One reason: For some time now clearly more women than men have been studying architecture, and the trend is upward. By no means all of them actually make it in the profession; some do not even join in the first place, or they stop after only a short time. The “missing group”, the discrepancy between the number of female students and the number of women who are registered as member architects of a chamber of architects, is about 20 percent.
Of those who stay, few make it into the top league. There, architecture remains a men’s affair. So the big question is:
Why do so many women who have often graduated with flying colors then turn their backs on architecture again?
A second reason: A disturbing number arose when we looked back at the history of the DAM itself. Of the total of about 370 exhibitions that have taken place since the museum’s foundation back in 1984, about 100 were shows on individual architects; by contrast, of them, only four were monographic exhibitions on a female architect. FRAU ARCHITEKT took this imbalance as a reason to focus for the first time on women architects in Germany as a whole, on past and present, on their achievements in architecture, their lives, and their struggle to survive.
22 portraits of women architects from 1900 to the present
FRAU ARCHITEKT presents 22 women in Germany who have substantially influenced architecture since 1900 – or still do so. To be precise, it is slightly more than a century, as the story begins with Emilie Winkelmann, who founded her own architecture office in Berlin in 1907. The line runs from the beginnings right through German history since 1900, the Reich under the Kaiser, the interwar years followed by the Third Reich, through the division of Germany and its reunification into the 21st century. Analogously to that history and all its ruptures, FRAU ARCHITEKT presents a broad spectrum of major female architects who not only come from different social milieus, but can also be assigned to conflicting gender positions and opposing camps in both architecture and politics. Thus, the group includes female pioneers driven by Modernism, members of the women’s movement and staunch feminists, aristocrats and members of the middle class, left-wingers and right-wingers, socialists and businesswomen, Jews forced into exile and last but not least a prominent Nazi – the pioneers were not always to be found under the banner of democratic progress.
Some of the architects are as good as unknown even among the specialists, and certainly to the general public. FRAU ARCHITEKT seeks to give women in architecture more visibility, to ensure they do not remain anonymous and to put faces to their names and give them voices. The flashback into history also serves as an instrument that enables us to see the present and the future with a keener focus.
FRAU ARCHITEKT in film
In addition to the 22 portraits, the exhibition aims to give women architects a voice – as examples and representatives. The house within a house, which Oswald Mathias Ungers inscribed into the DAM as a programmatic core, has been transformed into a “women’s room”, acting as a cinema for nine film portraits for the duration of the exhibition. Women architects address questions that have been important to women in architecture over the last century, and possibly still are today. Born between 1930 and 1995, they report on their experiences in the postwar period, in East Germany, West Germany, following Reunification and in the present day – a broad spectrum of very different professional foci and decades of bundled occupational and life experience in the male-dominated architectural profession.
Iris Dullin-Grund (Berlin) won the competition for an “educational and cultural building” in Neubrandenburg in 1960. Ten years later she became municipal architect, a position she held until Reunification. In the former East Germany this was one of the most renowned posts in architecture. In 1983, 39-year-old Ingeborg Kuhler (Berlin) won the competition for the Museum für Technik und Arbeit (today the Technoseum) in Mannheim. In 1984 she became the first woman to be appointed to a German architecture faculty as professor of design – at Berlin’s Hochschule der Künste (today the UdK, Berlin University of the Arts), where she taught until 2007. Single mother Marie-Theres Deutsch (Frankfurt/Main) made an architectural mark on Frankfurt with the Portikus and the revitalization of the banks of the River Main. Susanne Hoffmann (Berlin) founded the studio Baupiloten in 2001 and takes a participatory approach to all her projects, primarily educational buildings, one that involves users in the planning process. Since graduating in 2004, Bavarian architect Anna Heringer (Lauffen) has principally constructed buildings in Bangladesh that take into consideration traditional design. She has received numerous awards for her work. The two young architects Cathrin Schultz and Kathrin Sievers have been successfully working together in Bremerhaven for a few years and received the BDA Award Bremen in 2014. Students Aylin Akgöz and Meike Kimmel are about to graduate and enter the profession.
FRAU ARCHTEKT and “Treasures from the Archive”
Parallel to the exhibition the DAM is showing in its series “Treasures from the Archive” a small selection of the plans and drawings for an unrealized design for a Berlin office building by Zaha Hadid (1950-2016). The late Zaha Hadid is undoubtedly the most famous female architect of the 21st century. Even though she cannot be counted among German women architects, her early successes in Germany (Aedes exhibition, West Berlin, 1984; Vitra Fire Station, Weil am Rhein, 1997) played an important role in her career.
