Women in Landscape Architecture in Austria and Central Europe

The proposed research project aims at analyzing the role of women garden and landscape architects in the 20th century, with special focus on Austria and Central Europe insofar as it concerns the newly founded states following the Austro-Hungarian monarchy after 1918. The research project is based on the hypothesis that women played a significant role in the maturation of the profession. Women garden architects were members of a larger constellation of professionals who shaped and influenced garden and landscape architecture and thus were of utmost importance for the profession and for the design of landscapes in the broadest sense. In due consideration of and relation to the diverse professional structure, focusing on women will give a deeper understanding of the profession, its practice and development, and, in consequence, of dealing with nature and landscape in the 20th century. During the 20th century, the role of women in garden and landscape architecture, as in professional life in general, matured according to political, social, and cultural changes. These changes had great impact on the approach and understanding of design and planning, on tasks, clients, and on the structure of organizations and of academic training. We intend to look closer at these changes and their mechanisms from the women`s side. The role of women in garden and landscape architecture will be related to the role of men to achieve a balanced overall view. Thus, the results allow for conclusions about the structure of the associations, and the work and tasks of garden and landscape architects in general. The analysis will also give an insight into the design approach and understanding. In particular, we look at how women garden and landscape architects coped and interfered with the conditions during Austro-fascism, National Socialism, and exile. Finally, we await new findings on the contribution of women in the formative postwar era and the following decades, mostly influenced by social liberation and ecological movement. We intend to collect ample and profound evidence of women working in garden and landscape architecture in the 20th century. Therefore, we have to look over the margin, to architecture, horticulture and gardening, literature, and to the arts, to grasp as many women as possible; women who were designing, cultivating, constructing, writing, and teaching, and thus were important for the creation of open spaces and for the profession in general at that time.

In early 20th century women played a far more important role in the maturation of garden and landscape architecture than it is widely acknowledged today. The vocational training situation for women improved fundamentally in 1913, when Yella Hertzka opened a horticultural college for women in Vienna. Fifteen years after its foundation, the school had trained approximately 180 women from the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and Poland. Among them were most of the women who started a successful professional career in the 1920s and 1930s, opened their own nurseries and designed private gardens. Women like Anna Plischke and Helene Wolf consolidated the Wohngarten style of the 1920s and 1930s in Austria. Their fundamental knowledge of perennials proved a valuable skill, as plantings became central features at that time. Most of the women who were successful in the Interwar period were violently driven out of Austria in 1938/39 as they were of Jewish families. Their horticultural and practical training allowed them to survive in exile; moreover they brought European trends in garden design or in the use of plants to their new home countries like New Zealand, Sweden and the USA. But it was not only through expulsion that garden architects of Austrian origin shaped landscape architecture outside the country; strong professional relation towards Slovenia and Serbia existed. While we have learnt quite a lot about the prosperous 1920s and 1930s, the period of Austrofascism and National Socialism as well as the decades after WW II still need further research. After WW II the gender ratio in the profession deteriorated, but, nevertheless, women designed significant projects, like Hedi Renner who, in 1965, was responsible for the garden of the German embassy in Vienna.We have filed the collected evidence in a database, called LArchiv. As of 10 December 2014, LArchiv contains information on 521 persons involved in gardening as well as garden and landscape architecture, 1,389 design projects, 1,401 publications, 50 training centres, and 78professional organizations and associations within the field. What first seemed to be a foggy bubble of scattered evidence, has become a slowly growing, but still fragmentary inventory of 20th century Austrian landscape architecture. Long-term, the database is to be made accessible to the public when financing is secured. Findings of this project are not only of utmost importance for the understanding of landscape architecture history, but provide results for other areas of science, especially gender and exile studies, horticulture, architecture, and urban planning.