'I don't want to be labelled as an architect of kitchen only.' Margarete Schutte-Lihotzky (1897-2000), who died in Vienna shortly before her 103rd birthday is best known for her 'Frankfurt Kitchen', the prototype of today's fitted kitchens.
10 000 versions were installed in the Frankfurt Social Housing which she designed under Ernst May from 1926-30.
Yesterday's AK Files offered us a view of a kitchen exhibiition at MOMA including her innovative designs.
Today, ARTKABINETT social network of fine art collectors will read more about the work of the this cutting edge modernist.
Schutte-Lihotsky never wrote about her career, but instead she left us with an account of her resistance work during the Second World War.
In the Vienna of her childhood there was hunger, homelessness and tuberculosis. At the Vienna School for Applied Arts she studied architecture, against her family's wishes, under Josef Hoffman and Heinrich Tessenow, who opened her eyes to the practical help architecture could offer in improving people's lives.
She was born Margarete Lihotzky into a bourgeois family in Vienna.
The daughter of a liberal-minded civil servant whose pacifist tendencies 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 University of Applied Arts Vienna), where renowned artists such as Josef Hoffmann, Anton Hanak or Oskar Kokoschka were teaching.
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 then 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."
However, studying architecture under Oskar Strnad, Lihotzky was winning prizes for her designs even before her graduation. Strnad was one of the pioneers of sozialer Wohnbau in Vienna at the time, designing affordable yet comfortable council housing for the working classes.
Inspired by him, Lihotzky understood that connecting design to functionality was the new trend that would be very much in demand in the future. After graduating, she, among other projects, worked together with her mentor Adolf Loos, planning residential estates for World War I invalids and veterans.
In 1917 she won a housing competition, after visiting the suburbs where up to nine people lived in one room. Schutte-Lihotzky joined Adolf Loos in designing affordable housing for the Settlement Movement (Siedlungsbewegung).
They fought for sites, materials and finance. Impressed by Schutte-Lihotzky's work, Ernst May invited her to Germany when he was appointed Frankfurt's building director.
Only design ingenuity -- prefabrication, tailored plans, reinforced concrete and simple details -- made social housing at all possible. She was disappointed in Frankfurt colleagues who considered politics beneath them. 'I am convinced that this attitude very much helped the Nazis come to power.'
In 1927 she married the architect Walter Schutte. They lived in one room with a Frankfurt kitchen. 'No children and a small flat, those are very favourable conditions, and also a man who agrees to share the work.
Later Schutte-Lihotzky was in the team Ernst May took to Moscow to build new industrial cities in the Soviet's first five year plan.
After Hitler came to power, the Schutte-Lihotzky and her husband supported the Austrian resistance, while simultaneously building French children's clinics and Turkish village schools. In 1939 she joined the illegal Austrian Communist Party.
During a clandestine visit to Vienna in 1941 she was arrested by the Gestapo.
When the political situation in the Weimar Republic began to further deteriorate and unduly favour the political right, Schutte-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 of architects was commissioned to help realize the first of Stalin's five-year plans, for example by building the industrial city of Magnitogorsk which, situated in the middle of nowhere in the southern Ural Mountains, Russia, on their arrival only consisted of mud huts and barracks: It was to have 200,000 inhabitants in a few years' time, the majority of them working in the steel industry.
Although the May Brigade was credited with the construction of 20 cities in three years, the 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, Sch¸tte-Lihotzky remained in the Soviet Union until 1937, when Stalin's Great Purge made life there intolerable and dangerous as well.
She and her husband moved first to London and later to Paris, France. Also, in 1933 Schutte-Lihotzky had presented some of her work at the Chicago world's fair, Century of Progress.
In 1938 Schutte-Lihotzky, together with her husband, was called to Istanbul, Turkey, to teach at the Academy of Fine Arts, and to reunite with exiled German architect Bruno Taut. (Unfortunately Taut died soon after their arrival.) Lihotzky also designed kindergarten pavilions based on the ideas of Maria Montessori.
On the eve of World War II Istanbul was a safe meeting place for many exiled Europeans, a common destination for exiled Germans, and the Sch¸ttes encountered artists such as the musicians BÈla BartÛk or Paul Hindemith.
In Istanbul Schutte-Lihotzky also met fellow Austrian Herbert Eichholzer, an architect who at the time was busy organizing Communist resistance to the Nazi regime.
In 1939 Schutte-Lihotzky joined the Austrian Communist Party (KP÷) and in December 1940, of her own free will, together with Eichholzer, travelled back to Vienna to secretly contact the Austrian Communist resistance movement.
She was arrested by the Gestapo on January 22, 1941, only 25 days after her arrival. While Eichholzer and other "conspirators", who had also been seized, were charged with high treason, sentenced to death by the Volksgerichtshof and executed in 1943, Sch¸tte-Lihotzky was "only" sentenced to 15 years of imprisonment and brought to a prison in Aichach, Bavaria, where she was eventually liberated by U.S. troops on April 29, 1945.
After the war
Following the war she was much in demand outside Austria for her expertise in buildings for children. She didn't avoid controversy.
In 1988, Schutte-Lihotzky refused to accept Vienna's Award of Honour for Science and Art from the hands of President Kurt Waldheim, a former Waffen SS officer.
Nowadays, her original kitchens can occcasionaly be purchased at auction typically priced between 15.000 and 18.000 Euros.
