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Wednesday Woman: Gabriela Carrillo
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Gabriela Carrillo is a Mexican architect known for her sensitive, site-responsive designs that blend contemporary forms with local context and materiality. Born in Mexico City in 1978, she studied at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and worked with renowned architect Mauricio Rocha for 19 years. In 2019, she opened her own firm, Taller Gabriela Carrillo.
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Carrillo approaches architecture as a collaborative endeavor. “I believe we need to break the paradigm of starchitects and start to work collaboratively,” she says. Her architectural style is rooted in material honesty, context-responsiveness, light, and sensory experience. She often works with local and traditional materials, such as regional stone, wood, and brick, and combines these with careful detailing to let light, shadow, and texture define the space. Her major projects include the Criminal Courts for Oral Trials in Pátzcuaro, the San Pablo Oztotepec Market, Iturbide Studio in Mexico City, and the Photo Museum Cuatro Caminos.
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Carrillo has received numerous honors for her work, including the Emerging Voices Award from The Architectural League of New York (2014) and the Architect of the Year Award from The Architectural Review (2017). She is also a co-founder of the Colectivo C733, dedicated to developing public projects in Mexico.
Wednesday Woman: Peggy Tolk-Watkins
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Peggy Tolk-Watkins was an American painter and poet whose work bridged the Bay Area’s artistic and musical worlds. Born and raised in New York City, she worked with underprivileged children as an arts and crafts supervisor in Lower East Side settlement houses. She studied literature at Black Mountain College. After graduating, she moved to San Francisco, where she became a central force in the city’s postwar nightlife.
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In 1950 Tolk-Watkins founded The Tin Angel, a legendary jazz and folk club that nurtured performers including Odetta, Kid Ory, and Turk Murphy. Later, with Sally Stanford, she opened The Fallen Angel, another renowned venue that cemented her role in shaping San Francisco’s cultural scene. SF columnist Ralph J. Gleason wrote that Peggy had the knack of “getting interesting people to come to the club regardless of the entertainment of the moment. She was stimulating to talk to herself and that drew interesting people.”
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Alongside her club work, Tolk-Watkins was a self-taught artist. She pursued painting and exhibited at the de Young Museum in 1960. Her “primitive” style, marked by bold colors and imaginative depictions of animals and flowers, reflected both playfulness and depth. Her painting “The Red Reindeer” is dedicated to Ruth Asawa, Tolk-Watkins’ peer at Black Mountain College, and is held in the collection of the Sausalito Historical Society. Asawa collected Tolk-Watkins’ work and displayed it in her home. Several works will be on view this autumn as a part of Asawa’s retrospective at MoMA in New York, opening October 19th.
Wednesday Woman: Jadwiga Grabowska-Hawrylak
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Jadwiga Grabowska-Hawrylak was one of the most important Polish architects of her generation. Her career helped shape the postwar identity of Wrocław in the 1950s. One of the first women to graduate from the Faculty of Architecture at Wrocław University of Technology, she became a central figure in the city’s reconstruction after World War II.
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Grabowska-Hawrylak’s early projects included housing developments designed to address urgent shortages, but she is best known for her bold modernist and later brutalist buildings. Her most iconic work, the sculptural Manhattan housing complex on Plac Grunwaldzki, constructed between 1963 and 1969, remains a landmark of Polish modernism. Combining innovative prefabrication techniques with expressive concrete forms, the project embodied both modernist ideals and the constraints of socialist-era architecture.
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Over the course of her career, Grabowska-Hawrylak’s designs, which ranged from schools and churches to residential blocks and public buildings, balanced aesthetics with post war priorities of civic responsibility. Her architectural practice was inseparable from rebuilding society and shaping collective life.