10 female architects who left their mark

The internationally sought-after British architect is no stranger to success: She won the RIBA award — the "Oscar" of the architecture world — three times. The public loved her massive timber structure "The Smile," a large tunnel she designed as a pavilion for London Design Week in 2016. It quickly became a crowd favorite.

This award-winning British architect runs an office in London and has many prominent building designs to her name. A shining example is Lisbon's Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, which curves over the promenade like the crest of a wave. Its façade is decorated with ceramics tiles, like the scales of a serpent, while its roof serves as a balcony perfect for catching city views.

The Iraqi-British architect was one of the biggest names on the scene before her untimely death in 2016. Hadid was known for playing with unique forms and shapes, as seen in like Rome's National Museum of Contemporary Art, which consists of sloping concrete surfaces stacked on top of one another, like futuristic, brutalist Legos. Her futuristic design prevailed over 273 other competitors.

The portrait from 1969 shows one of the most influential architects of the GDR, Iris Dullin-Grund, surrounded by her main projects. She created the general development plan for Neubrandenburg and was responsible for the high-rise tower of the House of Culture and Education in the city, where she was a chief architect from 1970 to 1990. Her fame spread beyond the borders of former East Germany.

Some consider Sigrid Kressmann-Zschach to be the West German counterpart of Iris Dullin-Grund. Born in Leipzig in 1929, where she studied engineering, she became a successful building contractor with around 300 employees in West Berlin in the 1960s — no small feat for the time. She was responsible for unique Berlin buildings including the Kudamm-Karee and died in 1990 in Berlin.

The Café Samt und Seide (reconstruction pictured), was designed jointly by big names of the Bauhaus design school, Lilly Reich and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for a 1927 exhibition. The two met in 1924 and worked closely together until the latter moved to the USA in 1938. The result of this collaboration included the Barcelona Pavilion for the 1929 World Exhibition and Villa Tugendhat in Brno.

Architect Lotte Cohn, pictured here, was one of the first women to graduate with an architecture degree in 1916. After working in Berlin, she emigrated to present-day Israel in 1921, where she made a name for herself as a freelance architect in Tel Aviv, especially for the construction of kibbutzes, the collective settlements where residents shared wealth and property.

What appears to be a perfectly normal kitchen today caused a sensation almost 100 years ago: The "Frankfurt kitchen" was the prototype for the modern fitted kitchen and was designed by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky in 1926. Considered efficient and pragmatic, thousands were installed in social housing units in Frankfurt during the Weimar Republic and became a hit worldwide.

An architect and furniture designer, Eileen Gray was a pioneering figure in the Modernist movement. Her best-known work is the villa she built on the French Riviera in 1926, the "E-1027." But for years, historians believed it had been built by her male colleague, Le Corbusier. In 2019, a graphic novel was published about the intrepid designer-architect, called "A House Under the Sun."

Women who wanted to become architects in early 20th-century Germany were often met with malice and rejection. In Munich and Berlin, Therese Mogger was not allowed to attend university and could only audit courses. However, she went on to become one of the first German female architects. In 1911, Elisabeth von Knobelsdorff was the first woman in Germany to obtain a degree in engineering.