Designing Transformation

International Symposium
University of Applied Arts Vienna, May 16-17, 2019

The International Symposium, “Designing Transformation: Jews and Cultural Identity in Central European Modernism,” offers a contemporary scholarly perspective on the role of Jews in shaping and coproducing public and private, as well as commercial and socially-oriented, architecture and design in Central Europe from the 1920s to the 1940s, and in the respective countries in which they settled after their forced emigration starting in the 1930s. It examines how modern identities evolved in the context of cultural transfers and migrations, commercial and professional networks, and in relation to conflicts between nationalist ideologies and international aspirations in Central Europe and beyond.

This symposium sheds new light on the importance of integrating Jews into Central European design and aesthetic history by asking symposium participants, including architectural historians and art historians, curators, archivists, and architects, to use their analyses to “design” - in the sense of reconfigure or reconstruct - the past and push forward a transformation in the historical consciousness of Central Europe. In doing so, the symposium points to the necessity of challenging the present political and cultural status quo, which prefers to suppress cultural differences in society, by projecting progressive and transformative “designs” that recognize the value of such differences for the future.

Concept and Organization: Dr. Elana Shapira
Dates: May 16-17, 2019
Venue: University of Applied Arts Vienna, Vordere Zollamtsstraße 7, 1030 Vienna, New Auditorium
Cooperation Partners: University of Brighton Design Archives, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art

Organized as part of the FWF (Austrian Science Fund) research project “Visionary Vienna: Design and Society 1918-1934”

Friday May 17, 2019
10.00 Architecture and Identity in Central Europe and Beyond
Moderator – Maximilian Hartmuth (University of Vienna)

1. Matthias Boeckl (University of Applied Arts Vienna) – A Modern Identity Fabrication Project: Josef Hoffmann’s Professional Networks
2. Or Aleksandrowicz (Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa) – Climate, Health, and Nation Building: German-Speaking Immigrants and the Origins of Israeli Bioclimatic Building Design
   11.00 Discussion and Break
   11.30 Trauma and Design - Projecting Transformative Designs onto the Future
   Moderator – Georg Spitaler (VGA – Austrian Labor History Society, Vienna)
3. Rosemarie Burgstaller (Historian and Curator) and Michael Zinganel (Architectural and Urban Historian) – Place/Space and Resistance: the Theresienstadt Ghetto
4. Sue Breakell (University of Brighton Design Archives) – ‘Memory’s instruments and its very medium’: the Archival Practices of Émigré Designers
   12:30 Discussion
   13.00 Lunch Break
   14.00 Launching the Future: Design, Emigration and Cultural Renewal
   Moderator – Sophie Lillie (Art Historian, Vienna)
5. Rebecca Houze (Northern Illinois University) – Cultural Exclusion and Creative Transformation: Anna Lesznai’s Embroidery Design
6. Lesley Whitworth (University of Brighton Design Archives) – Émigré Journeys, Transport Motifs, and the Iconography of Travel in the Work of Willy de Majo
   15.00 Discussion and Break
   15.30 Roundtable Discussion – Historiography and its Discontents: Jews and Cultural Identity in Central European Modernism
   Moderator: Elana Shapira
   Rainald Franz, Jasna Galjer, Rebecca Houze, Juliet Kinchin, Rudolf Klein, Celina Kress, and Ursula Prokop

Symposium will be held in English
The organizers reserve the right to alter the program without notice.

Free admission. Registration requested:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/international-symposium-designing-transformation-jews-and-cultural-identity-in-central-european-tickets-58601497657