EVENT: Lecture: Memories of the Resistance: Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and the Architecture of Collective Dissidence, 1938-1945 by Sophie Hochhäusl. New York, 24 February 2020
The Detlef Mertins Lecture on the Histories of Modernity at Columbia GSAPP
Wood Auditorium (Room 113), Avery Hall – 1172 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027
A lecture by Sophie Hochhäusl, Assistant Professor, Architectural History and Theory, Stuart Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. With commentary by Raphael Koenig, Leonard A. Lauder Fellow in Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Christianna Bonin, Ph.D. Candidate, History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture + Art, MIT and introduction by Felicity Scott, Director, PhD program in Architecture and Co-Director of the Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices program at Columbia GSAPP.
Today Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (1897-2000) has been widely recognized as one of the most significant female figures in modern design who worked in Austria, Germany, the Soviet Union, and Turkey in the 1920s and 1930s. These decades of professional work were marked by a drastic break between 1940 and 1945, when Schütte-Lihotzky was interned for her participation in the Communist resistance against the Nazi regime. Her recollections from the years of internment became the subject of the 1984 German-language book Erinnerungen aus dem Widerstand (Memories of the Resistance).
The lecture Memories of the Resistance explores Schütte-Lihotzky’s book as a critical historical document that exemplifies the spatialization of organized dissent in the 1940s. It provides a glimpse into resistance as lived practice and how dissent became activated by solidarity and collective action. The lecture also highlights why Schütte-Lihotzky’s activism led to the ostracization of such an important architect in postwar Austria. Her struggle for the design of Holocaust memorials became entangled with the country’s tragic politics of forgetting, where only two of her plans were realized. The talk will include excerpted readings from the English language translation, which is edited by Dr. Hochhäusl, and translated by Dr. Koenig, and Ph.D. Candidate Christianna Bonin.
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