Émigré 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.

Table of Contents:
Introduction - Elana Shapira and Alison J. Clarke I. Social Transformation and Mass Consumption 1. Isotype and Architectural Knowledge - Eve Blau 2. (Mis)Understanding Consumption. Expertise and Consumer Policies in Vienna, 1918-1938 - Oliver Kühschelm 3. Shaping the Mass Mind: Frederick Kiesler and the Psychology of Selling - Barnaby Haran II. Assimilation, Emancipation and modern Pluralism 4. Becoming American: Paul T. Frankl’s Passage to a New Design Aesthetic - Christopher Long 5. Paul László and the Atomic Future - Monica Penick 6. Eva Zeisel: Gender, Design, Modernism - Pat Kirkham III. “Outsiders” Perspectives and Cultural Critique 7. Real and Imagined Networks of an Émigré Biography: Victor J. Papanek Social Designer - Alison J. Clarke 8. Kiesler, Rudofsky, and Papanek: the Question of Gender - Elana Shapira 9. Felix Augenfeld: Modern Architecture, Psychoanalysis and Antifascism - Ruth Hanisch IV. Emigration and Education - Bauhaus in the USA 10. György Kepes’s “Universities of Vision: From Education in Design to Design as Education of the Mind - Anna Vallye 11. The Architectonics of Perception: Xanti Schawinsky at Black Mountain College - Eva Díaz V. Envisioning a Global Home 12. Between Culture and Biology: Schindler and Neutra at the Limits of Architecture - Todd Cronan 13. Bernard Rudofsky: Not at Home - Felicity D. Scott References Index

About the Author :
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.

Review :
…its scholarly contribution to the ongoing critical discussion of early 20th century modernism and the influence of the European experience, and a newly lived American experience, offers a worthwhile read. This innovative anthology on the émigré and exile experience of designers and architects in the United States invigorates the long-overlooked theories of Vilém Flusser, who argued that transnational cultural production in exile was essentially dialogic. Rather than dwelling on exile as an experience of loss and isolation, the authors in this book consider concepts such as otherness and creativity, European modernism and American commodity culture, local assimilation and global imaginations, and the hybrid tensions between past and present to consider various exilic design languages. By taking émigré cultures in the plural this set of essays reaches a nuanced understanding of the experience many designers of Central European origin entailed when negotiating their new identities in 20th-century America. The book addresses contributions both to new design thinking as well as anti-design languages, and in this, it is an original and important contribution. Émigré Cultures in Design and Architecture provides much-needed analysis about how European émigré designers and architects engaged with America during the twentieth-century, an episode previously alluded to mostly in passing. These new essays advance our understanding of the complexity of these encounters, explaining what was gained, what was lost, and what is still be learned from them.