Wivi Lönn needed a special permit to enter the Tampere industrial school as the only woman in her class, and another to read architecture at the Polytechnic in Helsinki, where she qualified in 1896. She was the fourth woman in Finland to become an architect and the first to open her own office — the first woman in the country to practise independently rather than inside someone else's firm. She won open competitions repeatedly: Tampere's central fire station, girls' schools in Tampere and Jyväskylä, and, with Armas Lindgren, the Estonia Theatre in Tallinn and the New Student House in Helsinki. School buildings were her speciality and her instinct in them was anti-institutional — daylight, warmth, rooms scaled to children. In 1956 she became the first woman awarded the honorary title of Professor by the Finnish Association of Architects.
