In Design Dialogue, editor Elana Shapira presents twenty-three articles (in German and English) by scholars who examine the networks and intellectual exchanges between Jews and gentiles that shaped what is now understood as Viennese modernism. As each of these essays demonstrates, Jewish contributions to the creation of modern Viennese culture were central to its formation and helped to define its distinctness. The scope of these examinations runs from the early nineteenth century through the Anschluss in 1938, revealing the consistent presence of such networks and exchanges in modern Viennese cultural life. Design Dialogue thereby adds to the body of scholarship that focuses on the significance of Jewish participation in such cultural networks as they supported and facilitated the development of modern architecture, art, music, theater, and design in the Habsburg capital. More importantly, however, with its emphasis on both prominent and less well-researched figures in the fields of Viennese design and architecture, Design Dialogue provides nuance to this scholarship: it presents a series of investigations that help to refine many standard conceptions of Viennese modernism by prioritizing what Shapira describes in her introduction as “lesser-known cultural networks that revolved around specifically Jewish identities” (13) rather than, for example, those directly associated with the well-known figures of the Vienna Secession.

Shapira also states that, in addition to focusing on intercultural networks that fostered the formation of Viennese modernism, the assembled authors “examine Jewish identifications, and sensitively explore the negative and positive images of ‘Jewishness’ as presented in public media and further negotiated within cultural networks” (13). Additionally, because each article illuminates specific dimensions of Jewish culture in Vienna at particular historical moments, she asserts that the critical approach that guides this volume undermines any “problematic projection of ‘the Jews’ as a fixed and monolithic, stereotypical ‘Other’” (13). In our current academic context, mounting challenges to some notion of a uniform Viennese Jewish identity might be perceived as less than groundbreaking. However, this stance allows for the analysis of a range of topics and perspectives that reveal some of the complex strategies used by Jews to navigate issues of belonging and identity in the modern Viennese urban environment, where both pro-Jewish and antisemitic policies and attitudes existed side by side, and in varying degrees of strength and weakness.

Given the persistence of debates throughout the time frame covered by Design Dialogue about which segments of the Viennese population could rightfully claim a sense of belonging, it is perhaps unsurprising that homes—their architecture and interior designs—feature prominently in more than half of the articles. For example, several essays discuss villas created for Jewish homeowners during the nineteenth century; the authors analyze issues such as the collaborative processes between architect and homeowner, considerations of public-facing presentations of Jewish identity (which also appear in analyses of the architectural styles of synagogues), and the symbolic weight of building homes in a Neo-Renaissance style as opposed to a Neo-Baroque style. As these articles demonstrate, issues related to identity, home, and belonging that emerged in the early and mid-nineteenth century persisted into the fin de siècle and the interwar years, informing the designs most frequently associated with Viennese modernism.

This volume includes additional essays about individual architects, patrons, and architectural styles, as well as articles that highlight ways that the design and furnishing of interior spaces expressed designers’ and inhabitants’ identifications with Jewishness and modernness. Questions of home and belonging appear in a more overtly political light in articles that consider the impact of Theodor Herzl's theories of political Zionism on the types of architecture envisioned for a new Jewish homeland and on the Viennese cultural landscape in general.

In “Loos remodeled,” a particularly illuminating example of the types of “design dialogues” that helped to create Viennese modernism while contributing to Viennese Jews’ sense of belonging, Sabine Plakolm-Forsthuber examines the architect Liane Zimbler's skillful 1936 remodeling of an apartment originally designed by Adolf Loos for Leopold Goldman. Zimbler was known for the numerous projects she undertook to adapt and update already existing interiors, and many of her clients were well-educated, bourgeois Jewish women she met through the women's organizations to which she belonged. Credited also for coining the term “remodeling work,” she was able to transform Loos's 1910‒11 design, which had accommodated Goldman's desire for a very private refuge, by maintaining Loos's typical emphasis on function and spaciousness while creating an even more modern, open, and functional living space. She also designed furniture for the young family who commissioned this project, which they carefully packed and moved with them to the United States, where they fled in 1938. The seamless relationship between Loos's version of modern design and Zimbler's updated, more functional reworking resulted in a lasting testament to the cultural exchanges that helped to create Viennese modernism. The enduring flexibility of the resulting designs is demonstrated in the adaptability of Zimbler's furniture to a dramatically different environment: the exiled family's new residence in the United States.

A broad swath of additional, illuminating topics appears in this anthology, ranging from the use of color in Sigmund Freud's famous office (Eric Anderson) to a pamphlet on industrially produced carpets written by Felix Salten—perhaps best known today as the author of Bambi—in which he synthesized his understanding of Zionist ideals with his thoughts on mass production and consumption (Werner Michael Schwarz) to Emilie Bach's advocacy of both historical and modern needlework through her writings, exhibitions, and design education reforms, which made her an important “tastemaker” in fin-de-siècle Vienna (Rebecca Houze). Most of the articles serve as compelling examples of the “design dialogues” that Shapira has identified; some, however, seem to have been included primarily to provide historical context, given the fact that their links to “design” issues are less than clear. Overall, though, due to the articles’ emphases on networks connecting both well- and lesser-known Jewish and gentile architects, designers, writers, and patrons, the total effect of this volume is a more granular understanding of Viennese modernism and of the importance of Jewish participation in its conception and creation.