Margarete Schuette-Lihotzky; Pioneering Architect

Margarete Schuette-Lihotzky, 102, Austria’s first woman architect and leader in her country’s Nazi resistance. Born in Vienna, she was the first woman in the Austro-Hungarian Empire to study architecture at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts. After designing housing complexes in Vienna, she moved to Germany in 1926, where she became famous for creating the first standardized built-in kitchen, known as the “Frankfurt kitchen,” and designing apartments for the working class. A scale model of the kitchen was placed in the Austrian Museum for Applied Art in Vienna in 1990. Schuette-Lihotzky, a lifelong Communist, moved to Moscow to work in 1930, specializing in kindergartens and other buildings for children. But at the outset of World War II, she returned to Austria to participate in the resistance and was jailed by the Nazis. She continued her career after the war, designing children’s facilities primarily in Communist nations, including the Soviet Union, China and Cuba. In 1977 she was awarded a medal for her work in world peace movements, in 1978 an honor badge for services for the “release of Austria,” and in 1980 an architecture prize from the city of Vienna. She wrote and lectured widely on architecture and her experiences during the wartime resistance. On Tuesday in Vienna of the flu.