Fembio Special: Famous Lesbians
Emilie Winkelmann
born on May 8, 1875 in Aken an der Elbe/Anhalt, The German Empire
died on August 4, 1951 at Hovedissen Manor near Lemgo, West Germany
German architect
150th birthday on May 8, 2025
Biography
“...I am the first woman to have studied architecture and to have set up my own independent business as an architect responsible for the planning and supervising of the construction of buildings.” This was how Emilie Winkelmann described both her life's work in her will of September 14, 1950 as well as the beginning of a new chapter in the history of architecture in Germany.
As the daughter of a teacher, Emilie aimed for something more in life than to marry and be supported by a bourgeois husband. She was drawn to her grandfather's carpentry business and construction company, and she completed an apprenticeship as a carpenter there even though at the time this was highly unusual for a woman. She acquired basic knowledge in construction and in working with wood; the designs and drawings she produced in her grandfather's business were used in numerous conversions and new buildings (including an oil refinery and a large brickworks). She earned her own money as a draftswoman.
The next logical step – studying architecture to become an architect – was out of the question. Women in Prussia were not allowed to pursue an academic degree at a university and entering a profession was thus rendered impossible for a woman. In the women's movement that had emerged across Europe and the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, women had taken up the fight for civil rights, legal equality, the right to education, the right to gainful employment and for the freedom to choose an occupation. Yet it was not until 1909 that women in Germany were admitted to technical colleges and universities, and the Prussian regulation that allowed professors to continue to officially exclude women from classes was not repealed until 1921.
However, Emilie Winkelmann was a very determined young woman and she chose to ignore the fact that women were banned from attending universities in Prussia in 1902. She was 27 years old when she moved to Hanover and completed a semester of general studies as an auditor at the Technische Hochschule Hannover. She then applied for exceptional admission to the architecture faculty as an auditor under the name “E. Winkelmann” – presumably to deliberately mislead the authorities given that they would assume the E stood for a man’s name – and she was admitted. She completed the four-year program in architecture as Emil Winkelmann. However, she was denied permission to take the mandatory final exam in 1906 and thus left the university shortly before the other students were awarded their degrees in civil engineering (Dipl.-Ing.).
She then moved to the affluent city of Berlin and worked briefly in a planning office. The following year she set up her own business as an architect. Since the professional title of architect had not yet been protected, she was able practice as an architect despite not having passed the final exam necessary for qualification as a Dipl.-Ing.
Emilie Winkelmann was the first female freelance architect in Germany. From the beginning, her architecture practice was very successful, at times employing up to 15 staff.
“In 1908, I began to work independently as an architect after winning the competition for the theater building at Blumenstrasse 10 in Berlin. It is a building for the same number of visitors as the Oetker Hall in Bielefeld, but not as striking because it is sandwiched between tall buildings which also makes it more difficult to solve, especially at the exits.” This is how Emilie Winkelmann herself described her start as an architect in the will she wrote on September 14, 1950.
She was awarded the commission for the construction of the theater building. It needed to contain numerous individual banquet halls and ballrooms where separate events could take place simultaneously. Her competitors had failed to design the staircase in such a way that visitors arriving for one event and visitors leaving another event did not get in each other’s way. Emilie Winkelmann’s solution was a so-called double staircase – a two-armed spiral staircase in which the stairs for entering and the stairs for exiting are offset by 180 degrees.
The first prestigious project she was awarded was a success, but the building was destroyed in the war.
It was also at the beginning of her professional career that she was commissioned by the Oriental Institute of the University of Berlin to carry out the preliminary work for what was then Germany's most prominent project abroad – the House of Friendship in Constantinople. Although her plans received a great deal of attention and were widely admired, an additional competition was announced, to which she was then not invited!
The gradual advancement of women such as Emilie Winkelmann in the creative disciplines rattled many men who expressed a consternation that was blatantly misogynistic. Karl Scheffler, an otherwise renowned art and architecture critic, was not alone in his criticism of the call for women’s equality: it was, he decried, a dangerous and contagious disease. In a book published in 1908, Die Frau und die Kunst (Woman and Art), he warned that should women act against their very nature, at the cost of an insidious loss of their own femininity, and succeed in establishing themselves as artists the downfall of the arts would be the result. Women who challenged men in this way would suffer a hermaphroditic personality change; in the end, they would experience not only masculinization, but also prostitution and lesbianism. Above all, he emphasized, women should stay out of architecture. The highest aspirations of mankind were fulfilled by architects; only real men – robust, energetic, autocratic men – could take on this work, not masculinized women (Voigt/Bressan, p. 10 2f.) He claimed that “women fail most spectacularly in the fields that demand the strictest limitation, the strongest sense of form and the purest sense of style: in music and in architecture. Since a woman is incapable of the abstract, she is also incapable of mathematics; and of the temporal arts, none is based more on abstraction and mathematics than music; and of the spatial arts, none more than architecture. There has never been a creative composer or architect of the female sex.” (Stojanik, p.3) He recommended that women work within the applied arts where they could play around with finished forms that could be easily imitated or varied. The generally held view was that women could never become architects because they were unable to think three-dimensionally.
