Ella Briggs was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria) in 1880. She studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna, at the Staatsgewerbeschule in Salzburg and, when women were finally admitted after the end of the First World War, at the Technische Hochschule in Munich. Following the rise of Nazism and the introduction of anti-Semitic legislation she moved to London in 1936, where after the war became a member of RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) and was one of the principal architects working on the visionary social housing project in Bilston in the West Midlands, promoted by fellow émigré, Otto Neurath.
Architect Ella Briggs was born Elsa Baufeld into a middle-class Jewish family in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria) in 1880. From 1901 to 1906 she studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Applied Arts), where she took a painting course with Koloman Moser, one of the leading protagonists of Viennese Modernism. In 1903–04 she interrupted her studies to travel to New York, where her brother Maurice had founded the New German Theatre. Here she first experimented with interior and furniture design and was awarded the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition medal in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1907 she married the lawyer Walter Briggs, but divorced him in 1912 and returned to Vienna, where she mainly worked as an interior designer. Her furniture was shown at the 5th and 7th exhibition of the Association of Austrian Women Artists in Vienna in 1914 and 1915. From 1916 to 1918, she was a guest student at the Building School of the Technical University of Vienna. In 1918–1919, she studied structural engineering at the Staatsgewerbeschule in Salzburg. When women were finally admitted after the end of the First World War, she enrolled in the Technische Hochschule in Munich and graduated in 1920. Briggs was a member of the Austrian Association of Women Artists (Vereinigung bildender Künstlerinnen Österreichs, VBKÖ), the first women’s artist association in Austria, and became the first woman to be a member of the Austrian Association of Engineers and Architects.
In 1920 she returned to the USA, working as an architect in both New York and Philadelphia for the construction company Kahn & Gregory. In 1923–24 she returned to Austria, where she worked as a journalist and finally obtained two commissions as a part of the social housing programme of ‘Red Vienna’. Among the buildings she designed were the residential complex known as the ‘Pestalozzi Hof’, and ‘Ledigenheim’, Vienna’s first communal student residence. During this time, she also collaborated with Jewish social scientist Otto Neurath. On behalf of a New York publisher, she toured Sicily in 1925 to photograph local monuments and farmhouses. This resulted in the publication of Small Domestic and Provincial Architecture of Sicily, whose original photos were sold by Briggs to the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1937. Following the economic crisis at the end of the 1920s, Briggs relocated to Berlin in 1927 in the hope of finding better professional conditions. In 1928–32 she published in various specialist journals, including Deutsche Bauzeitung and Bauwelt, and took part in the 1931 German Building Exhibition.
Following the rise of Nazism and the introduction of anti-Semitic legislation, Briggs was expelled from the State Chamber of Fine Arts in 1935, as a result of which her working opportunities were curbed, forcing her to flee to England the following year. In exile she encountered great difficulties in practicing her profession at first, as her application for an architectural license was rejected until the end of the Second World War (Benton 1996, p. 140). In 1946 she acquired British citizenship and subsequently became a member of the Royal Institute for British Architects (RIBA), which enabled her to set up her own architectural office in London. In 1947 she became one of the principal architects working on the Stowlawn estate, a visionary social housing project in Bilston, an industrial town in the West Midlands, promoted by fellow émigrés, Otto Neurath, and his wife, Marie Neurath. Briggs intended to build eight-house terraces around common green spaces, as her predecessor Sir Charles Reilly had conceived, using simple designs to reduce building costs in the era of post-war austerity. After the death of her brother Fritz, with whom she shared a house in London, she retired in 1953 to Enfield in Middlesex (now part of London), where she died in 1977 of leukemia. The designs she produced in the USA are held at the Vienna Künstlerhaus. In 2017 two researchers from the University of West of England (John Bird and David Green) posted a request for information on Briggs in the December issue of the AJR Journal in an attempt to rectify the lack of scholarship in the UK on Briggs' life and work in exile, while a thesis on Briggs was completed at the University of Vienna in 2019.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Ella Briggs]
Publications related to [Ella Briggs] in the Ben Uri Library