Olga Gemes was born on 26 June 1905 in Budapest, Austria-Hungary (now Hungary). Trained in Vienna, Dresden, Berlin and Paris, she qualified as an architect under Hans Poelzig. After moving to England in the early 1930s, she built a varied career in textile design and teaching, exhibiting at <em>Britain Can Make It</em> in 1946 and later working as freelance photographer.
Architect and designer Olga Gemes was born on 26 June 1905 in Budapest, Austria-Hungary (now Hungary). She was later known variously as Olga Gémes-Ford and Olga Gémes-Forbát. She studied architecture in Vienna, Dresden, Berlin and Paris, and completed her professional training at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin-Charlottenburg, where she studied under Hans Poelzig. After qualifying, she worked in Paris, including for Galeries Lafayette, and also collaborated with her sister Elisabeth (Erzsébet), an interior designer, on projects such as the remodelling of a country house and on competition submissions (RIBA Refugee Committee Papers database).
By the early 1930s Gemes had settled in England, where she increasingly established herself in the applied arts as well as architecture. By the end of that decade she was active in British design circles and was listed on the National Register of Industrial Art Designers. Her work focused on textiles of several kinds, including furnishing and printed fabrics, as well as rugs and carpets. A later study of Warner & Sons’ records also identifies her among the freelance women textile designers active in the 1930s, noting that the firm purchased one of her block-print designs between 1929 and 1940 (Boydell 1995, p. 37). In 1939 she was living at 23 Normanton Road, South Croydon, Surrey, with her husband. After the Second World War, her designs appeared in a number of significant exhibitions and publications. In 1946 her work was included in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Britain Can Make It exhibition, and in 1948 she was listed among the leading British textile designers in Grace Lovat Fraser’s survey, Textiles by Britain. Her work was also featured in design and architectural periodicals, such as Architectural Review, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, Ter es Forma and La Construction Moderne.
Teaching formed an important part of her later career. During the 1940s she lectured for Oxford University’s Extra-Mural Studies programme, and in the 1950s and 1960s she taught in Leicester, first at the School of Architecture and later at Leicester College of Art. The newspaper profiles published in 1957 are especially valuable for showing how she understood the relationship between architecture and design: defending her work in textiles, she argued that ‘an architect should be able to design not only a house but everything that goes with it’ (Evening Post 1957, p. 5; Kidderminster Shuttle 1957, p. 9). The same articles also describe her use of her own colour photographs to illustrate lectures, anticipating the photographic work she pursued later as a freelance photographic illustrator for publishers in Britain and abroad. She was a Fellow of the Central Institute of Art and Design and a member of the Society of Industrial Artists and Designers. Olga Gemes died London, England on 5 September 1988. Her work is not currently represented in UK public collections.
Irene Iacono