International Workshop Rediscovering Ella Briggs

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International Workshop – “Rediscovering Ella Briggs – The Challenge of Writing Inclusive Architectural Histories for Women Who Broke the Mold” Concept and organization: Elana Shapira with Despina Stratigakos and Monika Platzer Recent public discussions on the role of women architects in shaping Red Vienna as well as on the influence of Austrian émigré architects in Britain has focused scholarly attention on Ella Briggs (1880-1977), a modernist who worked in Austria, the United States, Germany, and Britain. The workshop will bring together leading scholars from the United States, Britain and Austria to present their research on Briggs in a collaborative forum intended to “recover” the biography, career, and contributions of an architect who forged new paths both as a woman and as a modernist. In the process, the symposium also seeks to understand her role in shaping urban citizenship in the interwar period and the place of her story within historical memory in Vienna today. Ella Briggs (née Elsa Baumfeld) was born in 1880 to a well-to-do Jewish bourgeois family in Vienna. She married Viennese lawyer Walter J. Brix, who changed his name to Briggs after he immigrated to New York City. After her divorce and return to Europe, Ella Briggs established herself as an independent woman and successful architect in Vienna and Berlin. Facing persecution in Hitler’s Germany, Briggs fled to England where she reconnected with other Austrian émigrés and continued her architectural career. Despite new research on Briggs’ modernist architecture and a growing acknowledgement of her position as the “second woman architect of Red Vienna,” many questions remain about her biography and career. It is therefore critical to provide a platform for scholars from different disciplines to address Briggs’ career as designer, architect, and critic. Each speaker will present a talk on different aspect of Briggs’ biography and career. The workshop will conclude with roundtable discussions addressing methodological and research challenges in reconstructing the biography and career of Briggs as well as the question of how to position her career in the broader context of inclusive narratives that seek to go beyond mainstream architectural histories. The International Workshop seeks to broaden the historiography of Austrian architecture beyond social democratic and conservative party lines and even beyond its national borders, thereby adding new layers of complexity to civic memory in Austria, Germany, Britain, and the United States today.

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