Eugenie Pippal-Kottnig

In 1941, she was commissioned to set up the chemical laboratory of the testing and experimental department of the Kraftfahrtechnische Lehranstalt der Waffen-SS in the Maria Theresien barracks. For 6 months, until the spring of 1942, she was busy with this project. Until now, little has been known about the chemical laboratory. From 1944, the site itself served as part of the Mauthausen concentration camp.

At the end of the summer semester of 1943, she wrote a dissertation on Entwurfspläne zu einer 4-klassigen Volksschule für eine Gartenstadt mit Bauzeichnungen und Modell (design plans for a 4-class elementary school for a garden city with construction drawings and a model), and from then on, she was a graduate of the Reichshochschule für angewandte Kunst Wien, as it was called at the time. In the same year she met her future husband, the painter Robert Pippal. At first, they got in touch through a pen friendship and only later, when he was in the military hospital injured in the war, they met in person for the first time. Already a few months later, at the end of 1943, they married.

In September 1944, she was contacted by the Reichskammer der bildenden Künste (Reich Chamber of Fine Arts in Berlin) and asked to make herself available for total war service, should she not already be assigned to a construction project important to the war effort. However, it is not known whether this letter had any effect.

The end of the war and the immediate post-war period brought some changes to her life. She joined the Zentralvereinigung der Architekten Österreichs (Central Association of Architects of Austria) in 1945. Then she broke off her collaboration with Franz Schuster because she felt professionally ignored when he published the book Treppen aus Stein, Holz und Eisen. Entwurf, Konstruktion und Gestaltung kleiner und großer Treppenanlagen (Die Bauelemente III)  (Stairs of Stone, Wood and Iron. Draft, Construction and Creation of small and large staircases (The elements of building III)) was published under his name by the Julius Hoffmann Verlag in Stuttgart, although all the construction drawings had been executed by Eugenie Kottnig without mentioning her share. She then went into business herself and received her first freelance commissions thanks to personal contacts. When in 1947 she and her husband were asked to contribute illustrations to the Österreich-Buch (Austria book) published by Ernst Marboe, this was an artistic breakthrough of sorts.

On 15 September 1949 she received the authority as an architect. Her work and interests in the Second Republic were manifold. She took part in competitions, planned interiors, and found pleasure in making drawings for publications. She took part in such prominent competitions as the Museum der Stadt Wien (Museum of the City of Vienna) or the redesign of the Danube Canal, in which 38 architects participated, and for which she – together with her professional partner Boris Christo Christoff – was able to achieve 5th place. In 1953, she briefly took over the editorship of the architecture magazine Der Bau, but soon resigned after internal conflicts. She remained successful with contributions to publications. She published city plans in the magazine Sie und Er (She and Him) or designed an invitation card to the Heurigen for the Austrian Foreign Minister Karl Gruber in 1952. Some other illustration projects remained only in the planning phase and were not realized.

Increasingly, she worked in the field of interior design. Whether for private clients from Vienna to New York, or business clients, here the office building of the company Franck and Kathreiner in Linz and the Wiener Städtische Bestattung (Vienna Municipal Funeral Service) are worth mentioning.

Although she worked with her husband in their joint studio for over five decades, it was always important to her to push ahead with independent projects as well. Thus, from the mid-1950s onwards, she was able to secure commissions from the City of Vienna for housing developments, e.g. in 1962-1966 for the housing development at Jägerstraße 65-67 in Vienna’s 20th district, or in 1968-1973 for the housing development at Thürnlhofstraße 20-25 in the 11th district. Whether as a responsible for planning or in collaboration with other architects, she was a busy and sought-after architect until the 1980s. She died in Vienna in 1988 at the age of 77.