Moscow Material

In 1930, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (1897–2000) left Frankfurt am Main together with her husband Wilhelm Schütte and numerous members of the "Ernst May Brigade" for the USSR, where she worked at the Moscow Architectural Institute under Hannes Meyer until she left for Paris in 1937. In addition to numerous designs for model flats and kindergartens, children's sanatoriums and school buildings – projects which she was partly managed – from 1935 to 1937, she concentrated primarily on creating detailed designs for children's furniture and a model design for crèches.
The materials for these furniture designs now preserved in the Collection and Archive were originally intended for two projects that never came to fruition: a research project with designs for standardized furniture for the care of infants in crèches and a scientifically supported model project with children's furniture for apartments. The latter includes ideas which were to be presented in the form of a sample exhibition (which was also never saw the light of day), for which Schütte-Lihotzky numbered her designs and grouped them into clusters, as well as categorizing them by age group and level of need. These notes are supplemented by short explanatory texts written by the architect herself.
 
On the 25th anniversary of Schütte-Lihotzky’s death and following the successful monographic exhibition curated by Bernadette Reinhold and Stephanie Buhmann for the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York in 2024, the Collection and Archive Institute will examine her work through a close reading of these two case studies. The exhibition Moscow Material uses the architect’s own writings to provide the first in-depth look at the sketches, preliminary studies, (detailed) plans and visualizations of the designs for children's furniture. In addition, numerous photographs of the architect from her time in Moscow as well as archive documents, letters and postcards provide a visual commentary on the construction of the USSR in the 1930s from her perspective. The initial design process for the children's furniture took place during the period known as the “Great Terror”, making it particularly revealing in terms of political and social tensions. As both visual and verbal statements, these designs and ideas not only allow us to understand Schütte-Lihotzky's private and public conception of design, but also to visualize the complex political and social demands of her position.

This exhibition runs alongside the continued cataloguing and study of the architect’s legacy – which comprises over 10,000 objects – currently underway as part of a digitization project at the Collection and Archive.

The program accompanying the exhibition takes place in cooperation with the Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky Zentrum.

Opening Hours: Wednesday – Saturday: 2 – 6pm, closed on public holidays
Concept and Exhibition Design: Robert Müller
Overall Management: Cosima Rainer
Exhibition Management: Judith Burger, Anja Seipenbusch-Hufschmied
Digitization project: Silvia Herkt, Bettina Buchendorfer