Finding Ella Briggs: The Life and Work of an Unconventional Architect

This publication is from the Bartlett School of Architecture.

Editors

• Despina Stratigakos | Professor, University at Buffalo
• Elana Shapira | University of Applied Arts, Vienna

About

Finding Ella Briggs: The Life and Work of an Unconventional Architect (Princeton University Press, 2025) is the first biography of architect Ella Briggs (1880–1977), edited by Despina Stratigakos and Elana Shapira. A Financial Times Best Book of the Year, it brings together an international team of historians to recover the many facets of a life that spanned global borders and cultures.

Barbara Penner’s two chapters provide the first comprehensive history of Briggs’s four decades in Britain. Born in Vienna to a Jewish family, Briggs trained as an artist before moving into interior and architectural design. She worked in New York, Paris, Vienna and Berlin, and was among the first women to earn an architecture degree from TU Munich. Best known for her housing work in Red Vienna, she became the first female member of the Austrian Association of Engineers and Architects.

Briggs fled to London in 1936, aged 56, escaping Nazism. Though initially overlooked, she became a regular contributor to Homes and Gardens in the 1940s and 1950s, publishing nearly 30 articles promoting modern, humane housing. At 66, she was commissioned to design the Stowlawn Estate in Bilston – 80 homes focused on well-being and community. In 1947, she became the only known female refugee architect to receive RIBA Licentiate status.

Despite growing scholarship on refugee architects in Britain, women are almost entirely absent from the record. In Charlotte Benton’s authoritative A Different World (1995), Briggs is the only woman among more than 60 entries. Penner’s chapters, supported by various sources including the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies, draw on detailed archival research to reinsert Briggs into 20th-century architectural narratives, shed light on the gendered dynamics of modernism and exile, and highlight women’s contributions to Britain’s architectural culture in the mid-20th century.

Finding Ella Briggs: The Life and Work of an Unconventional Architect (2025) is published by Princeton University Press.

ISBN: 978-0691263953

Further reading

• Find out more about the book

Image: Ella Briggs, ‘Essentials of House Planning’, Homes and Gardens (April 1944), p. 36.