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.
Émigré Cultures in Design and Architecture
Description
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
Author Description
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.