Elsa Gidoni


Elsa Mandelstamm Gidoni was a German-American architect and interior designer.

Early life

Gidoni was born Elsa Mandelstamm in Riga, Latvia, into the Lithuanian-Jewish family. Her father Fayvush Mandelstamm was a physician. She studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg from 1916-1917 and at the Technical University in Berlin in the mid-1920s. She then operated her own interior design firm from 1929 to 1933.
In 1933, after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor, Gidoni left Berlin and settled in Tel Aviv. There, she designed an economics school and worked on various projects such as planning the Swedish Pavilion at the Levant-Fair and the Café Galina. Much of Gidoni's work was of the International Style, an architecture style that became popular after World War I and is characterized by the use of industrial materials, lack of color, and flat surfaces. In 1938, she left Tel-Aviv due to increasing conflict within the political landscape, and moved to New York where she worked as an interior designer for Heimer & Wagner before eventually finding work as a project designer at the architectural firm of Kahn & Jacobs.
She became a member of the American Institute of Architects in 1943. In 1960, she was one of 260 women in the AIA and only one of 12 working in New York.
Her first husband was the art critic and writer :ru:Гидони, Александр Иосифович|Alexander Gidoni. She later married Alexis L. Gluckmann, an engineer. In April 1978, she died at the age of 77 at her home in Washington, DC.

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