🔍 MăreșteIn memoriam
Margarete "Grete" Schütte-Lihotzky (née Lihotzky; 23 January 1897 – 18 January 2000) was an Austrian architect and a communist activist in the Austrian resistance to Nazism. She is mostly remembered today for designing what is known as the Frankfurt kitchen.
Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky a adăugat o fotografie
acum 9 zile
Margarete "Grete" Schütte-Lihotzky (née Lihotzky; 23 January 1897 – 18 January 2000) was an Austrian architect and a communist activist in the Austrian resistance to Nazism. She is mostly remembered today for designing what is known as the Frankfurt kitchen.
Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky a adăugat o fotografie
acum 9 zile
Early life and education Margarete Lihotzky was born on 23 January 1897 into a bourgeois family in Margareten, since 1850 part of Vienna. Her grandfather Gustav Lihotzky was a mayor of Czernowitz, Ducal Bukovina, and her mother Julie Bode was relative of Wilhelm von Bode. Her father was a liberal-minded civil servant, Erwin Lihotzky, whose pacifism made him welcome the end of the Habsburg Empire and the founding of the republic in 1918. Lihotzky became the first female student at the Kunstgewerbeschule, today the University of Applied Arts Vienna), where renowned artists such as Josef Hoffmann, Anton Hanak, and Oskar Kokoschka taught. Lihotzky almost did not get in. Her mother persuaded a close friend to ask the famous artist Gustav Klimt for a letter of recommendation. In 1997, celebrating her 100th birthday and reminiscing about her decision to study architecture, she remarked that "in 1916 no one would have conceived of a woman being commissioned to build a house – not even myself." Lihotzky studied architecture under Oskar Strnad, winning prizes for her designs even before her graduation. Strnad was one of the pioneers of sozialer Wohnbau in Vienna, affordable yet comfortable social housing for the working classes. Inspired by…
Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky a adăugat o fotografie
acum 9 zile
Housing design In 1926 she was called to the Hochbauamt of the City Council of Frankfurt am Main, Germany, by the architect and city planner Ernst May where she worked on the New Frankfurt project. May had been given the political power and financial resources to solve Frankfurt's housing shortage. He and Schütte-Lihotzky, together with the rest of May's assembled architectural staff, successfully brought functional clarity and humanitarian values to thousands of the city's housing units. Lihotzky continued her work by designing kindergartens, students' homes, schools and similar community buildings. Schütte-Lihotzky designed kindergarten pavilions based on the ideas of Maria Montessori. In Frankfurt she met colleague Wilhelm Schütte, whom she married the following year.
Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky a adăugat o fotografie
acum 9 zile
Frankfurt kitchen As part of the New Frankfurt-project Lihotzky created the Frankfurt Kitchen in 1926, which was the prototype of the built-in kitchen now prevalent in the Western world. Based on scientific research by U.S. management expert Frederick Winslow Taylor and her own research, Lihotzky used a railroad dining car kitchen as her model to design a "housewife's laboratory" using a minimum of space but offering a maximum of comfort and equipment. The kitchen measured just 1.9 x 3.4 meters. Kitchen surfaces were painted blue-green as scientists claimed the color repelled flies. The Frankfurt City Council eventually installed 10,000 of her mass-produced, prefabricated kitchens in newly-built working-class apartments. On her 100th birthday Schütte-Lihotzky commented "You'll be surprised that, before I conceived the Frankfurt Kitchen in 1926, I never cooked myself. At home in Vienna my mother cooked, in Frankfurt I went to the Wirthaus [restaurant-pub]. I designed the kitchen as an architect, not as a housewife." In September 2024, in central Vienna, a 1970s version of the Frankfurt kitchen, restored by architect Renate Allmayer-Beck on the basis of Schütte-Lihotzky's original plans and photos, was opened to the public.
Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky a adăugat o fotografie
acum 9 zile
Wartime activities As the political situation in the Weimar Republic deteriorated and shifted to the political right, Schütte-Lihotzky joined a team of seventeen architects, the "May Brigade", led by architect Ernst May and including her husband and Erich Mauthner, also from Vienna. In 1930 they travelled to Moscow by train. There the group was commissioned to help realize the first of Stalin's five-year plans by building the industrial city of Magnitogorsk in the southern Ural Mountains. On their arrival, the city consisted of mud huts and barracks. It was to have 200,000 inhabitants in a few years' time, the majority the populace working in the steel industry. Although the May Brigade was credited with the construction of 20 cities in three years, political conditions were bad and the results mixed. May left Russia in 1933 when his contract was up. With the exception of brief business trips and lecture tours to Japan and China, Schütte-Lihotzky remained in the Soviet Union until 1937. She and her husband moved first to London and later to Paris. Also, in 1933 Schütte-Lihotzky had presented some of her work at the Chicago world's fair, "Century of Progress". In 1938 Schütte-Lihotzky, together with her husband, was…
Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky a lăsat un gând
acum 9 zile
Post-war In 1945, after the war had ended, she moved to Sofia, Bulgaria, where she came up with the Kindergarten System, a modular architectural system of plans she designed for the municipality. Positing that the advancement of women would benefit society at large, she wrote of her Kindergarten System in Sofia, "The growing percentage of the Bulgarian women in production and in all sectors of the public life of the country will make the establishment of children’s institutions increasingly important in the coming years." It was also during this time that she was able to reunite with her husband, Wilhelm Schütte, after being imprisoned for more than four years for her participation in the Communist Resistance against the Nazi regime. Margarete Schütte-Lihotsky eventually returned to her native Vienna in 1947. Her strong political views – she remained a communist – prevented her from receiving any major public commissions in post-war Austria, despite the fact that innumerable buildings had been destroyed and had to be rebuilt (Wiederaufbau). Consequently, apart from designing some private homes, Schütte-Lihotzky worked as a consultant in China, Cuba, and the German Democratic Republic. In 1951 she separated from her husband, Wilhelm Schütte. Belatedly, her accomplishments were officially…
Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky a lăsat un gând
acum 9 zile
Commemoration The Australian singer, writer, and director Robyn Archer wrote a play based on Schütte-Lihotzky's life. Architektin, featuring Helen Morse, Ksenja Logos, Craig Behenna, Duncan Graham, Antje Guenther, Michael Habib and Nick Pelomis, produced by the State Theatre Company of South Australia, and directed by Adam Cook, opened on 2 September 2008 at the Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide, South Australia. The song "The Frankfurt Kitchen" by Rotifer is another tribute to her work. Schütte-Lihotzky was celebrated in an exhibition Cumhuriyet Kadınları Sahneye Çıkıyor: Cevval, Akılcı, Dirençli, Sabırlı ve İnançlı, (Republican Women Take to the Stage: Brave, Rational, Resistant, Patient and Faithful) organised at Goethe-Institut Ankara from 5 December 2023 to 4 February 2024 in honour of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Republic of Turkey and the 90th anniversary of Turkish women gaining the right to vote. It showcased the lives and careers of six women who were educated in the young Turkish Republic and the Weimar Republic and whose careers made an impact on the world. Alongside Schütte-Lihotzky, the exhibition featured archaeologist Halet Çambel, architect Mualla Eyüboğlu Anhegger, Semiha Berksoy, Turkey's first Muslim opera singer, paediatrician Erna Eckstein Schlossmann and computer scientist Marianne Laqueur.
Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky a lăsat un gând
acum 9 zile
Honours and awards Architecture Award of the City of Vienna (1980) Austrian Decoration for Science and Art (1992) Grand Decoration of Honour in Gold with Star for Services to the Republic of Austria (1997)