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 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.