Beyond FRAU ARCHITEKT – supporting program and cooperations with other institutions
Today the gender upheaval is discussed right across society; it affects the social reality of women in all professional fields. For this reason too FRAU ARCHITEKT targets a broad spectrum of visitors. The exhibition is intended to address not only female and male architects, men and women in design professions, but also an audience interested in such topics as gender equality and contemporary history. FRAU ARCHITEKT acts as a visualized platform offering everyone information and an opportunity for discussion. As such, the extensive supporting program relies on cooperation with universities, professional associations and networks as well as with institutions that are a significant part of urban society and likewise address topics relating to gender equality. Accompanying film series, work reports by Frankfurt women architects, an informal talk round with the very first women architects, workshop series and a PechaKucha Night round out the exhibition.
“Jeanne D’ARCH”, a symposium curated by Julia Hinderink and planned for early November, invites eleven women architects to debate (female) architectural positions in relation to the topics material, participation, education, role models, awards, and exhibitions. An international symposium entitled.
“Women Architects and Politics in the long 20th Century” will follow in January 2018 and will address the current status of gender research in architecture – with academics from Europe, the USA and Israel. The cooperations are very broad, ranging from the neighboring Filmmuseum, the Historisches Museum and Jüdisches Museum to the Dept. of Women’s Affairs of the City of Frankfurt/Main, the Evangelische Akademie and Volkshochschule Frankfurt (Adult Education Center), to Goethe University Frankfurt (Institute of Art Education), Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences and Technische Universität Darmstadt.
“Who’s afraid of women who build?” – FRAU ARCHITEKT for children and young people
A comprehensive educational program is geared towards children and young people, aiming here too to discuss opportunities and limitations in the architectural profession and to sharpen gender awareness of the challenging of existing role models. As such, a technology action week entitled “Jungen konstruieren – Mädchen dekorieren?” (Boys construct – girls decorate?) is planned in cooperation with the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences. It will offer both mixed school classes and groups of just girls an opportunity to try out several things at “experiment stations”.
Workshops and projects such as “Bauen Frauen anders?” (Do women build differently?), “Rosa Räume für Rapunzel” (Pink rooms for Rapunzel) and the building academy “Wer hat Angst vor Frauenzimmern” (Who’s afraid of women who build?) offer practical opportunities for exploration, also and in particular for target groups for whom cultural participation is not a given. A children’s non-fiction book “Frauen bauen. Kinder entdecken Architektinnen” (Women who build. Children discover women architects) will put the gender question on the compass of 10-14 year olds and tell stories of women who had or have to hold their own in the man’s world of architecture – in an authentic manner and on an equal footing.
FRAU ARCHITEKT is sponsored by the German Federal Cultural Foundation, Halle. The exhibition is under the auspices of the Minister for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety, Dr. Barbara Hendricks, and the President of the German Federal Chamber of Architects (BAK), Barbara Ettinger-Brinckmann.
22 PORTRAITS
Victoria zu Bentheim und Steinfurt (1887-1961) – The Princess
Victoria zu Bentheim und Steinfurt was clearly not destined by birth to one day work in a predominantly middle-class domain and pursue a profession. Yet travels through Europe as well visits to the restoration work being carried out on Bentheim Castle between 1883 and 1914 awakened her interest in professional work in architecture. After 1908/9, women were allowed to attend universities in Prussia, but they required an exemption from the Prussian Ministry of Education. A letter of recommendation from Emperor Wilhelm II, a relative, supported her enrollment at the Royal Technical University in Berlin. The Princess began her studies in 1913, but interrupted them to work for the military in Döberitz and in the occupied areas of northern France during the First World War. After receiving her degree in 1919, she moved to Castle Steinfurt Her family established the Royal Bentheim Building Authority for her, and for the next fifteen years she designed farmhouses, monuments and furniture in addition to overseeing restoration projects on their properties. In 1935 she relocated to Mittenwald and worked for private clients. She joined the NSDAP in 1933, but during the Second World War she sheltered a Jewish woman and her daughter in addition to organizing forged identity documents for another woman who has escaped a concentration camp.
