When a woman built the Brooklyn Bridge

With its elegant, 42-meter-high granite towers and thick steel cables, the Brooklyn Bridge – then the longest suspension bridge in the world – became a New York landmark soon after its opening in 1883. What few people know: The mastermind behind the bridge was a woman. Emily Warren Roebling started out as secretary to her husband, Washington A. Roebling. When he fell ill, she took on more and more tasks and eventually rose to become chief engineer in her husband’s company. “Without me,” she said confidently, “the Brooklyn Bridge would never have been associated with the name Roebling.”

Roebling is one of 18 women featured in the exhibition “Women Building City” at the Architekturforum (afo) in Linz. “We want to make visible what women have been building for many years,” says architectural journalist Wojciech Czaja, who designed the exhibition with Katja Schechtner. The show was previously shown in Vienna, Bregenz and Klagenfurt. For the afo it was enriched with projects from Upper Austria (production: Veronika Platz). Anna Detzlhofer from Innviertel designed the harbor park in Linz, which opened last year and is located on the roof of a logistics hall belonging to Linz AG. Gabriele Riepl (in cooperation with her partner Peter Riepl) also played a leading role in the Kepler University campus, which was expanded in 2021.

You can also see works by students from the Linz Art University who, under the direction of Professor Sabine Pollak, experimentally dealt with urban architecture. But what would cities look like if more women were involved in major projects? “Women build no differently than men,” says Pollak. “It’s not in the genes.” Nevertheless, she believes that a lot would change, such as the use of public spaces or public buildings.

The Pritzker Prize, the Oscar of the architecture world, shows that it is still important to bring female architects to the fore. In 2012 he went to Wang Shu. The jury didn’t care that he realized all of his projects with his wife, the architect Lu Wenyu, as his partner. She was simply ignored.

The exhibition “Women build a city” is open until March 22nd at the Architekturforum Oberösterreich, Herbert-Bayer-Platz 1, Tuesday-Fri. 3-7 p.m., on view. Information is available on afo.at.