Public Lecture by Caroline Ford: The New Dwelling, Social Activism and Architectural Innovation in Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky's and Juliette Tréant-Mathé's Design of Social Housing in Interwar Europe

The University of Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning is pleased to invite you to a lecture by Professor Caroline Ford of UCLA. Professor Ford is in Sydney in conjunction with a combined meeting of the Europan Architectural History Network (EAHN) and the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ)—Distance Looks Back, July 10-13, 2019.
EVENT DETAILS

WHEN:
6pm Friday 12 July
Refreshments served from 6pm, talk commences at 6.30pm

WHERE:
Lecture Theatre 250, Level 2, Wilkinson Building
148 City Rd Darlington, The University of Sydney NSW 2006

ABOUT THE TALK

This lecture focuses on two women architects who were professionally trained prior to the First World War--Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and Juliette Tréant-Mathé-- whose work, in contrast to most of their female counterparts, focused on social housing in central Europe, the Soviet Union and France, and who made significant contributions to the development of modern architecture in the interwar period. It explores how and why their careers converged, while diverging so markedly from other women architects of the period (Lilly Reich, Eileen Gray, and Charlotte Perriand, who never received formal architectural training). It also considers the relationship between their architectural designs and their social activism--a phenomenon that has been more effectively explored with respect to male architects in interwar Europe (for example, Bruno Taut).

A central issue is the experience of exile, which explores the theme of "distance looks back," especially in the case of Schütte-Lihotzky, who was forced to leave Germany with the rise of Nazism, sending her first to Russia with the Ernst May brigade, then to Paris, and later to Istanbul, at the invitation of Bruno Taut. The lecture is broadly framed in terms of the relationship between new hygienic as well as environmental concerns associated with the so-called "new dwelling (neue wohnung)" and architectural modernism in the 1920s and 1930s. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Caroline Ford is Professor of History and Peter H. Reill Chair in European History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of three books. Her most recent book, Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France was published by Harvard University Press in 2016 and which appeared in French as Naissance de l'écologie: polémiques françaises sur l'environnement, 1800-1930 (Paris, 2018). Her most recent article, "The Paris Housing Crisis and a Social Revolution in Domestic Architecture on the Eve of the First World War," appeared in the Journal of Modern History in September 2018.
ABOUT THE CONFERENCE
Distance Looks Back, 10 July - 13 July
A thematic conference of the European Architectural History Network, held in conjunction with the 36th annual conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand. More information on the conference theme and the full conference program is available here.