How a group of émigrés overcame adversity – and enriched the world with their modernist vision. A century on from the birth of the Bauhaus school, Dominic Lutyens looks back.
By 1939, more than 300 modernist architects from Germany and Austria – along with others from Russia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and Romania – had settled in the UK, many of them émigrés from Nazi-controlled Europe. The more famous of these included architects Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Berthold Lubetkin and Erich Mendelsohn. Many, but not all, were Jewish refugees.