Princess Victoria zu Bentheim and Steinfurt died in 1961 and is buried in Castle Steinfurt
Emilie Winkelmann (1875-1951) – The First Woman Architect in Germany
“Regardless of one’s intelligence, without mathematical abilities, without a talent for drawing, even without a certain practical understanding of everyday needs, material conditions and financial relations no one can make it through their studies and practical work in an office,” observed Emilie Winkelmann in 1913. This clear-headed understanding of the architectural profession sustained her through a career, which spanned five decades. Highly unusual for a young woman around 1900, Winkelmann had apprenticed at her grandfather’s construction company in Aken near Dessau. When the business was sold to settle a debt, she decided to forge a career on her own. Starting in 1902 she attended the Royal Technical University Königliche Technische Hochschule in Hannover as a guest student. Because women were only allowed to enroll as regular students in Prussia until 1908/9, she was not allowed to take the final examinations. Architects in Germany were not licensed at this time, and in 1907 Winkelmann opened her own office in Berlin. Her membership in the city’s leading women’s association, the Lyceum Club, soon brought her in contact with clients who were willing to hire a female architect. Her office thrived, and she built residential and commercial projects in Berlin and throughout northeastern Germany for private clients and women’s organizations. Emilie Winkelmann became a member of the Association of German Architects BDA in 1928. Her Berlin office was destroyed in World War Two. She died in 1951 and is buried in Aken.
Therese Mogger (1875-1956) – Woman Architect and Client
Around 1900 Therese Mogger, née Geiger, decided to boldly challenge convention: Using her inheritance—her family operated a brewery for the Benedictine monastery in Ottobeuren—, she divorced her husband, placed her three sons in boarding school and prepared to study architecture. Bavaria allowed women to attend universities as auditors beginning in 1904 and to matriculate in 1905, and shortly afterward Mogger became a guest student taking classes in architecture at the Technical University in Munich. After acquiring practical training in offices near Lake Constance and Mullheim, around 1911 she moved to Düsseldorf. There she built apartment houses in the Gerresheim district,sometimes acting as both client and architect. To attract clients, she also published her designs for single- family houses in a supplement to a local newspaper. Around 1920 Therese Mogger became the first woman to join the Association of German Architects. In the 1920s and 1930s her buildings, such as a day care center, a clubhouse and a variety of housing served the needs of a diverse urban population. She also contributed articles about modern architecture to women’s magazines and was the President of the Association of Dusseldorf Women Artists.
Therese Mogger died in 1956 and is buried in Ottobeuren.
Lilly Reich (1886-1947) – The Exhibition Designer
As was typical around 1900 of young women wishing to work as artists, Lilly Reich underwent training with a focus on textile techniques, fashion, and interior design. In the 1920s, working in collaboration with Mies van der Rohe, she used these skills to create striking interiors, furniture and exhibitions, which have become icons of modern architecture. Prior to 1914 Reich designed furniture and exhibitions for various women’s organizations. In 1912 was admitted to the Deutscher Werkbund and in 1920 became the first women elected to its governing board. In the early 1920s she lived in Frankfurt and organized shows for the Frankfurt Trade Fair. Between 1927 and 1937, now resident in Berlin, she maintained an independent atelier and collaborated with Mies van der Rohe. Their exhibitions, furniture and interiors were presented at the 1927 Weißenhof Exhibition in Stuttgart, the 1929 German Division of the Barcelona World Exhibition the 1931 Berlin Building Exhibition and the 1934 show German Work, German People in Berlin. They also created temporary installations for manufacturers of materials such as glass, silk and linoleum and built private residences. Her contribution was characterized by the complex arrangement of objects in space, bold colors and distinct textures.
During the Second World War, she remained in Germany, where she was called up for war service. She also insured the safekeeping of Mies van der Rohe’s papers. Lilly Reich died in Berlin in 1947.
Marie Frommer (1890-1976) – The Exile
“... she was a pleasant person, tall and slim. She was Jewish, highly intellectual, with that typically jewish keen, confident, and clear sense of judgment, and she was also warm-hearted, humorous, and funny”, recalled Lotte Cohn about her life-long friend, the architect Marie Frommer. Frommer, like Cohn, was one of the first women to study at the Royal Technical University in Berlin. Like Cohn, she went on to acquire practical experience in the reconstruction of East Prussia during World War One. Frommer, however, distinguished herself in 1919 when she became the first woman architect in Germany to earn a doctorate from the Technical University Dresden. The subject was the architecture of river cities. In the 1920s she ran a highly successful office in Berlin that specialized in commercial architecture. In 1936, like all Jewish members, she was banned from the Association of German Architects. After a brief stay in London, Frommer moved to New York in 1939. There her contacts in professional women’s organizations helped her to settle and find orientation. In 1946—at the age of 56—she passed the examinations to become a licensed architect and opened her own office. In 1948 the magazine Architectural Record featured her as one of the leading women architects in the United States.
