In 1938, Vienna lost its best and most creative minds. This rupture was manifested in all of the arts and sciences and its mark is felt to this day – not least in the field of furniture design. With inexhaustible creativity the Jewish furniture designers who were forced to flee Vienna continued to work while in exile. They taught at the best universities and spread their ideas and vision throughout the entire world. Their creations became classics of twentieth-century furniture design, the epitome of mid-century modern style. This book honors the memory of the exiled designers with a thorough overview of their work. It details their life stories and their visionary designs, which remain as relevant and contemporary as ever, and brings to light new aspects of the history of Viennese furniture design.

Visionary furniture design from Vienna In 1938, Vienna lost its best and most creative minds. This rupture was manifested in all of the arts and sciences and its mark is felt to this day - not least in the field of furniture design. With inexhaustible creativity the Jewish furniture designers who were forced to flee Vienna continued to work while in exile. They taught at the best universities and spread their ideas and vision throughout the entire world. Their creations became classics of twentieth-century furniture design, the epitome of mid-century modern style. This book honors the memory of the exiled designers with a thorough overview of their work. It details their life stories and their visionary designs, which remain as relevant and contemporary as ever, and brings to light new aspects of the history of Viennese furniture design. A new history of Viennese furniture design, with 27 detailed biographies Numerous previously unpublished photographs and sketches Including works by Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, Martin Eisler, Josef Frank, Friedrich Kiesler, Richard Neutra, Bruno Pollak, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, Franz Singer, Ernst Schwadron, among others

An essential text in the field of contemporary art history, it has now been updated to represent 30 countries and over 100 new artists. The internationalism evident in this revised edition reflects the growing interest in contemporary art throughout the world from the U.S. and Europe to the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Australia.

Design has an increasingly high profile - figures like Philippe Starck are as venerated and well known as more traditional artists. But where the literature on fine art is vast, design is still conparatively ill-served. This encyclopedia provides an account of the still largely unknown story of design.

Twentieth-century architect Frederick Kiesler's innovative multidisciplinary practice responded to the ever-changing needs of the body in motion, anticipating the research-oriented practices of contemporary art and architecture. In 1960, the renowned architect Philip Johnson championed Frederick Kiesler, calling him “the greatest non-building architect of our time.” Kiesler's ideas were difficult to construct, but as Johnson believed, “enormous” and “profound.” Kiesler (1890–1965) went against the grain of the accepted modern style, rejecting rectilinear glass and steel in favor of more organic forms and flexible structures that could respond to the ever-changing needs of the body in motion. In Elastic Architecture, Stephen Phillips offers the first in-depth exploration of Kiesler's innovative and multidisciplinary research and design practice. Phillips argues that Kiesler established a new career trajectory for architects not as master builders, but as research practitioners whose innovative means and methods could advance alternative and speculative architecture. Indeed, Kiesler's own career was the ultimate uncompromising model of a research-based practice. Exploring Kiesler's formative relationships with the European avant-garde, Phillips shows how Kiesler found inspiration in the plastic arts, experimental theater, early animation, and automatons to develop and refine his spatial concept of the Endless. Moving from Europe to New York in the 1920s, Kiesler applied these radical Dadaist, constructivist, and surrealist practices to his urban display projects, which included shop windows for Saks Fifth Avenue. After launching his innovative Design Correlation Laboratory at Columbia and Yale, Kiesler went on to invent new houses, theaters, and galleries that were meant to move, shift, and adapt to evolutionary changes occurring within the natural and built environment. As Phillips demonstrates vividly, although many of Kiesler's designs remained unbuilt, his ideas proved influential to later generations of architects and speculative artists internationally, including Archigram, Greg Lynn, UNStudio, and Olafur Eliasson.

This chronological text surveys the art and craft of building design from the temples of early Egypt to the landmarks of 20th-century design. Setting each architect in his social and historical context, the Gertrud Lehnert identifies key characteristics of style. The text is supported by carefully-researched photographs and drawings, and colour-coded pages make it easy to locate each era.