SLOVENSKÁ ARCHITEKTONICKÁ EMIGRÁCIA VO VEĽKEJ BRITÁNII V ROKU 1939

At the turn of the 1930s and 1940s, several hundred architects emigrated from Central Europe to Great Britain. The phenomenon of refugees from Nazi Europe is not new in historiography. It has also received attention from several researchers in the field of art and architectural history. In the case of emigrants from Czechoslovakia, the architect Eugen Rosenberg is a particularly notable example. Equally unexplored were the circumstances of their emigration and their strategies for surviving and utilizing their skills in their new country. The fate of those who planned such a journey but did not ultimately complete it has been entirely unknown to date. This study presents the results of research concerning those architects who were working in Slovakia at the time of their planned emigration to Great Britain. It explains the historical circumstances of this wave of emigration. It focuses on the lives and professional careers of the architects Adolf Drexler, Josef Konrad, Oskar Singer and Emerich Spitzer, but also covers the unsuccessful attempts to emigrate by Endre Steiner, Friedrich Weinwurm and Louis Becher. It also attempts to answer the question of what were the key circumstances around the decision to emigrate, and which factors most influenced the fate and professional careers of the architects in emigration. With access to previously unknown RIBA archives and extensive research carried out in other archives in Great Britain, it brings a range of entirely new insights into this wave of architectural emigration.