art.” 

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