In 1953 she became a fellow of the American Institute of Architects. Among her later projects she developed housing for military families. Marie Frommer died in New York in 1976.
Lotte Cohn (1893-1983) – The Zionist
In 1921 Lotte Cohn immigrated to the territory of the former British Mandate Palestine. She came as a Zionist, who had prepared for this step since her youth. For a period of almost five decades, Lotte Cohn was active as an architect. After her death she was honored as “One of the Builders of Israel”. Born in Berlin, Lotte Cohn began studying architecture as one of the first women at the Royal Technical University Berlin in 1912. During the First World War she participated in rebuilding in East Prussia. In 1921, Richard Kauffmann, the Frankfurt-born architect who had immigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1920, summoned her to work as his assistant. Both were responsible for planning kibbutzim and moschavim, new types of communal housing estates. In the beginning of the 1930s Lotte Cohn opened her architecture office in Tel Aviv. In addition to buildings such as the Pension Käte Dan she realized many housing estates. The 1930s were marked by the wave of emigration from Europe. An important part of her work was planning housing for the immigrants from Germany. She also acted as a mentor for the new arrivals and helped them with social and professional issues.
In the 1960s Lotte Cohn retired from professional work and dedicated herself to writing. Her over one hundred buildings and projects reveal a multifaceted picture of the cultural transfer of modern architectural trends to the Near Eastern landscape.
Marlene Moeschke-Poelzig (1894-1985) – The Sculptor
“The beautiful way the columns are molded, with a fine sense of proportion, is the work of the young sculptor Moeschke,” noted the critic Fritz Stahl about the Grosses Schauspielhaus, the conversion of Circus Schumann for the theater impresario Max Reinhardt, in 1920 in Berlin. “The young sculptor”— Marlene Poelzig, née Moeschke—studied sculpture, as one of the first women, at the Hamburg Academy of Art. In 1918 she met architect Hans Poelzig (1869-1936) in Berlin, where she had established her own studio. Until his death in 1936, they combined a personal relationship (they married in 1924 and had three children) and professional work. Although the decision to forego her professional independence was not easy, she was well aware of the difficulties that confronted women who desired to pursue an independent artistic career. The sculptor contributed bold, evocative forms to the couple’s joint work such as the chalice-like columns of the Grosses Schauspielhaus. Even though contemporary critics, such as Fritz Stahl, were well aware of her contributions, much of their collaborative work has been ascribed to Hans Poelzig. Marlene Moeschke Poelzig also carried out independent work, notably the design of the Poelzig House (1930), in Berlin-Westend, which included an office for her husband, an atelier for herself and ample spaces for their offspring.
In 1940, under pressure from the NSDAP, Marlene Moeschke Poelzig sold the Berlin house. She returned to Hamburg where she died in 1985.
Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (1897-2000) – The Woman Architect of New Frankfurt
Like no other, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky embodies the dawning of the modern era. In 1915 she was the first woman to study Architecture at the Applied Arts School in Vienna. After the First World War she became aware of the severe housing shortage, and for the rest of her life she explored how to design residential units for socially disadvantaged members of society. In 1926 Ernst May summoned her to “New Frankfurt” to join the Department of Building Typification. There she designed kitchens, public laundries and apartments for single professional women. The Frankfurt Kitchen, which saved time and optimized movement for the “New Woman”, was installed in 10,000 apartments; it is the “ancestor” of all modern kitchens. Her plans for daycare centers that are designed as pavilions and were further developed from standardized parts have received less attention. As a member of the “May Brigade”, she went to the Soviet Union in 1930 and helped design infrastructure to accommodate a socialist lifestyle in large housing estates in Moscow and Magnitogorsk. After spending time in Istanbul she returned to Vienna in1939. There she became involved in the Resistance, was arrested, sentenced to death and only in 1945 was freed from prison by the Americans. As a committed Communist in post-war Vienna, it was difficult for her to establish herself as a professional architect. She became involved in the women’s movement, wrote articles and her memoirs. She died in 2000 shortly before her 103rd birthday.
