In early July 1931, a number of the leading members of the Congrès internationaux d'architecture moderne, or CIAM, met in Berlin to plan the organization's next meeting, CIAM IV, scheduled for the summer of 1933. Among those present were Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Ernst May, Erich Mendelsohn and Alvar Aalto. Also in attendance was the Polish architect Szymon Syrkus (1893–1964), whom the Swedish historian Anders Åman once characterized as ‘perhaps the foremost exponent of Functionalism anywhere in Eastern Europe’ (quoted in Kohlrausch, p. 77).

Syrkus had been educated at the technical universities in Vienna, Graz and Riga, the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków and, finally, the newly established Warsaw University of Technology (WUT), from which he graduated in 1922. Later, working with his wife Helena Syrkus (née Ellasberg), he designed some of the best modernist villas and apartment buildings erected in Warsaw during the inter-war years. The Syrkuses also played a leading part in the formation of the Praesens group, which, in the 1920s, brought together the foremost Polish modernists. Later, Szymon Syrkus became one of the chief promoters of Warszawa Funkcjonalna, an ambitious and far-ranging plan for transforming Warsaw into a functionalist city.

The idea of the functionalist city was put forth forcefully at CIAM IV in July 1933. The meeting had originally been slated to take place in Moscow, but the rejection of Le Corbusier's entry for the Palace of the Soviets, which signalled the USSR's abandonment of CIAM principles, scuttled those plans. It was held instead aboard a luxury liner, the SS Patris II, as it sailed from Marseilles to Athens. During the journey, the members discussed the principles of the ‘functionalist city’. The document they issued afterward, the Athens charter, broadened the original agenda of the CIAM from architecture to full-fledged urbanism (Helena Syrkus, not unimportantly, was the charter's editor).

But even before then, Szymon Syrkus had been advocating a radically new stance toward urban design. At the 1931 preparatory meeting in Berlin, as Kohlrausch writes, Syrkus had ‘argued that “architects doing practical work should not waste any time” on the analytical study of existing cities’. Instead, Kohlrausch notes, ‘much more resolutely than the members of the other national groups’, Syrkus pushed his belief in the primacy of ‘the social and political dimension of the Functional City’ (p. 206). It was never realized, but Warszawa Funkcjonalna was a remarkable document of modernist regional and physical planning – one of the most radical and innovative visions of the new urbanism of the era.

That such a totalizing idea of city planning was carried in east central Europe, rather than in the ‘west’, is precisely the theme of Kohlrausch's book. His argument is that it was in the new countries of the region that were formed after World War I – Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary – where experiments in the new architecture and urbanism were pursued with the greatest enthusiasm and, in many instances, to their logical extremes. The reasons for this, he explains, had to do with the specific conditions there: ‘Given the situation of extreme economic challenges and political turmoil, these states almost by definition had to take on the challenge of modernization and attempt to harvest the fruits which modernization promised’ (p. 19).

In the book's introduction, Kohlrausch suggests that the best way to understand what was happening and why is to examine the new modernist architects of the region as a group. He writes that the architects of east central Europe had different assumptions and goals than their counterparts elsewhere: ‘For the architects in question…their identification with modernism entailed much more comprehensive goals, including those of personal emancipation, than for, say, a Dutch modernist architect’. I am not sure that is entirely true: there were certainly architects in the ‘west’ who articulated similarly ‘comprehensive’ aims and who saw in the shift to the new modes of building and planning paths to personal liberation. One need only to mention Le Corbusier or Hannes Meyer here. Still, it is undoubtedly the case that in inter-war Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary there was a broadly shared – or better, perhaps, collectivist – tendency toward radicalism in design absent in many other places.

Kohlrausch indicates in his introduction that his book is conceived as a sort of group biography of the region's modernists. At times, he provides insights into their shared experiences and ideas. But the work he has written is not what historians would call a ‘prosopograhic’ study; rather more, it is an analysis of these architects’ discussions, visions and activities. Brokers of Modernity, as the title has it, nevertheless is a good description of the book. But the subtitle – East Central Europe and the Rise of Modernist Architects – is misleading. Kohlrausch does consider developments in the newly founded Czechoslovak and Hungarian states, but the bulk of his book is focused on Poland. Aside from this problematic subtitle, Kohlraush's concentration on Poland and the new city planning there is not a defect but an important corrective. Far too little has been published about Polish modernism or urbanism outside the country; Kohlrausch is absolutely right to try to mend the imbalance. What he has produced is a useful look at Polish modernism and urbanism set into its regional context that will, one hopes, begin to shift our shared view a little further to the east.