Discover an extraordinary woman and architect who left her mark
on world capitals and reshaped modern design, featured in the new book, Finding Ella Briggs: The Life and Work of an Unconventional
Architect (Princeton University Press, 2025) by Despina Stratigakos and
Elana Shapira. Co-author Stratigakos joins us to talk about this little-known
talent.
Briggs (1880-1977) was an architect,
designer, and writer who trained with the Viennese Secessionists and brought
their radical ideas to Gilded Age New York. She designed modernist housing for
the masses in Austria, was jailed as a suspected spy in Mussolini’s Italy, and
thrived in Weimar Germany before suffering persecution under the Nazis. Fleeing
to London, she contributed to England’s postwar reconstruction.
Stratigakos and Shapira bring together an international team
of historians to provide the defining biography of this unconventional
designer. Whether she was fighting for integration at Europe’s architecture
schools or writing about innovative houses for American women’s magazines like Good
Housekeeping, Briggs embodied the transatlantic flow of modernism.
Stratigakos is vice provost and professor of architecture
at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, who explores how power
and ideology function in architecture. She is the author of Hitler’s
Northern Utopia: Building the New Order in Occupied Norway (Princeton University
Press, 2020), Where Are the Women Architects? (Princeton University
Press, 2016), Hitler at Home (Yale University
Press, 2015), and A Women’s Berlin: Building the Modern
City (University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
Shapira lectures at the
University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria, and is the author of Design
Dialogue: Jews, Culture, and Viennese Modernism (Böhlau Verlag, 2018) and Style
and Seduction: Jewish Patrons, Architecture, and Design in Fin de Siècle Vienna (Brandeis University Press, 2016).
Authors on Architecture: Ella Briggs—Sunday, November
16, 2025; 1-2:30 PM Pacific. $5. Go to www.sahscc.org and pay via PayPal; or mail
in order form with check. Zoom link sent upon registration.