Lotte Stam-Beese (1903-1988) – The Urban Planer
Lotte Stam-Beese studied at the Bauhaus and after 1945 realized exemplary, socially oriented housing estates in Rotterdam. Socialist politics, modern aesthetics and new gender roles shaped her eventful life and career. Born in Silesia, in 1928 Lotte Beese was one of the first women to study architecture at the Bauhaus. She began an affair with Hannes Meyer, who was married and the director of the Bauhaus. Once it became known, she was forced to abandon her studies. She subsequently worked as an architect in Berlin and in Brno, where she gave birth to a son. A member of the Communist Party, she relocated to the Ukrainian city of Kharkov (now Kharkiv) to help design a socialist housing estate. There she married the Dutch architect Mart Stam, who was a member of the „May Brigade“, led by Ernst May. The pair then moved to Amsterdam. In 1935 they opened an architecture office and their daughter was born. During World War Two, Lotte Stam-Beese completed her studies at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture and divorced Mart Stam.
In 1946 Lotte Stam-Beese—as the first woman—took a position at the Department of Urban Planning in Rotterdam. Until 1966 she oversaw the design and implementation of housing estates, including Kleinpolder, Pendrecht and Ommoord. She understood the civilizing potential of urban design, and included generous areas for collective interaction in these projects. In doing so remained true to her collectively oriented social ideals, as she felt that “the land belongs to us all”.
Gerdy Troost (1904-2003) – Hitler’s Designer
Between 1930 and 1945 Gerdy Troost advised Adolf Hitler about matters of design and architecture. Although she did not study and did not have an official position, her influence regarding artistic issues was recognized at the time. She learned about art and design first through her father, an interior architect who furnished the interiors of ships, and then on the side of the architect Paul Ludwig Troost (1978- 1934), who she married in 1934. After 1930 Hitler was the pair’s most important client. When her husband suddenly died in 1934, Gerdy Troost, together with Leonhard Gall, the assistant of Paul Troost, took over responsibility for the National Socialist projects, including the House of German Art and the Administration Building of the NSDAP on the Königsplatz in Munich. Gerdy Troost independently designed the interiors of Hitler’s Berghof on the Obersalzberg. Her other works included the design of certificates for courageous soldiers in addition to the lavishly decorated folders and boxes in which they were awarded. The 1938 book, Building in the New Reich, which she edited and assembled, was one indication of her position in the culture of the regime. It was a widely regarded and official representation of National Socialist architecture. Initially, the tribunals after the war accused Troost of being a “principal offender”. In 1950 she was finally convicted of only having been “less criminally responsible”. Afterwards she resumed her professional work and, in spite of her stained political reputation, was active as an interior architect for a long time.
Karola Bloch (1905-1994) – The Communist
Deeply committed to social justice, Karola Bloch, née Piotrkowska, trained as an architect in inter-war Europe and made an important contribution to architecture practice in the early years of the German Democratic Republic. Born in Łódź in 1905, she studied architecture in Vienna, Berlin and Zürich and married the philosopher Ernst Bloch in 1934. She worked as an architect in Paris, Vienna and Prague, and was an active member of the Communist Party. In 1938 the Blochs, who were Jewish, fled to the United States, yet returned to Leipzig in 1949. Beginning in 1950, Karola Bloch supervised the planning of a national system of standard childcare facilities for the Deutsche Bauakademie in East Berlin. One model project, the weekly childcare facility for the Leipzig Baumwollspinnerei, was realized in 1955. It featured dormitory rooms to enable children to sleep overnight during the week and open-air terraces for play during inclement weather.In 1957, Karola and Ernst Bloch’s criticism of the GDR’s political leadership led to her ouster from the Communist Party and put an end to her work for the Deutsche Bauakademie. In 1961, the Blochs were on vacation in the BRD and decided to remain there following the sudden construction of the Berlin Wall. Karola Bloch became involved in social causes, joined the UIFA (Union Internationale des Femmes Architectes) and published a memoir About my Life in 1981.
She died in Tübingen in 1994.
Wera Meyer-Waldeck (1906-1964) – A Bauhaus Architect in West Germany
Between 1927 and 1932 Wera Meyer-Waldeck was one of the few women who studied architecture at the Bauhaus. For the rest of her life, she remained in contact with leading personalities in architecture and design, stayed faithful to the design ideals of the Bauhaus and was committed to helping women achieve equality in the post-war era. After completing her studies she was a site supervisor for the Reichsbahn and carried out architectural work for a steel mill in Upper Silesia. After 1950 she maintained her own architecture office in Bonn. She collaborated with Hans Schwippert on the furnishings of the Bundeshaus as well as other buildings for the new Federal Republic. On her own she designed interiors, exhibitions and residential buildings. She traveled widely, wrote for professional publications and was interested in new technology, such as the use of solar energy. Meyer-Waldeck was a member of various women’s organizations and was convinced that women should play an active role in post-war society. One of her last projects, a dormitory in Bonn-Friesdorf to house 80 women students, demonstrates how she strove to accommodate the needs of women. The building rests on reinforced concrete columns to provide a protected parking space below for mopeds, bicycles and even 20 autos. “We have to think of the future when many women students will have their own auto”, declared the architect.
