Detail of illustration from the cover of Finding Ella Briggs: The Life and Work of an Unconventional Architect, ed. Despina Stratigakos and Elana Shapira (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025).
In recent years, robust and meticulous research has unearthed materials about women in architecture once thought to have been lost forever. In the case of Ella Briggs, scattered and long-forgotten educational records, photographs, letters, project information, articles, and other pieces of her fascinating life-puzzle have come to light. Viewed as a collection, these fragments form a picture not only of her physical contribution to the emergence of modern architecture in the early twentieth century but also of the ideas, influences, theoretical concerns, and unique creativity she brought to that enterprise.
Briggs captivates us not only with her courageous personality but also with her innovative challenges to the male-dominated realm of modernism. Initially trained in the largely female sphere of graphic design, she managed to escape the gendered boundaries of artistic production to enter a professional field—architecture—then reserved for men. She succeeded in obtaining commissions and demonstrated that she could do much more than simply cope with her male competitors, developing and vocally asserting her own ideas as a woman architect.
When assessing Briggs’s contributions, we need to consider her career in the context of Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century, when the city represented one of Europe’s most important art and design centers. The flourishing metropolis was populated by artists and intellectuals of international repute and offered progressive new educational opportunities for women of Briggs’s social class, particularly in the applied arts. In view of her proximity as a student to Vienna’s artistic luminaries, especially those within the Secession and Wiener Werkstätte, should we regard Briggs as a typical representative of what would become known as Austrian modernism, or did she develop her own approach? Even a brief reflection on an early project suggests it was the latter, that in finding her own position as an artist and as a woman, she emancipated herself from her own gendered Viennese education.1
In 1908, while sharing the German Theater commission in New York with other artists, Briggs designed the theater’s social rooms—the smoking salons, ladies’ parlors, and dining room—independently. Despite collaborating with the famous artist Alphonse Mucha, who oversaw the auditorium’s design, she did not subordinate her approach to his. Unlike Mucha’s somewhat outdated Art Nouveau style, Briggs created architectural compositions far more progressive in their simplicity and restraint. Beyond her innovative color schemes, the more casual arrangement of the furniture itself drew on developing modernist ideas from Vienna. Yet her design does not constitute a direct importation of Viennese Secessionist design, with its preference for a seamless Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), to the New World. Rather, Briggs contributed an interpretation of her own with a symbiosis of European interior design and American modernism.2 Although Vienna’s School of Applied Arts typically trained its graphic design students to create recognizable, repetitive patterns, Briggs produced something different and more fluid here. She realized that the American metropolis, with its own evolving identity, demanded from architects and artists a different strategy than that employed in Vienna.
Indeed, the American way of life appears to have had a lasting influence on the young Briggs, just as it did earlier on her renowned colleague Adolf Loos, whose works and writings readily referenced progressive American culture from a Viennese point of view. Briggs and Loos together occupied an important professional circle in Vienna. Both architects created seemingly “simple” small houses—Briggs, rural; Loos, modernist—and later devoted themselves to the development of large, modern, and visionary buildings within a democratic tradition. In 1910, toward the end of the monarchy, Loos designed the Goldman & Salatsch Haus, a commercial and residential building opposite the royal court at the center of the city, and the following decade Briggs designed the Pestalozzi-Hof in the nineteenth district as part of the ambitious Red Vienna housing reforms.3 Both of these projects were part of evolving democratic discourses in Austria about the rights of citizens, expressed through design—for Loos, in the political meaning of his aesthetics; for Briggs, in the rationalization of the floor plan.4 From the United States, both architects drew on American building culture, and particularly its advanced domestic technologies, as part of that search for greater equality.
