Discover an extraordinary woman and architect who left her mark on world capitals and reshaped modern design, featured in the new book, Finding Ella Briggs: The Life and Work of an Unconventional Architect (Princeton University Press, 2025) by Despina Stratigakos and Elana Shapira. Co-author Stratigakos joins us to talk about this little-known talent.
Briggs (1880-1977) was an architect, designer, and writer who trained with the Viennese Secessionists and brought their radical ideas to Gilded Age New York. She designed modernist housing for the masses in Austria, was jailed as a suspected spy in Mussolini’s Italy, and thrived in Weimar Germany before suffering persecution under the Nazis. Fleeing to London, she contributed to England’s postwar reconstruction.
Stratigakos and Shapira bring together an international team of historians to provide the defining biography of this unconventional designer. Whether she was fighting for integration at Europe’s architecture schools or writing about innovative houses for American women’s magazines like Good Housekeeping, Briggs embodied the transatlantic flow of modernism.
Stratigakos is vice provost and professor of architecture at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, who explores how power and ideology function in architecture. She is the author of Hitler’s Northern Utopia: Building the New Order in Occupied Norway (Princeton University Press, 2020), Where Are the Women Architects? (Princeton University Press, 2016), Hitler at Home (Yale University Press, 2015), and A Women’s Berlin: Building the Modern City (University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
Shapira lectures at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria, and is the author of Design Dialogue: Jews, Culture, and Viennese Modernism (Böhlau Verlag, 2018) and Style and Seduction: Jewish Patrons, Architecture, and Design in Fin de Siècle Vienna (Brandeis University Press, 2016).
