Twenty Austrian architects who settled in the US at the turn of the century radically altered our thinking about architecture. Their little known but impressive story is powerfully told on Visionaries in Exile, a CD-ROM by Austria-based Science Wonder Productions.
Pop the disc into your drive and you're presented with photographic portraits of several severe-looking Austrian architects from another age. Clicking their heads yields fascinating yarns exploring the evolution of their thinking about design and how buildings impact human behavior.
I have to admit I never gave much thought to who invented the shopping center. But discovering builder and theoretician Victor Gruen's role four decades ago in creating this architectural genre was eye-opening. Visionaries in Exile offers Gruen's original shopping center blueprints plus the text of his manifesto "Shopping," which connects the typical housewife's need for shopping to "spiritual hunger."
Perhaps the most radical thinker here is Bernard Rudofsky, a dabbler in fashion as well as an architect profoundly influenced by traditional Japanese arts. Radical doesn't mean humorless: Rudofsky's Museum of Modern Art show of a half century ago, Are Clothes Modern?, included a symmetrical woman's shoe, designed for a perfectly symmetrical foot.
This disc gave me a strong sense of just how playfully imaginative these Austrian architects became when their fantasies were kick started by hefty infusions of American money and technology. It's a rich historical irony that the most whimsical designs created by these left-wing Austrian professors were later built by conservative businesses to serve as headquarters for corporate America.
Visionaries has a few bothersome shortcomings. Blueprints and drawings are reproduced without much sharpness or detail. The biographies of the architects are long on personal trivia and short on moments of creativity. But for anyone who has ever questioned how American architecture developed, this program offers a pantheon of giants who altered New World landscapes with Old World finesse.
Visionaries in Exile, CD-ROM for Mac and PC: US$49.95. Organa: +1 (212) 233 5161, fax +1 (212) 233 5160, on the Web at www.organa.com/.
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