Loos was one of the few Central European architects who had also experienced the advanced plumbing infrastructure of the United States and England. He realized its importance, claiming that water usage correlated with a society’s level of progress. In an essay written in 1898, Loos advocated adopting these sanitary advances; he titled the essay “Die Plumber” (after the English), as at that time there was still no German term to describe the new technology.5 Briggs endorsed the mission to raise awareness of the importance of integrating bathrooms into the home and the need for proper installation. Indeed, in her later exhibition work, she made the technology of plumbing a focal point of display.6
In contrast to Loos, who experienced and admired the United States from a visitor’s perspective, Briggs worked there professionally. Thus, she had the opportunity to export her Viennese artistic lineage to New York and, in turn, to bring the influences of New York back to Vienna. Wherever she traveled, Briggs collected ideas and concepts in order to incorporate them later in the appropriate place. After returning to Vienna from New York in the mid-1920s, she introduced a household amenity already typical in American households: the bathroom. Briggs incorporated a shower together with a toilet in her design for a 38-square-meter apartment, proposed for Vienna municipal housing. Praised in the September 15, 1926, issue of Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung (the official journal of Berlin’s Building Department), the bathroom was a novelty in Viennese social housing.7 The inclusion of this amenity confirms the decisive impact the American kitchen and bathroom planning had on Briggs’s experience. More than mere design concepts, the introduction of bathroom and kitchen improvements (including indoor plumbing, refrigeration, and laborsaving appliances) was transformative in domestic architecture of the twentieth century. Briggs’s (ultimately unsuccessful) effort to introduce these into the apartments of Vienna’s social housing program was just as radical an innovation as Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s introduction of the Frankfurt Kitchen to social housing in Germany in the same period.8 How truly revolutionary Briggs’s idea was in 1920s Vienna can be deduced from the fact that the apartments in the city’s most famous super-block, the Karl-Marx-Hof (1930), would not possess their own bathrooms until a renovation in 1989.
This comparison of Briggs’s work and preoccupations to those of Loos might seem at first glance to be an attempt to embed Briggs within the Viennese artistic circle recognized today as pioneering early modernism. But this would be a simplification—one that would not fully address the complexities of gender and aesthetics in delineating boundaries between outsiders and insiders. Certainly, these circles were comprised of men, positioning the female Briggs as an outsider. But even Loos, while a leading architect in fin de siècle Vienna, also occupied the margins, albeit in a different way: as a notorious taunter, mocking his architectural colleagues.9 Unlike Josef Hofmann, who was a well-respected professor and leading figure of the Secession promoting the notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk, Loos was a provocateur who dared to challenge what he saw as the false cultural claims of the “inner circle” whenever he got the chance. Against their focus on their own artistic self-realization, he insisted on prioritizing the client’s needs—a stance also shared by Briggs. In this sense, both Loos and Briggs were outsiders.
Another prominent member of Vienna’s intimate circle with whom Briggs shared many experiences as well as some artistic ideas is Josef Frank. Like Loos, Frank received international recognition for his contribution to modern architecture and the applied arts. But whereas Loos was ten years older than Briggs and thus preceded her in many ways, Frank was five years younger, and yet able (because of his gender) to obtain his architecture degree ten years before her. Nevertheless, Briggs would share with Frank ideas and perspectives on stylistic eclecticism, as well as outspoken skepticism about orthodox modernism’s rigidity.