Emilie Winkelmann ignored these prejudices.
All of her designs and constructions were successful. The residential buildings she constructed ranged from stately villas to urban apartment buildings, many of them in Berlin's Westend. In 1909 she received one of the most important commissions of her career: the construction of an apartment building for wealthy upper-class clients in Charlottenburg, which at that time was not yet part of Berlin. The luxurious and generously sized apartments ranged from 190 to 270 square meters and were housed in a building on a street named after the painter Walter Leistikow; within two years, she had planned, implemented and finished the work on what she would later refer to as the Leistikowhaus. The fact that Emilie Winkelmann had received this major contract only a year after opening her practice and that she also managed to execute the contract in the shortest possible time points to how her expertise had quickly been recognized as well as to the excellent connections she had with key suppliers and tradespeople.
The building has four apartments on each floor, and all are grouped around a courtyard and are accessible by elevator – a technological novelty at the time. Each residential unit has its own entrance as well as a separate service entrance with its own stairway. After many decades of various uses and structural alterations to the interior, the building was restored to its original proportions in 2014. The Leistikowhaus is now a listed building, as are all of the other buildings in Berlin constructed by Emilie Winkelmann that survived the war.
Emilie Winkelmann was chair of the Women in Architecture section of the groundbreaking exhibition Women in the Home and at Work in 1912 where the achievements of women were showcased. She presented 26 of her own designs; the diversity of these submissions demonstrated the wide range of her expertise and was evidence of her enormous popularity. She submitted plans for:
6 single-family homes and country estates in Berlin and Schleswig
1 apartment building – these were the designs for the Leistikowhaus, completed the previous year
3 guest houses in Berlin
4 plans for the conversion and interior fittings of mansions in Pomerania
3 designs for factory buildings, two of them in her hometown of Aken
Plans for three farm buildings on Usedom. Special mention in her CV was made of the manor house in Mellenthien, where she planned and converted “a horse stable for 165 stallions, a building for livestock, and a stud farm for 12 foals,” as well as of her restoration of the moated castle there.
3 public buildings such as exhibition halls and schools
Included under Miscellaneous was the design for a bridge over the Drag in Pomerania and a development plan for a site in Steglitz.
If Emilie Winkelmann's rapid rise was initially due entirely to her skills as an architect, it was her talent for networking that proved instrumental to her continued success.
One influential network was established after she cleverly succeeded where two male colleagues had previously failed; she turned the floor plan around so that the commissioned building, the Hotelpension Tscheuschner in Berlin, could be accessed from a different side. The owners of the hotel were members of the Junker, the landed gentry east of the Elbe in Prussia, and the commission thus opened up her first crucial network. Emilie Winkelmann received commissions from the Junker clientele for over 30 years.
In 1914 she designed the House of the Woman for the first International Exhibition of the Book Trade and Graphics in Leipzig, receiving a gold medal for her work.
The second network she built up was within a circle of independent, professionally successful and sometimes wealthy women, often from the world of music and film in the 1910s and 1920s. In particular, her membership of the Lyceum Club, the city's leading women's association, soon provided her with a clientele willing to hire a female architect. In addition, working for women corresponded to her increasing commitment to the women's movement.
In the decades that followed, Emilie Winkelmann realized residential and commercial projects for both private clients and for women's organizations in Berlin and across northern Germany.
In 1913/1914, she received a commission from the Genossenschaft für Frauenheimstätten (building association for women’s accommodations) to build a house equipped with modern service facilities for retired working women in Potsdam-Babelsberg. The Haus in der Sonne (House in the Sun, Hermann-Maaß-Straße 19/20) offered unmarried working women who had previously had to take a room in a boarding house the possibility to rent their own apartment for the first time. Emilie Winkelmann equipped the building with an elevator and designed small one- and two-room apartments that had a kitchen, a bathroom and central heating. There was also a communal room where the women could meet and have meals together. The building complex was renovated in 2005 – today it is owned by the Babelsberg e.G. building association and still houses a number of single women.
