The Viennese cafe was a key site of urban modernity around 1900. In the rapidly growing city it functioned simultaneously as home and workplace, affording opportunities for both leisure and intellectual exchange. This volume explores the nature and function of the coffeehouse in the social, cultural, and political world of fin-de-siecle Vienna. Just as the cafe served as a creative meeting place within the city, so this volume initiates conversations between different disciplines focusing on Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century. Contributions are drawn from the fields of social and cultural history, literary studies, Jewish studies and art, and architectural and design history. A fresh perspective is also provided by a selection of comparative articles exploring coffeehouse culture elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

"Designs on Modernity" presents the 1925 Paris Exhibition as a key moment in attempts to update the image of Paris as "capital of the 19th century." At the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes, Paris itself, as much as the commodity, was put on show. Tag Gronberg focuses on the Exhibition as a set of contesting representations of the modern city, stressing the importance of consumption and display for concepts of urban modernity. Here Le Corbusier's now famous Pavillon de L'Esprit Nouveau with its Plan Voisin for the redesign of Paris confronted another equally up-to-date city: Paris as "a woman's city," world centre of fashion and shopping. Taking as her starting point one of the most dramatic 1925 exhibits, the rue des Boutiques which spanned the river Seine, Gronberg analyses the contemporary significance of the small Parisian luxury shop. She shows how boutiques, conceived both as urbanism and as advertising, redefined Paris as the modern city.

The Viennese cafe was a key site of urban modernity around 1900. In the rapidly growing city it functioned simultaneously as home and workplace, affording opportunities for both leisure and intellectual exchange. This volume explores the nature and function of the coffeehouse in the social, cultural, and political world of fin-de-siecle Vienna. Just as the cafe served as a creative meeting place within the city, so this volume initiates conversations between different disciplines focusing on Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century. Contributions are drawn from the fields of social and cultural history, literary studies, Jewish studies and art, and architectural and design history. A fresh perspective is also provided by a selection of comparative articles exploring coffeehouse culture elsewhere in Eastern Europe.