Sophie Hochhäusl

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Sophie Hochhäusl is an architect and architectural historian whose scholarly work centers on modern architecture and urban culture in Austria, Germany, and the United States with a focus on environmental history, women and gender studies, and the history of social movements. Her most recent work engages questions of housing, health, and food production in the city, wartime resource scarcities, and the work of urban cooperative movements, including women’s associations. She is an assistant professor in history and theory of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.

While at the Radcliffe Institute, Hochhäusl is working on an interdisciplinary architectural history that will make architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s 1980s German-language book Erinnerungen aus dem Widerstand available to English-speaking audiences. Alongside an in-depth discussion of the architect’s design work, the project explores Schütte-Lihotzky’s engagement in the resistance movement against the Nazi regime and her postwar activism in the Austrian women’s and peace movements. By charting an inclusive history of Schütte-Lihotzky’s work, including her political activism, the project highlights new networks of exchange and expertise among women, along with the agency of social movements in design histories.

Hochhäusl studied architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and earned a PhD in the history of architecture and urbanism at Cornell University. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships, among them the Botstiber Fellowship in Austrian-American Studies, the Bruno Zevi Prize, the Clarence S. Stein Institute Award, and the Graham Foundation’s Carter Manny Award.