Ottilie von Hansemann, a wealthy entrepreneur's widow, women's rights activist and pioneer in the fight for women's access to higher education, was also part of the network of women in Berlin involved in the women's movement. She pledged an endowment of millions to the state of Prussia in 1908 on the condition that the universities admit women as students. The then Minister of Culture delegated the decision to the university rectors, who were unanimous in their rejection of von Hansemann's offer. As a result, Ottilie von Hansemann invested the money instead in a residential and educational facility for female students. She provided 200,000 marks (over 400,000 euros in today’s currency) for the purchase of the property and the construction work. Both Emilie Winkelmann, as the architect, and the Victoria-Lyceum Association for the Promotion of Higher Education for Women, which had been founded in 1869, donated expertise and funds to the project.
The document for the laying of the foundation stone on April 28, 1914 emphasized that the need for the project arose from “the realization of the necessity to create a place in Berlin for women university students where in communal living arrangements they can find the protection, peace and quiet as well as other conditions that will ensure the best possible achievement of their academic objectives.” The neoclassical building was completed in 1915 and accommodated over 100 women; it exemplifies the reformist philosophy of the women's movement. Ottilie von Hansemann had stipulated in her will that another million Reichsmarks should go to the foundation of the teaching institute. After her death in 1919, the building underwent its first renovations. Named Victoria Studienhaus after its patron, Empress Auguste Victoria, it provided dormitory accommodations for female students until the 1970s. The building was then renovated and expanded and today it is a complex of condominiums and is called the Ottilie-von-Hansemann-Haus.
Initially Emilie Winkelmann had chosen to convert a former coach house in Berlin-Charlottenburg into accommodations for herself. But shortly after the completion of the Victoria Studienhaus, she moved into the small house in Charlottenburg together with Ottilie von Hansemann. This information, contained in her estate, suggests that the two women had formed a domestic partnership and shared a life together in what was referred to at the time as a Boston marriage.
Emilie Winkelmann experienced her heyday up until the First World War. But even after the war ended, she continued to build in the spirit of the empire. She remained a sought-after architect, and worked on the conversion of many more manors and mansions in the country as well as on villas in cities. She deftly positioned herself between tradition and modernity. A trade journal praised her work: “With great tact, she responded to the client's wishes and then understood how to modify them in her own way, so that ultimately her style prevailed.” To this day, both the richness of form of her works and the excellent craftsmanship are widely recognized. The specialist literature mentions Emilie Winkelmann in the same context as famous architects such as Alfred Messel or Hermann Muthenius. Yet she was not accepted into the Association of Architects (BDA, Bund Deutscher Architekten) until 1928.
Emilie Winkelmann's success came to an abrupt end in 1933 when she refused to join the Nazi Party. “I had no part in the buildings of the Third Reich because I did not want to become a ‘comrade’ in the party,” she wrote in her estate. As a result, she received no further public commissions. Following “the decree of the general building ban issued by the Third Reich, my work as an architect also came to an end” (ibid.).
In the early 1940s, when Berlin was suffering from bombings, she was taken in by the Von der Schulenburg family, who owned the Hovedissen Manor near Lemgo and who had been among her clients. Emilie Winkelmann died there in 1951.
Emilie Winkelmann remained unmarried all her life. It does not appear that she had any relationships with men. Among the members of her family – whom she apparently preferred to keep at a distance – she was known as Aunt Emilie, “a somewhat bossy lady with short hair and in trousers” (Voigt).
It is her biography as a promoter of women's rights and women’s access to education that makes her unforgettable, alongside her career as a brilliant architect. Even under Gropius at his Bauhaus, women were never allowed to study architecture, only arts and crafts. This emphasizes the extent of the pioneering work, the courage and the creative power of Emilie Winkelmann.
Women architects have since made it to the top, as evidenced by Eileen Gray, Lina Bo Bardi or Zaha Hadid, who said at an awards ceremony in 2013 that “the idea that women cannot think three-dimensionally is ridiculous.” However, as Ursula Schwittala said in a 2021 lecture, there exists to this day a “male leadership elite, whose presence is reproduced in the media and which reinforces the discrimination and lack of visibility of women in architecture.”
We still need role models like Emilie Winkelmann.
One of Emilie Winkelmann's favorite sentences was: “I know how it could be done.” She didn't just “do” it, she mastered it – as an intelligent and independent-minded individual, as a brilliant designer and architect, as a courageous and strong-willed woman, as a pioneering trailblazer and as a fervent advocate for women's rights.
She became a feminist because men had tried to deny her the career she wanted.
(Text from 2023; translated with DeepL.com; edited by Ramona Fararo, 2025.
Please consult the German version for additional information, pictures, sources, videos, and bibliography.)
Quotes
I think it is wrong to emphasize the work of women in the construction industry when it really only comes down to quality.
Without mathematical skills, without a talent for drawing, and even without a certain practical sense for living conditions, material and monetary circumstances, no one will succeed in their studies and later in practice despite their intelligence.
If you hold the rights to one or more of the images on this page and object to its/their appearance here, please contact Fembio.
