Ella Briggs. Siegfried Latte. Franz Hillinger. You've probably never heard of these architects, nor of the nearly 500 other Jewish architects and interior designers who lived and worked throughout Germany before 1933. That's because a series of laws banned them from Germany's state-governed fine art association, to which practicing architects were required to belong. After 20 years of research into the lives and fates of these architects who were forced to leave Germany, Haifa-born architect Myra Warhaftig (who passed away earlier this month at age 78) published a book about them. Now Pentagram is helping to bring their work to the attention of those of us who don't speak German with the publication of Pentagram Papers 37: Forgotten Architects, designed by Justus Oehler and Christiane Weismuller.

Forgotten Architects surveys the work of 43 architects of prewar Germany, providing terse biographical sketches and images of their work (pictured above is Moritz Hadda's 1929 Showcase House, which he designed in Breslau before his 1941 deportation to an unknown location). How does their work look today? David Sokol discusses:

German Jewish architects working before 1933 had not only followed modernist principles, but had experimented with and poked fun at them. Several of their works seem remarkably relevant today. Erwin Anton Gutkind's spiderlike block of Berlin flats (1925-1926) seems like an ancestor of the dynamic, biomorphic forms of Zaha Hadid. Wilhelm Haller's design for the Jewish Cemetery in Halle/Saale (1929) features a billboard-scale diamond pattern that hints at the postmodernism of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.