Since 2022, Modernism Week has presented Stories Untold, focused on the history and narratives of architects and design professionals historically left out of the spotlight.

On May 19, 1937, a single man walked from Mexico to California to reside permanently in the United States. The lonesome émigré was Leopold Fischer (1901–1975), a Jewish Austrian social housing architect who had fled Nazi Germany in late 1936.

In Vienna and Weimar Germany, Fischer was known as a student of Austrian Modernist Adolf Loos and occasional collaborator of Walter Gropius. Once in California, Fischer never achieved fame comparable to his fellow Austrian architects and Loos students, Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra; indeed, architectural history barely acknowledges Fischer’s California architecture.

By piecing together scant archival sources and circumstantial evidence of Fischer’s life and work in exile, Professor Volker M. Welter unveils the architect’s contribution to metropolitan Los Angeles.

The trajectory of Fischer’s exile architecture begins just before World War II with Frank Lloyd Wright–influenced domestic designs, moves after the war to domestic projects that comment on contemporary houses by Richard Neutra and Midcentury Modernists, from there to suburban standardized upper middle-class dwellings in the 1950s, and, finally, to a small all-glass pavilion in the 1960s, Fischer’s ultimate architectural manifesto or legacy that evokes faint images of the Bauhaus on the Pacific

Interwoven into this account are glimpses of Fischer’s still largely unknown private life, such as his friendships with modernist émigré composer Arnold Schoenberg, and with a Los Angeles soprano and her pianist daughter, who helped him escape Nazi Germany and settle in an iconic L.A. building. There, Fischer most likely met California Modernist architect Gregory Ain; a professional contact that illuminates a previously unknown path by which knowledge about European Modernism seem to have reached the South Land.

Following the presentation, Prof. Welter will be signing his newly released book, Exiled in L.A.: The Untold Story of Leopold Fischer's Domestic Architecture (2025, Getty Publications)

Volker M. Welter is a professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests center on domestic architecture; émigré architects; patronage; histories of Modernism, revival styles, and sustainable architecture. He is the author of, among many books and papers, Tremaine Houses: One Family’s Patronage of Domestic Architecture in Midcentury America (2019, Getty Publications), Walter S. White: Inventions in Mid-century Architecture (2015, Art, Design & Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara) and introduced the architect son of Sigmund Freud into the history of European modernism with Ernst L. Freud, Architect: The Case of the Modern Bourgeois Home (2012, Berghahn Books).

Underwriting for Stories Untold and complimentary admission generously provided by Room & Board roomandboard.com