Ella Briggs (born Elsa Baumfeld; Vienna, 1880 – England, 1977) was an Austrian interior designer and architect, one of the few women to practise architecture in interwar Vienna. Her career, shaped by several periods of exile, took her from Vienna to New York, Berlin and London.
She studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna from 1901 to 1906, mainly with Koloman Moser, a leading figure of the Vienna Secession. In New York, where she married in 1907, she built a reputation as an original interior designer, with commissions such as the social rooms of the New German Theatre. Back in Vienna she opened her own firm in 1912. World War I opened the way to architecture: she became the first woman allowed to audit lectures in the architecture department of the Technische Universität Wien, and later earned her degree in Munich in 1920.
In socialist Vienna she won municipal social housing commissions, including the Pestalozzi-Hof and the Ledigenheim, making her a notable figure of Red Vienna. After a period in Berlin, where she designed an apartment block in Mariendorf, she emigrated to England in 1935. There she rebuilt her practice and gained British citizenship in 1947.
Her legacy rests mainly on her Viennese social housing estates, while much of her interior work has been lost.