Can the design of a building determine who gets to think, write, and create?

Woolf argued that women couldn't produce great literature without a room of their own and independent income. Her essay was fundamentally about architecture and access: the locked libraries of Oxford, the private studies of male writers, the domestic spaces where women were confined. Architecture has always determined who has privacy, who has a workspace, and who has the space to think. Woolf understood that buildings don't just shelter people -- they enable or prevent their ambitions.