Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky

Child’s workspace in a Froebel kindergarten, Vienna, designed by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky 1952

Photo source: www.kindergartenamkapaunplatz.wordpress.com

Nowadays it is possible to walk into a preschool classroom and be immediately aware of the child-sized furniture and play equipment.  Perhaps, as a parent, you have even experienced what it is like to sit in one of those little chairs during a parent education event, or a school community meeting? These pieces empower children to be independent and confident in their learning environment but, of course, school or childcare facilities did not always prioritize the creation of aesthetic and functional spaces where children could move freely in accordance with their developmental needs. Come and learn a little about one of the first architects to value the importance of child-sized furniture, who lived to see over a century of changes in her native Vienna!

Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky in 1981 Photo: Margherita Spiluttini

When Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky celebrated her 100th birthday in 1997, she mentioned that in 1916 (the first year of her studies at Vienna’s prestigious  “Kunstgewerbeschule” (now the Austrian city’s University of Applied Arts) no one believed that a woman would ever be commissioned to build a house - not even herself. Over a century has passed since took the groundbreaking step for a woman at the time by studying architecture and the legacy of this innovative inventor is preserved in a special museum in her native city dedicated to her life and work.

The story goes that petite, red-haired Margarete was adamant from an early age that she wanted to pursue architecture as a career, and that she actually applied to the university program against her parents’ wishes. Her talent was noticed almost immediately, however, which may have brought her parents some consolation; in 1916/17 a university competition was held on the theme of "a residential kitchen in the outer suburbs." Even though it was one of her first architectural works, Grete Lihotzky, the only female participant, won the Max Mauthner Prize for her project, which was a two-story workers' housing complex around a square courtyard.

The prize-winning trend continued. It was an award in 1920 for a garden allotment design that first brought Margarete into contact with Vienna's Housing movement and the pioneer of modern architecture, Adolf Loos. The collaboration was to have a profound effect on her entire career, and led to significant developments in the design of homes, kindergartens, children's furniture and self-assembled furniture. (Regarding the latter, her influence is felt to the present day; in the 1990s the Swedish furniture store Ikea presented her with an award for her trailblazing style).

In 1927, Grete Lihotzky married the architect Wilhelm Schütte, and together they relocated to the Soviet Union in 1930. At this point in her life she played an important role in constructing schools and childcare facilities that were uniquely styled and sized according to the needs of young children, as well as multifunctional children’s furniture. Interestingly, it was not until the 20th century that the subject of functional, child-scaled furniture had come to be on the agenda of important European designers.

In the second quarter of the 20th century, the success of scientific pedagogy, proposed by Maria Montessori, increased the spread of children's furniture in the period after the 1930s. In her book "The Discovery of the Child", Montessori recounts the moment when she decided to solve the difficulty of finding child-size furniture:

“I therefore began to study a pattern of school furniture that was provided to the child and that corresponded to his need to act intelligently. I had tables built in different shapes, that did not rock, and so light that two four-year-olds could easily carry them. Chairs, made of straw or wood, also very light and beautiful, and which were a miniature reproduction of adult chairs, but provided for children. I ordered wooden chairs with wide arms and wicker chairs; square tables for one person, and tables of other shapes and sizes.”

Inspired by Maria Montessori’s principles, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky designed her first kindergarten project in 1929 and became somewhat of an expert in this field over the decades that followed. Organizing space as an optimal environment for children’s development and growth became her primary focus. The epidemic-like occurrence of childhood diseases including scarlet fever was fairly common at this time in history; strict hygiene measures often influenced how spaces for children were designed in the interest of preventing the spread of illness.

Children in a Froebel kindergarten work in a beautiful space with abundant natural light, designed by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky in 1952

Establishing a relationship between the indoor and outdoor physical environments was also important to her and she was motivated to incorporate the possibility of experiencing nature in a child’s education by including numerous interior windows and glass doors in her designs so as to enable the learning environments to maintain a visual connection with the outside world.

In 1938, alongside her husband, Schütte-Lihotzky accepted a teaching position at the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul, Turkey. Istanbul, on the brink of World War II, served as a relatively safe haven for many exiled Europeans. In December 1940,  she voluntarily returned to Vienna in order to  discreetly engage with the Austrian Communist resistance movement. However, just 25 days after her arrival, she was arrested on January 22, 1941, and endured several interrogations by the Gestapo. While Eichholzer and others faced death sentences and execution in 1943, Schütte-Lihotzky received a 15-year prison sentence. She was ultimately liberated by U.S. troops on April 29, 1945.

At the end of the war Margarete was to eventually return to her native city, where over 80,000 apartments had been destroyed and over 35,000 people had been rendered homeless. With her vast international experience in social housing construction, she wanted to participate in the reconstruction of Vienna. However, for political reasons  she received hardly any public commissions in the post-war period. One exceptional example of her dedication to the developmental needs of Vienna’s children exists in a Froebel kindergarten that was constructed in 1952, with the support of mayor Franz Jonas. 

Children in concentrated activity amid furniture and facilities that are sized according to their age and developmental needs, as part of a Froebel kindergarten in Vienna, Austria, designed by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky in 1952