Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky

Biography
Margarete Grete Schütte-Lihotzky was an Austrian architect, communist activist, and resistor against German Nazism. She was one of the first women to study architecture in Austria and probably the first woman to engage in the architectural profession in Austria. She spent several professional years in Germany, the Soviet Union, and Turkey. Among her most famous designs is the so-called Frankfurt Kitchen, which was created in collaboration with Ernst May as part of the New Frankfurt projects from 1925 to 1930.
Margarete Lihotzky came from a well-off Viennese family. Her father Erwin Lihotzky (1856-1923) was a liberal-minded civil servant with pacifist tendencies (in 1918 he advocated for the end of the Habsburg Empire and the establishment of a republic). Her mother Julie Bode (1866-1924) was related to the German art historian and museum curator Wilhelm von Bode (1845-1929). Her grandfather Gustav Lihotzky was the mayor of the city of Chernivtsi, which was the capital of the easternmost crown land of Bukovina, and later became a court councilor at the Vienna Ministry of Justice.
Margarete Lihotzky studied architecture from 1915 to 1919 under Oskar Strnad and civil engineering under Heinrich Tessenow at the Vienna School of Applied Arts (today's die Angewandte). As a student, she participated in a competition for workers' housing in 1917, where she first encountered the theme of social construction and won the Max Mauthner Prize for her project. She completed her architectural practice in Strnad's studio, where she contributed to a theater project for director Max Reinhardt. Through her participation in the competition for the gardening quarter Scharfberg, she became involved with the Viennese settlers' movement. At the beginning of 1921, she worked together with Adolf Loos on the Friedensstadt housing project. Subsequently, she worked with Ernst Egl on the Eden housing project in the 14th district of Vienna, where she focused primarily on the issues of cleaning rationalization, on which she wrote her first professional article. From 1992, she worked in the building office of the Austrian Association for the Allocation of Gardens and Apartments. She designed basic types of settlement houses and established a consulting center for housing design.
Through Adolf Loos, she became acquainted with Ernst May, who hired her in 1926 for the department of standardized elements in Frankfurt am Main, where she designed a prototype of a modern kitchen, of which a total of 12,000 units were eventually installed in various versions in the New Frankfurt housing estates.
At the municipal building office, she met her colleague Wilhelm Schütte, whom she married in 1927. For the Vienna Werkbund housing estate, she designed two row houses in 1932. Among the 32 authors of the Vienna functionalist housing estate, she was the only female architect.
After the deterioration of the economic and political situation in the Weimar Republic, in 1930 Ernst May moved with his entire team of experts from Frankfurt to Moscow. Schütte-Lihotzky was the specialist in kindergartens and school buildings in May's team. From Stalin, they were tasked during the first Soviet Five-Year Plan with realizing dozens of socialist cities, led by the grand plan for the industrial city of Magnitogorsk in the Southern Urals, of which only a quarter was ultimately realized.
In 1933, Schütte-Lihotzky presented her work at the World’s Fair in Chicago. In 1934, she completed a lecture tour in Japan and China. In 1937, she left the Soviet Union with her husband for Paris and later moved to Istanbul, where in 1938 she had the opportunity to teach at the Academy of Fine Arts. At the beginning of World War II, the Istanbul Academy was a safe haven for several other architects such as Bruno Taut and Clemens Holzmeister. In Istanbul, Schütte-Lihotzky also met the Austrian architect Herbert Eichholzer, who attempted to organize a communist resistance group against the Nazi regime. In 1939, Schütte-Lihotzky joined the Austrian Communist Party (KPÖ) and in December 1940 traveled to Vienna to establish secret contact with the Austrian communist resistance movement. However, just a few weeks after her arrival, she was arrested by the Gestapo due to an informant's betrayal, accused of treason, and on September 9, 1942, sentenced to death (later commuted to 15 years in prison, but her co-defendants were executed). She was subsequently transferred to a women's prison in Aichach, Bavaria, where she was liberated by Canadian troops in April 1945.
After the war, she initially worked in Sofia, Bulgaria. In 1947, she returned to Vienna, but due to her communist convictions, she received almost no public contracts. The Vienna Social Democracy at that time was strictly anti-communist. Around 1950, however, she could design some public buildings (the kindergarten on Kapaunplatz in the 20th district of Vienna is now protected as a historic monument).
In 1951, she divorced her husband. She prepared a number of exhibitions, worked on private contracts for international organizations, and for women's and peace movements. She embarked on study trips, worked as a journalist, and served as a consultant for the People's Republic of China, the German Democratic Republic, and Cuba.
In the 1960s, she designed a holiday home in Radstadt for her sister, where she spent summer months since then. The Republic of Austria publicly recognized her work only with a significant delay, when in 1980 she received the City of Vienna Prize for Architecture. In 1988, she refused to receive the Award for Science and Art from Federal President Kurt Waldheim due to his questionable Nazi past (she only accepted it from his successor Thomas Klestil in 1992).
In 1993, the first comprehensive exhibition of her work took place at the Vienna Museum of Applied Arts titled “Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky Social Architecture Contemporary Witness of a Century.”