A Team of 16 Scholars Unlocks the Life of an Unconventional Architect

Thirty years later, with a team of 15 collaborators, she finally unlocked much of Briggs’ story. The result was “Finding Ella Briggs: The Life and Work of an Unconventional Architect," named by The Financial Times as one of the best architecture and design books of 2025. As the FT architecture critic put it: “I admit, I’d never heard of her, yet hers is surely one of the most remarkable stories in architecture.”

And remarkable it is. Briggs was an architect, designer, and writer whose life reads like a novel. She integrated the architecture program at the Vienna Technical University, trained with the Viennese Secessionists and brought their ideas to Gilded Age New York, designed social housing in Red Vienna during the 1920s, was imprisoned in Mussolini’s Italy as a suspected German spy, worked in Weimar Germany before fleeing the Nazis, and helped rebuild England following World War II.

Briggs’ constant movement made her history elusive. Stratigakos included fragments in her dissertation but kept thinking about Briggs for years—as did other scholars who hit the same dead ends.

Then, a breakthrough happened. In 2019, Stratigakos was contacted by Elana Shapira, an architectural historian at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. It was the centenary of Red Vienna, and Shapira wanted to know more about Briggs.

Their conversation sparked an idea: What if everyone interested in Briggs gathered in one place to piece her story together?

And that’s just what happened. In 2022, they organized a one-day workshop at the Architekturzentrum in Vienna, and by the end of the day, they had made the connections necessary to collaboratively forge ahead with a book about Briggs. The group—who half-jokingly refer to themselves as the “Ella Briggs Detective Brigade”— included those who not only had the skills to research and write Briggs’ biography but also had the expertise and context to understand it.

“Sixteen people wrote the book,” Stratigakos confirmed. “We wanted to research it and write it together; we didn’t want an edited volume. That was one of the many challenges we faced.”

The Architekturzentrum played a key role in the process, setting up a virtual portal to house research discoveries and written documents. The group hired a writing coach to help establish a cohesive voice and narrative, navigating their multiple languages and writing styles with aplomb. Editor Michelle Komie at Princeton University Press played an important role in the final presentation and readability of the book as well. The entire process took two years.

The team’s diversity was its strength: architects, historians, curators, archivists, and students embedded in key locations from Briggs’ life. Collaboratively, they uncovered documents scattered across continents—tax records in New York, letters in Vienna, licensing documents in London, and even Briggs’ 1950s restitution claim and German citizenship application. These materials now reside in a dedicated archive at the Architekturzentrum, ensuring her legacy endures.

Importantly, this project also challenges assumptions about humanities research. While it’s typical for medical or scientific research to be conducted by teams, it’s generally assumed that humanities research is conducted by individuals. “There’s this idea that we are lone scholars, and we work at our desk surrounded by books,” Stratigakos shared. “That model works against new histories because, as with Briggs, the only way to recover her history was to do this collaboratively.”

But collaboration required new kinds of support—something not readily available through today’s institutional and grantmaking framework. Without resources and assistance from the Architekturzentrum and UB’s School of Architecture and Planning led by Dean Julia Czerniak, this book wouldn’t exist. 

Stratigakos hopes their success can serve as a blueprint and spark future change. “We have a model here that’s incontestable proof that you can recover the histories of women in architecture to a remarkable degree, much more than we thought. But it is going to require different institutional supports, different funding methods, and different ways of working together. For me, the next stage is to use this book to advocate for those changes, because I don’t want to go back.”

Over the years, Stratigakos has learned that institutional change plays an important role when striving to make a lasting impact. That belief inspired her to create the University at Buffalo’s Despina Stratigakos Visiting Fellowship, a program that supports research on the built environment as a vehicle for the creation of more inclusive communities with a focus on gender and sexuality in architecture.

“Leaders are important, and visionaries are important, but leaders come and go. So, making sure that change gets embedded in the very fabric of an institution is absolutely critical.”

Next semester, Stratigakos plans to use the book in the classroom at UB as part of an exploration of the stories that aren’t told in architecture—the theme chosen by this year’s Stratigakos fellow, María Novas Ferradás.

Briggs’ story also underscores persistent gender gaps in the field of architecture and the realities for women working in a male-dominated field. Stratigakos points out that while enrollment in architecture schools is nearly equal now, only 25% of working architects are female. So that begs the question—where are the women architects?

“Deborah Berke has called it a death by a thousand cuts. It’s heartbreaking; the loss of talent, the loss of dreams. We still have a lot of work to do in understanding retention and the culture of architectural practice, but we also have a lot of work to do in architectural history. We need to make sure this work is happening across multiple experiences, whether at school or later in practice.”

In April, Stratigakos will travel to Mexico City to speak at the Society of Architectural Historians’ annual conference, serving on a panel focused on women and the worlds they make in migration. It’s a particularly competitive opportunity, and Stratigakos is honored to have been selected to share Briggs’ story and all that she’s learned throughout this process.

“There’s growing interest today in broadening our knowledge about histories,” Stratigakos reflected. “That’s great, but there has to be an understanding of what’s involved in the process of finding new histories. This book was not possible outside a collaborative framework. In two years, we were able to do what others couldn’t do over decades.”