Exiled in L.A.

Volker M. Welter is a professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Tremaine Houses: One Family's Patronage of Domestic Architecture in Midcentury America (Getty, 2019).

In this stimulating study, Volker M. Welter examines the work ofemigre architect Leopold Fischer, who mainly built private houses and whosewritings and drawings are considered to be lost. Welter's analysis opens oureyes to a previously overlooked and important chapter in California's modernarchitecture history. -Dr. Burcu Dogramaci, Professor of Art History, Institutfur Kunstgeschichte, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat MunchenVolkerM. Welter is one of the most esteemed experts on avant-garde architecture andartists in exile. His newest book meticulously reconstructs the work of along-forgotten Austrian architect, Leopold Fischer. Fischer attended the schoolof Adolf Loos, worked with Walter Gropius in Dessau, and fled to the UnitedStates in 1936. Through in-depth source studies of numerous American andEuropean archives, Welter recreates the exemplary networks of architects inexile. These "detailed" representations are the foundation for a new, realistichistoriography of modernism.-Dr. Matthias Boeckl, Professor, Institute of Architecture, University ofApplied Arts Vienna“A student of Adolf Loos and afriend of Arnold Schoenberg, Leopold Fischer was one of the exile architectswho came to California in the 1930s but who has long since slipped intoundeserved obscurity. In contrast to the standard histories of mid-twentieth-centuryCalifornia architecture, Volker M. Welter here explores thedifference between the émigré and the immigrant architect to expose areferential as opposed to deliberately innovative architecture.”— Neil Jackson, author of CaliforniaModern: The Architecture of Craig Ellwood and Pierre Koenig: AView from the Archive