Joseph Urban

Urban received his education at the Imperial and Royal Academy of Fine Arts and the Polytechnicum in that city and studied further under Baron Carl Hasenauer. In 1897 he won the Kaiser Prize for his illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe's »The Mask of the Red Death« and later the Austrian State grand medal for other illustrations. In 1901 he came to America to design the Austrian pavilions at the St. Louis Exposition, for which he received the gold medal. Upon his return to Vienna, he turned his attention to architecture and the plastic arts of the theater. He had gained fame by his operatic and stage settings before returning to the United States in 1911 to serve as art director of the Boston Opera House and to make this country his permanent home. Many of the Ziegfeld productions in New York were designed by him. His particular mastery in the use of materials, forms, and colors made him internationally recognized as the greatest scenic designer living. As an architect, he was a daring designer, bound by no tradition and no school. In 1933 he was awarded the annual gold medal of the Architectural League of New York for his stage settings for a religious pageant. Among his most celebrated works abroad were the interior of the municipal building in Vienna, the Czar Bridge across the Neva River in Leningrad, the Palace of the Khedive of Egypt, and the Schloss of Count Carl Esterhazy near Pressburg in Hungary. He designed many buildings in the United States and climaxed his career with the color treatment for the entire Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago. He died without having seen the results of his work.