Like Frank, Briggs possessed strong graphic and compositional abilities, and she worked comfortably at a variety of different scales, from small graphic projects as a young illustrator to large buildings as a mature architect. Her early interior designs are fashionable as an independent reworking of the Secessionist style, but also mainstream in the sense that they could be integrated successfully into any household, not just those of the elite. They were decidedly modern but not avant-gardist: in this sense, they seem to anticipate Frank’s design ideology of “accidentism” in architecture, which, while rooted in modernism, at the same time sharply critiques its orthodox banality, arguing instead for greater pluralism in design inspired by the element of chance. It rebukes the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, of the architect as godlike creator. The writing room that Briggs designed around 1913, probably for herself, is a forerunner of accidentism: organized around a collection of cherished objects that appear to have been passed down within the family or acquired over the years, it is a distinctly personal space that integrates individuality, space, and time.10 Always client-oriented, both Briggs and Frank varied the stylistic approach to their architectural projects. Each developed a personal signature that transforms in a dialogical way, according to a given client and their environment. While skillfully combining different materials and textures, both exercised their passion for color and innovative spatial arrangements. Yet Briggs arrived at this interplay of ideas through her Viennese design training, together with her engagement with progressive home economics and her concern for women’s domestic lives, distinguishing her work in terms of its ambition from Frank’s, which overlooked specifically female needs in the pursuit of a pluralistic modernism.11
A notable similarity among all three architects was the role influential women played in their careers. Loos received the commission to design Rosa Mayreder’s first women’s club in Vienna, where he may have become acquainted with his lifelong supporter Eugenie Schwarzwald, a progressive Austrian reform educator. Briggs benefitted from her association with Yella Hertzka, creating an exhibition at her New Vienna Women’s Club. Frank was fortunate to establish at a turning point in his career a long and economically profitable relationship with Estrid Ericson, whose Svenskt Tenn design collaborative enabled him to launch a highly successful second career in exile.12
More broadly, all three architects had at one time strong networks of patrons and friends who promoted their work. Loos, for example, relied on friends of his Viennese circle such as the critic Karl Kraus to promote his ideas, and influential and internationally renowned clients such as the owners of leading fashion salons Leopold Goldman (Goldman & Salatsch) and Gisela Wolf (Kniže) to provide commissions.13 Yet, in considering these networks of support, we are compelled to question their relative power. For despite being extremely adept at cultivating networks in many different places, Briggs needed to work harder than Loos or Frank to find those next commissions. In exile in England, she struggled professionally in light of her isolation, although insisting to the last on the achievements and fame she had once shared with her Viennese colleagues.
Loos, Frank, and Briggs were certainly unusual. All three were citizens of the world, Viennese trailblazers of early modernism, whose work diverged from the doctrinaire, international modernism that developed subsequently. For this reason, Loos and Frank have typically been grouped into the loosely defined but intriguing historiographical category of the “other modernists.”14 Briggs’s career, by contrast, has largely eluded historical scrutiny until now, and she remains an outsider even among these “other” modernists. If, as the architectural historian Beatriz Colomina maintains, promoting one’s ideas in mass media constitutes an important hedge against oblivion, then how might Briggs’s obscurity today be explained, given that all three of these figures contributed publicly to the theoretical discourses of modernism, especially concerning housing issues?15 That Briggs’s contributions were appreciated in her own time is clear: her international activities, active participation in important exhibitions, and publication of many popular and professional journal articles provide evidence that her engagement in architectural discourses was visible, sought after, encouraged, and sustained. So why was she forgotten, whereas Loos’s and (to a lesser extent) Frank’s work is remembered in the histories of early modernism?
Today, as we recover her story, Briggs captivates us as a modernist innovator who demonstrated that, against all odds, a woman architect could succeed (to a degree) without being part of modernism’s male inner sanctum. From early on she worked independently, in parallel with much more famous players but never subordinating herself to any of them. She actively sought out beneficial connections and patronage but did not ingratiate herself or imitate others to advance her career. Briggs’s engagement throughout her life and work with questions about how modernity affected women, and her immersion in circles dedicated to advancing women’s causes, from women’s clubs to women’s magazines, shows that Briggs’s “otherness” emerges less out of formal issues than from a deeply personal and philosophical concern about what architecture meant to women’s self-actualization. From a historical perspective, she is thus doubly “othered”—as an architect who does not fit neatly into prescribed modernist lines, and as a woman.
Finding Ella Briggs: The Life and Work of an Unconventional Architect and the new research it makes available give us a chance to reconsider Briggs’s othering within the historiography of early Viennese modernism as well as broader questions about her pursuit of an architectural career in the first half of the twentieth century and her remarkable professional achievements. Briggs, it is clear, was an exceptionally determined character, whose focus on her artistic vocation and open-mindedness about what was possible contributed to a stunning degree of professional self-realization. Briggs’s unflinching desire to escape narrow social conventions in order to realize her own dreams fascinates and inspires us. At the same time, that she never received the level of support that allowed other male architects to soar saddens us, as it leaves many questions about her potential unanswered. Nonetheless, in searching for those answers, there is also hope that history can teach us about building a future for the architectural profession—and its storytellers—that includes instead of others.
