Elsa Gidoni

Elsa Gidoni (March 12, 1901 – April 19, 1978) was a German-American architect and interior designer.

Early life

Gidoni was born Elsa Mandelstamm in Riga, Latvia. Her family is of German-Jewish heritage. She studied architecture at the Technical University in Berlin and then operated her own interior design firm from 1929 to 1933.

In 1933, after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor, Gidoni left Berlin and settled in Tel Aviv. In 1938, she moved to New York, where she worked as an interior designer for Heimer & Wagner before eventually finding work as a project designer at the architectural firm of Kahn & Jacobs.

She became a member of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in 1943. In 1960, she was one of 260 women in the AIA and only one of 12 working in New York.

She married Alexis Gluckmann. In April 1978, she died at the age of 77 at her home in Washington, DC.

Select works

• Swedish Pavilion at the Levant Fair with Genia Averbuch, Tel Aviv, 1934
• Apartment house, Tel Aviv, 1937
• General Motors Futurama pavilion, 1939 World's Fair
• Research Library, 23 West 26th Street, New York
• Hecht Co Department Store, Ballston, Virginia

Further reading

• Stratigakos, Despina. "Reconstructing a Lost History: Exiled Jewish Women Architects in America." in Aufbau (The Transatlantic Jewish Paper), Vol. LXVIII, No. 22, p. 14. October 31, 2002.
• Stern, Robert A.M., Thomas Mellins and David Fishman. New York 1960: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Second World War and the Bicentennial. New York: The Monacelli Press, 1995.
• Torre, Susana. Women in American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective. New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1977.

External links

• Café Galina at Levant Fair, Tel Aviv, 1934, designed by Elsa Gidoni and Genia Averbuch, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
• Apartment house, Tel Aviv, 1937, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
• Research library, 23 West 26th Street, New York, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
• Architectural drawings for a department store ("Hecht Co."), Ballston, Virginia, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.