In the period between the world wars the architectural avant-garde was firmly central and eastern European.

It is hard to imagine now but the combination of revolution in Russia, of emerging states attempting to forge their identities through architecture and of an intellectual diaspora that forced many of the finest architects away from their roots to Germany, Britain and the US – notably Hungarians Marcel Breuer and Ernö Goldfinger and Russian Berthold Lubetkin – led to an explosion of radical design. From Adolf Loos to Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, all the greats of modernism were at work in central Europe and Russia.