Srdečně zveme na další přednášku z cyklu Collegium historiae artium, kterou přednese Elana Shapira (Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien) na téma From a Workshop to a Book: Finding the Architect Ella Briggs.
Přednáška se uskuteční ve středu 25. března 2026 v 16.30 v zasedací místnosti (sál 117) Ústavu dějin umění AV ČR, Husova 4, Praha 1.
In the academic world of the humanities, scholars collaborate on book projects in various ways. The life and career of Ella Briggs (1880-1977)—a prominent female architect in interwar Vienna and one of only two women to plan social housing in Red Vienna—was revealed through a unique process. Briggs worked in New York, Breslau, Vienna, and Berlin, ultimately ending her career in exile in London. Rumors circulated about her activities in Breslau (today Wrocław) in the early 1910s, and newspaper reports surfaced in Europe and the U.S. about her brief imprisonment on false espionage charges in fascist Italy in the mid-1920s. To address the many facets of Briggs’s life and career, we needed to brainstorm. With this in mind, I approached Despina Stratigakos, an architectural historian, and Monika Platzer, the head of collections at the Austrian Architecture Museum in Vienna. They had worked on or were familiar with Briggs’s architecture. Together, we organized a workshop in June 2022. The workshop was titled “Rediscovering Ella Briggs: The Challenge of Writing Inclusive Architectural Histories for Women Who Broke the Mold.” This collaboration resulted in the groundbreaking book Finding Ella Briggs: The Life and Work of an Unconventional Architect, published in 2025. In this lecture, I will highlight the new discoveries and novel methodological approaches that emerged during our nearly three-year collaboration with fourteen colleagues. As I will discuss in my lecture, our aim is to propose a collaborative approach that can serve as a model for addressing the fragmented histories of women architects in Central Europe and beyond.
