Back to the origin

Her parents had emigrated there in the late 1950s. Sylvia moved to Burgenland when she was seven years old. Her mother and sister still live there. Her personal connection to Burgenland as well as her professional connection to biomimicry prompted her to take part in the first summer academy of sustainable universities, SOAK Biomimicry* 2023.

She began her training as a carpenter and designer at HTL Mödling. She then studied interior design at Rosenheim University of Applied Sciences. She completed her degree in architecture at the Weissensee School of Art in Berlin, where her mentor was Daniel Libeskind.

Her professional career began in Berlin as a freelance architect, after which she worked on a museum project in London for almost two years. "I was a designer for the British Galleries at the Victoria & Albert Museum, responsible for the Tudor & Stuart Galleries. In 2000 I moved to the USA, where I settled in Chicago, the city of my birth, and worked for 20 years as an architect and design director in various architectural firms. During this time, I worked on international projects of various sizes and gained a lot of experience in the development of commercial offices for large tech companies."

In 2020, she returned to Austria and spent two and a half years designing biophilic office landscapes. After completing the relevant training, she worked as a biomimicry practitioner. She now teaches as a designer and biomimicry practitioner at the HTL1 for Architecture and Design in Linz.

As far as the biomimicry approach is concerned, she tries to keep up to date with sustainability and our environment and living space.

*Biomimicry means using innovation inspired by nature to propose potential solutions to human problems.