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 confl icts 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 reconfi gure 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, 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"