Name Elsa Gidoni | ||
Elsa Gidoni (March 12, 1901 – April 19, 1978) was a German-American architect and interior designer.
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Early life
Gidoni was born Elsa Mandelstamm in Riga, Latvia, into the Lithuanian-Jewish family. Her father Paul Mandelstamm was an architect. She studied architecture at the Technical University in Berlin and 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. In 1938, she 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 (AIA) 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 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.