Emigre Cultures in Design and Architecture

This new volume addresses the lasting contribution made by Central European émigré designers to twentieth-century American design and architecture. The contributors examine how oppositional stances in debates concerning consumption and modernism’s social agendas taken by designers such as Felix Augenfeld, Joseph Binder, Josef Frank, Paul T. Frankl, Frederick Kiesler, Richard Neutra, and R. M. Schindler in Europe prefigured
their later adoption or rejection by American culture. They argue that émigrés and refugees from fascist Europe such as György Kepes, Paul László, Victor Papanek, Bernard Rudofsky, Xanti Schawinsky, and Eva Zeisel drew on the particular experiences of their home countries, and networks of émigré and exiled designers in the United States, to develop a humanist, progressive, and socially inclusive design culture which continues to influence design practice today.

Author Biography

Alison J. Clarke is professor of design history and director of the Papanek Foundation, University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria. She is the editor of Design Anthropology: Object Culture in the 21st Century (2010) and the author of Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America (2014), and of the forthcoming Designer for the Real World: Victor Papanek and 1970s Design Activism.

Elana Shapira is a lecturer of design history and theory, and a senior researcher in the Émigré
Cultural Networks project at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria. She is the author of the forthcoming title Style and Seduction: Jewish Patrons and Modern Architecture and Design in Fin de Siècle Vienna.