Elsa Mandelstamm 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, into the Lithuanian-Jewish family. Her father Fayvush (Pavel) Mandelstamm was a physician.[1] She studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg from 1916 to 1917 and at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin-Charlottenburg (now Technische Universität Berlin) in the mid-1920s. She then operated her own interior design firm from 1929 to 1933.
Tel Aviv
In 1933, once Adolf Hitler became Chancellor, sweeping anti-Jewish legislation was passed, with the result that Jews unable to practice their profession.[2] Gidoni left Berlin and settled in Tel Aviv where she practiced as an architect until 1938. There, she designed an economics school[3] and worked on various projects such as planning the Swedish Pavilion at the Levant-Fair and the Café Galina.[4] Much of Gidoni's work was of the International Style,[5] an architecture style that became popular after World War I and is characterized by the use of industrial materials, lack of color, and flat surfaces.[6]
New York
In 1938, she left Tel-Aviv due to increasing conflict within the political landscape,[7] and moved to New York where she worked as an interior designer for Fellheimer & Wagner before eventually finding work as a project designer at the architectural firm of Kahn & Jacobs.[8] With Kahn & Jacobs she was the lead architect on several significant commissions including the Universal Pictures Building at 445 Park Avenue in Manhattan, completed in 1947. Praising its use of light and other structural features, architectural historian and critic, Lewis Mumford, called the 445 Park Avenue office building "technical milestone." The Britannica Book of the Year 1947 included the building as among the five top architectural achievements of the year. The four other notable structures cited were designed, respectively, by Oscar Niemeyer, Alvar Aalto, Buckminster Fuller, and Le Corbusier.[9]
She became a member of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in 1943.[10] In 1960, she was one of 260 women in the AIA and only one of 12 working in New York.[11]
Her older sister was violinist Margarita Mandelstamm Selinsky. Her first husband was the art critic and writer Alexander Gidoni. She later married Alexis L. Gluckmann, an engineer. In April 1978, she died at the age of 77 at her home in Washington, D.C.[12]
Select works
Hecht Co Department Store, Ballston, Virginia
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
Universal Pictures Building, 445 Park Ave. New York, NY
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.
^Gropius, Walter; Wachsman, Konrad (22 April 2021). "Into Exile: With Gropius and Wachsmann to the New World". MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies. MIT Press. Retrieved 28 February 2024. Prominent among both groups of exiles—Jewish and non-Jewish—were the architects, and especially those architects who had constituted the vanguard of the Modern Movement.
^Stern, Jewel; Stuart, John A.; Kahn, Ely Jacques; Kahn, Ely Jacques (2006). Ely Jacques Kahn, architect: beaux-arts to modernism in New York (1. ed.). New York London: Norton. pp. 204–206. ISBN0-393-73114-6.
^"Elsa Gidoni (1901-1978)". The AIA Historical Directory of American Architects Wiki Pages: ahd1015844. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 15 October 2015.
^Ennis, Thomas W. (March 13, 1960). "Women Gain Role in Architecture". The New York Times. ProQuest115037462.
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