Austria. Media News.

Dear friends of Austria and fellow travelers,

Austria’s history is dominated by powerful rulers and striving intellectuals, seemingly all men. Take a closer look, though, and you’ll find that there were quite a few trailblazing women who set an example for generations to come, some more quietly so than others. One famous example is Empress Maria Theresia, who, aside from raising 16 children, also ran an Empire covering a significant part of Europe. More recent female power-brokers include art collector Heidi Goess-Horten or Lilli Hollein, new General Director of the MAK Vienna, both of whom are currently shaping Vienna’s art world.

For the purposes of this newsletter, however, we’d like to focus on two pioneers of the 1920’s and 30’s. Since 2018, the city of Vienna has been awarding the annual Hedy Lamarr prize to women who are shaping today's digital world. And this fall, a new museum dedicated to the life of architectural pioneer Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky will open its doors in Vienna.

Also of note on both sides of the Atlantic: If you happen to be in New York City any time soon, and you are planning to see Tom Stoppard’s play "Leopoldstadt", named after Vienna's 2nd District, a traditionally Jewish neighborhood, here is some background reading for you about Vienna's close connection with Jewish history in Europe.

With warmest regards,
Sigrid Pichler

Manager of Public Relations
Austrian Tourist Office New York City
sigrid.pichler@austria.info
tel 212 575 7723 x 119

www.austria.info 

Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky was a remarkable woman in more ways than one. Shunned in post-war Vienna because of her politics, the first female architect to graduate from the Kunstgewerbeschule, designer of the groundbreaking Frankfurt Kitchen, fierce public housing advocate, and resistance-fighter, is only now being recognized as the outstanding personality she was. This fall, a new museum will highlight the various stations of her life and showcase her work.

Located in the apartment she lived in for 30 years until her death at the age of 102, the Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky Zentrum is scheduled to open on September 21, 2022. The apartment itself is under monument protection, as are five other buildings in Vienna which were built by Schütte-Lihotzky. The center will also focus on research highlighting the role of other leading women in Austria’s architectural history.

Schütte-Lihotzky herself was best known for designing the Frankfurt kitchen, the first built-in kitchen and precursor of most modern kitchen designs. The architect wanted to come up with a solution for making women’s lives easier by freeing up time through streamlining the cooking and cleaning processes in the kitchen. Although she was later criticized for cementing women’s roles as homemakers, she maintained until old age that her goal had always been to rationalize household duties to make economic independence and self-realization possible for more women. A replica of her kitchen can be seen at the MAK design Lab in Vienna.

Likewise, her architectural and social housing projects were designed to build a better life for working class people. In her mind, the 1920s offered a chance to leave behind the class distinctions that were baked into architecture. Deeply shaped by the social-democratic Red Vienna, she designed apartments for single, working women, almost an affront at the time, and planned residential estates for invalids and veterans.

Hedy Lamarr, born in 1914 in Vienna, was once celebrated as “the world’s most beautiful woman,” but today she is mostly known as a pioneer of Bluetooth technology. Since 2018, the city of Vienna has been awarding the Hedy Lamarr Prize. It is not an award for acting, but rather a way of honoring women who shape(d) the digital world. In 2020, the recipient was Italian scientist Laura Nenzi; in 2021, the prize went to Dr. Pirker from the Graz University of Technology.

How did a 1930’s Hollywood icon inspire a technology award for women? Hedy Lamarr was born as Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Döbling, Vienna. The banker’s daughter soon discovered a flair for acting and embarked on a promising career after having been discovered by Max Reinhardt, one of the most prominent directors of German language theater of his time. After a brief and unhappy marriage, she fled to Hollywood, where she changed her name to Hedy Lamarr. Her first film, Algiers, made her an international star.

After the start of World War II, it became obvious that she also had a brilliant scientific brain. Lamarr contributed to the war effort by inventing the frequency-hopping spread spectrum together with the composer Georg Antheil. This groundbreaking innovation was originally intended to make the radio signals used for torpedo navigation untraceable and thus give the Allies a strategic advantage. With it, the two friends actually laid the foundation for the development of future telecommunications. The invention is used in modern technology to this day – GPS, WLAN, bluetooth and smartphones would not exist in its current form without Hedy Lamarr.

Only later in life did she gain recognition by the Electronic Frontier Foundation for her outstanding technical achievement; she received the EFF Pioneer Award in 1997.Yet, she did not earn a single penny from her and Antheil’s invention. Lamarr died in the US in the year 2000. It was her wish to be buried in Vienna and she was laid to rest in an honorary grave at the Vienna Central Cemetery.