Tripolskaya (nee Pevzner) was born in 1925 into a Jewish family in Rostov-on-Don, Russia. The family soon moved to Baku. At school, Tripolskaya wrote poetry and was a member of the school literary club, dreaming of studying at the Literature Department of Moscow State University. However, by the time it was time for her to apply to a university, the Second World War began, and the parents prohibited Tripolskaya from studying literature out of fear that she would be drafted into the army as a military journalist. Upon graduating from high school in 1943, she thus enrolled into the Department of Architecture of Azerbaijan Industrial Institute. There, she met her husband, future architect Oleg Tripolsky, whom she married in 1946. Upon graduating in 1947, Tripolskaya moved to work at Azgospromproekt, where she remained for her entire career, working on both architectural design and urban planning commissions for industrial objects in Azerbaijan and other republics. The most important among those was Belorechensk industrial hub in the south of Russia.