In 1964 Wera Meyer-Waldeck died in Bonn during the design development phase of this building.
Lucy Hillebrand (1906-1997) – The socially engaged Architect in the FRG
Born into a progressive Catholic-Jewish family in Mainz, Lucy Hillebrand took dance lessons as a child, and later studied architecture under the well-known church architect Dominikus Böhm at the Applied Arts School in Offenbach am Main and the School of Design in Cologne. These two formative influences, a fascination with the movement of the body through space as well as the desire to realize finely-crafted yet distinct forms, characterize her extensive œuvre, which encompasses architecture, crafts, film and theory. In 1928 Hillebrand opened her own architecture studio in Frankfurt/Main. During the Third Reich she was forbidden to practice. Personal tragedy, particularly the suicide of her Jewish mother in 1942 to avoid deportation, deeply impacted her life. Between 1945 and 1973 she ran her own architectural office in Göttingen. Many of her buildings addressed pressing social needs: Housing for students; a church for refugees; and facilities for children and youth that conveyed a sense of orientation and In 1973, Lucy Hillebrand closed her office following the death of her husband, the sociologist and journalist Erich Gerlach. She turned to theoretical issues and taught at the Comprehensive University Kassel from 1988 to 1989. In 1986—as the first woman architect—the Archive of the Deutsches Architetkurmuseum acquired her papers. Lucy Hillebrand was 91 years old when she died in Göttingen in 1997.
Grit Bauer-Revellio (1924-2013) – Architect for Woman Artists
Grit Bauer-Revellio, born Bauer, whose family owned a successful construction company, began her studies during the Second World War at the Technical University in Stuttgart. The „Stuttgart School“ was not favored by women prior to 1945, perhaps because of the close connection between architecture and engineering as well as the conservative ideas about education, which did not consider men and women to be equals. Bauer was not intimidated. In 1949 she completed her degree and then worked in various offices in Stuttgart. In 1952 she won a competition—limited to women architects—that was sponsored by the GEDOK (Association of German and Austrian Women Artists) for a building to house residential studios and exhibition spaces in the western part of Stuttgart. Bauer designed a compact, five-story building that was light and transparent facing the southern slope. The collaboration between architect and her clients did not run smoothly. Among other issues, some women mistrusted Bauer to such an extent that a court of arbitration had to be called in order for her to retain control over the design development drawings. Nevertheless the building was completed in 1955 and in 1959 the city of Stuttgart awarded it the Paul Bonatz Prize. After her marriage in 1956 and the birth of three children, Grit Bauer- Revellio slowly withdrew from professional life. More and more, it was her husband, also an architect, who took over the control of their joint projects.
Sigrid Kressmann-Zschach (1929-1990) – The Businesswoman
Sigrid Kressmann-Zschach, a successful architect and businesswoman, played a leading role in building activity in West Berlin during the 1960s and early 1970s. She was fascinating, and her luxurious lifestyle not only attracted the attention of the mass media, but also inspired fear and jealousy. Only recently have her life and her buildings attracted greater attention. The daughter of a builder in Leipzig, she completed her architecture studies in Dresden and moved to West Berlin in 1951. There she married the Social Democrat Mayor of Kreuzberg, Willy Kressmann, who helped her make contacts within his political network. The marriage lasted two years. She quickly established her own company, with 300 employees, and with herself acting as both architect and client. By the end oft he 1960s she also built in Essen, Frankfurt and Saarbrucken, and opened a branch in Bonn. The Steglitzer Kreisel was her downfall. It is a large project, including a shopping and business center with a 26-story tower. Together with her company, she spent six years building the project until diverse problems forced her business to declare insolvency. A committee of inquiry was established to investigate it. Beginning in 1974, legal action was instigated against her. Although she was never found guilty, her reputation was destroyed.
She married the artist Donatello Losito and used her wealth to support divers cultural institutions. In 1990 Sigrid Kressmann-Zschach died in Berlin.
