By Charles Paterson and Carrie Paterson
2013. Hardcover.
2017. First trade paper.
570 pages with 200 illustrations and an index. Ebook also available.
$29.95 (hc) | 9780983254010
$18.95 (pb) | 9780997003468
Cover: Olga Feigl Beck, Stefan Schanzer, Doris Schanzer, and Karl Schanzer, Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, 1938. Photo: Max Beck.
The memoir of architectural designer and Frank Lloyd Wright apprentice Charles Paterson (born Karl Schanzer) is a riveting tale of discovery and coming to terms with a past that casts a long shadow. Paterson was nine years old when the Nazis invaded Vienna in March, 1938. Fleeing Austria for Czechoslovakia just months later, only to witness the invasion of Hitler for a second time in Prague, the author and his sister Doris escaped to Paris to rejoin their refugee father Stefan before being adopted in Australia.
When the surviving Schanzer/Paterson family reunite in America in the late 1940’s, the story takes a different turn. Connecting family history with movements in Central European Modern architecture through Adolf Loos, the author’s uncle, and the American Modernism of Frank Lloyd Wright, Escape Home examines how architecture is a reflection of perseverance and how it can give form to the struggle of the spirit that quests simultaneously for freedom and security.
Escape Home is also the biography of a father written by his son and granddaughter with a background of family history and personal reflection. The Patersons’ loving portrait of Stefan Schanzer, who shepherded his family through tribulations with grace amidst sorrow and loss, is a story to be savored and shared.
Edited by Hensley Peterson, Carrie Paterson, and Paul Andersen.
Interview with Charlie Paterson and Carrie Paterson on Aspen Public Radio.
PRESS & PRAISE
This jewel should not be called a book but a museum.
– Will Semler, Melbourne, Australia
Intimate and scholarly. With footnotes and a lengthy index, [Escape Home] is a labor of love: a dossier of letters, mementos, documents, photographs, recipes and the contemporary reflections of family members. Beginning with ancestors in Hapsburg-era Vienna, the Patersons explore the death of Old Europe and the birth of what we’ve come to regard as American architecture. They also contend with the attempted annihilation of their bloodline and celebrate the courage and perseverance of those who survived. With enough material for at least three books, the authors are determined to fit it all into one. Patient readers will be rewarded.
An encyclopedic and epistolary family history, a eulogy for pre-Reich Vienna and an ode to midcentury modernism.
– Kirkus Reviews
An invaluable addition to the literature on the birth of modern Aspen… In a life filled with more optimism and achievement than bitterness, “Escape Home” is the capping effort at finding meaning in a life that has included hardship, heartache, success and home.
– Stewart Oksenhorn, Aspen Times Weekly
A remarkable multi-faceted story of a [Viennese] family who survives through the Holocaust, exile, war-time prison camp, and all the other vagaries of life…. One of the most amazing stories I ever read about escaping from Nazi-occupied France.
– Jill Meyer, five stars, Amazon Vine Top 500 Reviewer
One of the more uplifting accounts of European émigré life that I have read in a long time. At the same time, it is a deeply nostalgic book about the domestic qualities of architecture … about making for oneself a home, even under the most adverse circumstances. What else is architecture about, if not that? … If you consider architecture primarily as an art form, a monetary investment, or some abstract political act, then you will miss the relevance of this book. If, however, you think and feel architecture is about making a home for man—us, humans—on earth, then you will appreciate these tours de force of father and son…. It will touch you to tears right away, regardless of how many accounts of similar fates you believe to have studied and understood…. What a book!
– Volker M. Welter, author of Ernest L. Freud, Architect and Biopolis: Patrick Geddes and the City of Life
What is the measure of a life well lived? Rare is the person who does not look back on a lifetime with some sense of marvel… Some people live lives so large they seem to pack many existences into their brief time on this planet. Longtime Aspen resident Charles Paterson is one such person.
– Karina Wetherbee, Summit Daily
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Charles Paterson was born Karl Schanzer in Vienna, Austria in 1929 and now lives in Aspen, Colorado. An architectural designer, Paterson was one of the last apprentices to train under Frank Lloyd Wright. His coauthor and daughter Carrie Paterson is an artist, writer, and editor. She lives in Los Angeles.