Elsa Herrmann

Forgotten architect of Germany's first social housing projects and feminist urban planning

Elsa Herrmann (1894–1958) redefined urban living through her radical gender-inclusive housing designs in Weimar Germany. As one of the first female graduates from the Bauhaus architecture program, she implemented communal kitchens, childcare spaces, and women's work studios in her 1920s housing blocks – features considered revolutionary for domestic architecture.

Her Frankfurt Collective Housing Project (1926-29) introduced flexible partition walls and centralized services to reduce household labor, enabling women's workforce participation. This model influenced later co-housing movements worldwide. During Nazi rule, Herrmann destroyed her archives and went into internal exile, leading to historical erasure of her contributions.

Recent scholarship credits Herrmann with anticipating modern concepts of sustainable communities and work-life balance urbanism. The rediscovery of her Living Networks theory (1932) now informs smart city designs and pandemic-era spatial planning, cementing her legacy as a visionary erased from architectural canon.