Viennese Modernism and Landscape Architecture

Abstract

The text addresses the cooperation of modern architects and garden designers in Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s. Progressive garden architects, among them numerous Jewish women, ran garden design studios with attached nurseries and kept working together with modern architects from the Osterreichischer Werkbund. Like many architects, most of the very few women working in garden architecture in Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s came from liberal bourgeois Jewish families that had immigrated to Vienna around 1900. Jewish students of architecture usually attended the Vienna Technische Hochschule. The Hohere Gartenbauschule fur Frauen was the first advanced horticulture school for women within the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and was founded by the women’s rights activist Yella Hertzka in 1912; it became the leading training institution for women in horticulture and garden architecture in Vienna and the former Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. This offered women the potential to attain a higher professional training and a basis for economic independence as gardeners or garden architects. Their gardens, together with the architecture of the Wiener Schule, were significant contributions to Austrian garden architecture in the early twentieth century.