migr Cultures in Design and Architecture

(Hardback)

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This new volume addresses the lasting contribution made by Central European migr designers to twentieth-century American design and architecture. The contributors examine how oppositional stances in debates concerning consumption and modernisms 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 migrs and refugees from fascist Europe such as Gyrgy Kepes, Paul Lszl, Victor Papanek, Bernard Rudofsky, Xanti Schawinsky, and Eva Zeisel drew on the particular experiences of their home countries, and networks of migr and exiled designers in the United States, to develop a humanist, progressive, and socially inclusive design culture which continues to influence design practice today.

Reviews

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. * ARLIS/NA *
This innovative anthology on the migr and exile experience of designers and architects in the United States invigorates the long-overlooked theories of Vilm 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. * Sabine Eckmann, director and chief curator at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, USA *
By taking migr 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. * Jeremy Aynsley, Professor of History of Design at the University of Brighton, UK *
migr Cultures in Design and Architecture provides much-needed analysis about how European migr 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. * Timothy M. Rohan, Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA *

Author Bio

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 migr 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 Sicle Vienna.