Architects of the American Century.

The exodus of top Austrian talent to the U.S. reached a flood-state with the expulsion of Jews after the “Anschluss.” Among many “modernist” architects leaving for the U.S., Victor Gruen (neé David Victor Grünbaum), Richard Neutra, Rudolf M. Schindler and Frederick Kiesler were among the best known.

Gruen built the first enclosed shopping malls in the United States, eventually transforming the (sub) urban landscape of the country. He tried to arrest the social isolation created by suburbanization and sprawl after World War II with the communal and interactive urban environment he had experienced growing up in Vienna.

World famous fin de siècle Vienna architect Adolf Loos kindled Richard Neutra’s interest in urban America. Frank Lloyd Wright became his American mentor and his former classmate in Vienna, Rudolf Schindler, invited him to come to Los Angeles. Neutra’s architectural style, biorealism, was influenced by Freud’s psychoanalysis. He is known today as one of the quintessential modernist architects and became famous for his single family homes, whose designs aimed at being an extension of the nature of their owners.

Schindler built a house for himself in the early 1920s. After its purchase by the Austrian government in 1995, it has become the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles – carrying on Schindler’s modernist tradition as a forum for cultural and artistic exchanges by designers, artists and architects.

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