Ernst Lichtblau, Architect

From 1948 to 1957, Ernst Lichtblau served as head of the Department of Interior Architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design. During his brief tenure here, he introduced a generation of American students to European modernism, while redirecting the curriculum at RISD from its parochial emphasis on "good taste" to international standards of "good design."

This exhibition presents work executed by Lichtblau between 1913 and his death in 1963. A student of the great Viennese architect Otto Wagner (1841-1918) at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (1902-05), Lichtblau was a member of the Wiener Werkstatte and a professor at the Hohere Staatsgewerbeschule. As German hostilities spread, he fled Austria, emigrating through London to New York, where he arrived penniless in 1939. After brief stints as a freelance graphic designer and as an instructor of textile design at the Cooper Union (1945), Lichtblau was hired by RISD in 1947 to succeed Emilie Wildprett as instructor of Interior Design. By 1948 he was Chairman and immediately began redefining the department in the spirit of Otto Wagner's modern functionalism.

In this exhibition, domestic, commercial, civic and exhibition projects from Lichtblau's Vienna years are displayed chronologically, beginning in the South Gallery. The Wetmore Room contains photographs of exhibition buildings and innovative interiors from the 1930s. The drawings for a vast housing project, the Paul Speiser-Hof (1929-31), occupy two walls of the Garden Gallery.

Few drawings survive from Lichtblau's Providence years, although he received occasional architectural commissions, collaborated on the design of museum exhibitions, and participated with his students in a series of "Good Design" exhibitions sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art (1951-55). Several examples of furniture, prototypes and mass-produced tableware designed by Lichtblau around 1950 are displayed in this and the adjoining Garden gallery.

In June of 1957, Professor Lichtblau returned to his native Vienna but served as a visiting professor at RISD in 1959-60. Two years later, at the age of sevety-nine, he collaborated on the design of a school in the Grundsteingasse (1962). He died in Vienna the following year.

This exhibition has been organizd by the Otto Wagner Archive and is sponsored by the Austrian Cultural Institute, New York. Its guest curators are Dr. August Sarnitz, of the Otto Wagner Archive, and Samuel B. Frank, Director, Architecture and Design, Corning, Inc.