Merete Mattern (1930-2007) – The Visionary
Whereas Merete Mattern’s realized projects have not received much attention, she is well known for her highly imaginative unbuilt designs. In the 1960s her freely artistic urban designs challenged the inhospitality of post-war cities in West Germany. For a few years, she was seen as the new hope in city planning. The daughter of landscape architects Herman Mattern and Herta Hammerbacher, Merete Mattern studied in Kassel und Berlin. During her student years she worked with her parents on their various projects. In 1966, with her mother and other architects, she took part in an urban design competition for an extension to the city of Ratingen. Although she did not receive a prize, she was named the unofficial winner. Her scheme, a radically new idea about urban design, proposed an exuberant collage of various building typologies united in a giant mega-structure that resembled a landscape. Her Ratinger competition, along with her urban designs for Bratislava, Karlsruhe and even Washington DC., received national and international attention. In 1968, while she visiting professor at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, USA, she became ill. When she resumed her work in the 1970s, the feminist movement identified her freely composed forms and her interest in ecological architecture as an expression of gender difference in architecture, or „women’s architecture“.
Merete Mattern continued to pursue her architectural and artistic experiments until her death in 2007.
Iris Dullin-Grund (*1933) – The Chief City Architect
Iris Dullin-Grund, one of the most influential women architects in the GDR, even attracted the attention of the West German mass media. After completing her studies in 1957 she worked in the office of the chief city architect of East Berlin, Hermann Henselmann. In 1959 she relocated to Ernst May’s Hamburg office, but due to her political convictions she dutifully returned to the GDR. For Dullin-Grund, Socialism meant “the most happiness for the greatest number of people that is possible”. In 1959 she won the competition for the House of Culture and Education in Neubrandenburg, and between 1963 and 1965 she oversaw its completion. The building, made of a reinforced concrete skeleton, consists of four sections with flat roofs grouped around a courtyard and a 16-story tower, which provides space for leisure activities. She pursued her career in Neubrandenburg, first as a chief architect in the local state-run office for housing construction, and from 1970 to 1990 as the chief city architect. It was the most influential position that an architect in the GDR could achieve; only three women made it to this level. Dullin-Grund’s buildings and her innovative master plan for the expansion of Neubrandenburg brought her architecture prizes and recognition beyond the borders of the GDR. 1968 she was elected to the Deutsche Bauakademie. Since reunification she maintained an architecture office in Berlin and from time to time in southern France.
Gertrud Schille (*1940) – The Planetarium Builder
Even as a student at the University for Architecture and Construction in Weimar, Gertrud Schille, née Matthes, was interested in shell structures. After completing her studies she began working as an architect at the construction department of VEB Carl Zeiss Jena. She had a talent for design and, despite numerous difficulties that were inherent in the socialist system, was able to successfully manage large, complex projects. She became known as a specialist for shell construction. As part of the worldwide export of the Production Group “Zeiss-Astro”, VEB Carl Zeiss Jena began to offer complex structures that were ready for occupancy (observatories with precision instruments and telescopes, planetaria with projectors) from design to construction. Schille was promoted to managing project architect (1976-87) of the foreign department. In this position she was responsible for the export of complex, turnkey buildings, such as observatories with corresponding technical equipment. The Planetarium in Tripolis was built according to Schille’s design and can be considered as her masterpiece. She was involved in the planning of many other planetaria, including those in Wolfsburg, Algeria, Kuwait, Canada, and in the Soviet Union. At the end of the 1980s she researched the history of the development of planetarium architecture at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. After the fall of the Wall she worked as a self-employed architect (architecture office „Architrava“) with projects in Jena and the surrounding region.
Verena Dietrich (1941-2004) – Feminist, Lady of Steel
The daughter of an engineer, Verena Dietrich first completed an apprenticeship in metallography. The masterful use of steel in her architectural projects demonstrates the formidable knowledge about metal that she acquired at this time. Starting in 1969 she used her savings to finance her architectural studies at the University of Applied Sciences in Innsbruck. Beginning in 1975 she worked in male-dominated architecture offices in Cologne; Verena Dietrich called this time her „unfree years“. Here she experienced the subtle resistance of male colleagues who let her feel that women were not welcome in architecture. Her rebirth came about in 1982, when she became self-employed. Her impressive structures made of steel confirmed her reputation as an architect. An engaged feminist, she considered herself a leader of women architects who fought to secure a place in the profession. Her book, Architektinnen. Ideen – Projekte – Bauten (Women Architects. Ideas – Projects – Buildings), in which 62 women presented their work, appeared in 1986. Her desire to unite her female colleagues in a supportive community, fighting just as courageously as she did, was not realized. She received tenure at the University of Applied Sciences in Dortmund in 1998, and then devoted herself to teaching. The students became her extended family. At the end of her life, at age 62, she was proud that, alongside of 35 men, she was the second woman to have her professional papers accepted at the archive of the Deutsches Architekturmuseum.
