The Jewish Contribution to Modern Architecture 1830-1930

By Fredric Bedoire

Format: Hardcover

Pages: 518

ISBN: 978-088-125-808-0

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A book about architecture and society, a wide-ranging cultural and historical depiction of successful Jewish entrepreneurs in an increasingly industrialized Europe, from the dissolution of the ghetto and the 1848 liberation movement to Hitler's assumption of power in Germany. Inspired by Jewish messianism, they pursued a modern culture, free from the old feudal society.
The principal characters are bankers, merchants, and industrialists together with their architects, from Schinkel and Semper to Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier. They built in Paris, Berlin, and Vienna, Budapest and New York and Chicago, and in more remote centers of Jewish entrepreneurial activity, such as Oradea (Nagyvrad) in present-day Romania and Lodz in Poland, Stockholm and Gothenburg in Sweden. The buildings shed new light on the Europe of today, but also on a Europe that is lost beyond recall.
Much of the modern European urban landscape was inspired by the initiative of these industrialists and philanthropists.
Coincidental to the main thesis, this volume is also a history of Jews in the period.
About the author
The author is a Swedish scholar, Fredric Bedoire, Ph. D. and Professor of the History of Architecture in the Royal University of Fine Arts, Stockholm, a productive writer on architectural and cultural history. He has above all specialized in the emergence of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European society.
About the author, see further Marquis Who's Who in the World and Who's Who in America.