Architecture
with Andreas Nierhaus, David Schreyer, and Peter Stuiber Beginning in 2020, the Wien Museum MUSA presented the exhibition “Richard Neutra. Homes for California”. This expedition highlighted the US-based work of one of the Austrian history’s foremost modernist architects. To accompany it, a publication was made that also focuses on Neutra’s contemporaries. The basis for this…
By Kristina E. Poznan Jutting skyward on the University of Pittsburgh campus is one of the tallest educational buildings in the world, the Cathedral of Learning. The 2,000-room Cathedral was commissioned in 1921 and began hosting classes in 1931. In addition to the academic and administrative departments housed in this building, it contains over two…
By Jane King Hession In 1932, when Elizabeth Scheu left Vienna to complete her education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), she came armed with considerable knowledge of European modern architecture, a subject about which little was popularly known in the United States at the time. However, her arrival coincided with a groundbreaking exhibition…
By Jane King Hession Elizabeth “Lisl” Scheu Close (1912-2011) was Minnesota’s first modern architect. As the designer of more than 250 custom residences, several medical and laboratory facilities, and dozens of prefabricated house models from which 10,000 homes were produced, she was also one of the most prolific Austrian-born architects of the 20th century. Although…
Andreas Nierhaus, curator of architecture at the Wien Museum, and David Schreyer, an architecture photographer based in Austria, embarked on a research trip to Los Angeles and southern California during June 2017 with the intent of taking a fresh look at little-known residences of classic modernism. The works of Austrian-American architect Richard Neutra (1892-1970), who…
After Austria’s liberation by the Allies in 1945, Vienna became an important arena of the Cold War. In this book, Monika Platzer contextualizes the role of building activity and its protagonists in a nation lodged between competing systems. The global dimension of the East-West conflict and its ramifications are crucial to the reappraisal of Austrian…
By Nadine Zimmerli Today I would like to recount John Quincy Adams’s visit to a Silesian weaver’s home in 1800 to share the delightful and unexpected insights that historical research into European-American connections can bring. My book project reconstructs the American community in Dresden, Germany, from the late 1700s to World War I, and Adams,…