Ingeborg Kuhler (*1943) – The Museum Builder
Since 1990 a sloping white wedge, 30 meters high and 200 meters long, towers over southern Mannheim. Upon completion, it housed the newly opened Museum for Technology and Work (today: Technoseum); the local studio of the South West German Radio is located in a parallel tract. Other diagonals suggest the presence of interior ramps, which create the refined circulation for the continuous spaces inside.
In the 1980s, not only the building—resembling an elegant Ocean liner—as the Mannheimer Morgen called it, but also the architect was a great surprise. In 1982 a competition was held for the museum. Although up to this point she had not been able to build under her own name, Ingeborg Kuhler triumphed over the stars of the scene and won the first prize. In postwar West Germany it was the first time that a self-employed woman architect designed and realized not only such a large building volume, but also an edifice that was so prestigious. The male colleagues “badmouthed it“, reported DIE ZEIT in 1991. Ingeborg Kuhler was born in 1943 and studied at the School of Applied Art in Krefeld and later at the Technical University Berlin and worked in various offices. She became an expert in hospital planning and took an interest in complex building typologies, knowledge that helped her to design the museum. Shortly thereafter she became a pioneer in architectural education: in 1984 she became the first tenured professor for design at an architectural faculty of a German university, namely at the Hochschule der Künste (today: UdK, University of the Arts), and taught there until 2007.
Gesine Weinmiller (*1963) – FRAU ARCHITEKT today
Born in 1963 in Konstanz, building sites greatly fascinated her even at an early age. It was logical that in 1983 she decided to study architecture at the Technical University in Munich, with, among others, Karljosef Schattner. Later on, Josef Paul Kleihues and Hans Kollhoff, in whose Berlin office she worked for two years, greatly influenced her. Since 1992 Gesine Weinmiller has run her own office Berlin, in the meantime in partnership with Michael Großmann and a twelve-person team. She was not even 30 years old when she took part in important competitions. Her design for the conversion of the Reichstag received the second prize, just behind Norman Foster. This was so contrary to conventional notions, that at an official ceremony she was taken for Foster’s secretary. She did not win the equally prestigious competition for the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, but was awarded one of the four first places. After the fall of the Berlin Wall the German Federal Labor Court relocated to Erfurt. Weinmiller received the commission for the new building with—for a young professional—an extremely large budget of 100 million Deutsch Mark. The austere four-story building in the capital of Thuringia with the typically clear, reductive architectural language that would become her trademark is without a doubt her magnum opus. Other projects include: the L-Bank in Karlsruhe (2000) and the Judiciary Center in Aachen (2007). Among her current projects: A Church in Aachen (2012-17) and the Baden-Württemberg State Offices in Brussels (2013-19). Since 2000 Gesine Weinmiller is a professor at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg, today the HafenCity University (HCU).
She lives in Berlin with her husband, the architect Ivan Reimann, and their three children.
Almut Grüntuch-Ernst (*1966) – FRAU ARCHITEKT today
“Design proposals are always a tailor-made solution for the location, program and time”. Almut Grüntuch-Ernst studied at the Technical University in Stuttgart, the city of her birth. In 1987 she went to the Architectural Association (AA) in London where she met her partner Armand Grüntuch. Berlin was (and remains) their city of choice, and in 1991 they established an office there. After the fall of the Berlin Wall they felt they were in the right place. A job as an assistant professor, at what is today known as the University of the Arts, provided financial support to develop designs and participate in competitions. Since 2008 their place of residence and their office are located in a collective co-operative building, which they designed. The short distances ease the transition between home and work for the parents of five children. Grüntuch Ernst let their office grow slowly but steadily; they have many commissions. The designs result from “a constant dialogue”. Their work includes office buildings, transportation infrastructure, hotels, educational facilities and curatorial projects, such as the conception and design of the German entry to the 2006 Architecture Biennale in Venice. In addition to her office, Almut Grüntuch-Ernst enjoys teaching: 2011 she became a professor at the Technical University Braunschweig, where she directs the Institute for Design and Architectural Strategies (IDAS). From 2010 to 2015 she belonged to the Commission for Urban Design in Munich and since 2016 she is a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.
