Emigre Cultures in Design and Architecture

This new volume addresses the lasting contribution made by Central European emigre 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 emigres and refugees from fascist Europe such as Gyoergy Kepes, Paul Laszlo, Victor Papanek, Bernard Rudofsky, Xanti Schawinsky, and Eva Zeisel drew on the particular experiences of their home countries, and networks of emigre and exiled designers in the United States, to develop a humanist, progressive, and socially inclusive design culture which continues to influence design practice today.