(1872-1933)
Viennese born Urban was an architect, interior designer, and illustrator and one of many progressive European designers and architects who emigrated to the USA in the early decades of the 20th century. From 1906 to , whilst in Vienna, he was president of the Hagenbund (Artists' Association) from 1906 to and designed a number of buildings and interiors, including (with H. Lefler) the restaurant in the Vienna Town Hall (Rathauskeller). From 1911 he worked in the USA, where he was involved in the design of theatre interiors, film decor, set, and costumes. From 1922 he was the director of the New York branch of the Wiener Werkstätte. His work was seen in a number of exhibitions, such as the 1923 New York Art-in-Trades Club show at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel where his Viennese Werkstätte-influenced dining room stood out amongst the many other rooms that were executed in a variety of historicist styles. As a leading progressive designer Urban was later invited to contribute one of the room settings in the 1927 Contemporary American Design: The Architect and the Industrial Arts exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This show was one of a number put on by the Metropolitan to promote new directions in the decorative arts and design in the wake of the 1925 Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels and attracted many visitors over the nine months that it was open. Urban's work was widely illustrated in contemporary design magazines and he also played a prominent role at the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition of 1933 where he was coordinator of the colour schemes for the exhibition buildings. This gave rise to the popular description of the exhibition site as ‘Rainbow City’, a marked contrast to the ‘White City’ label of its predecessor the Chicago World's Columbian Exhibition of 1893.
