Helena Syrkus is looking at you. The glossy white, painted-steel wall behind Syrkus and her company—Sigfried Giedion on the left, Le Corbusier on the right—render the setting immediately recognizable to scholars of interwar modernism: she is on the SS Patris II, the Mediterranean cruise ship chartered to serve as the mobile site for the fourth meeting of the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne in 1933 (Figure 1).1 Helena and her husband, Szymon Syrkus, were among five architects in the Polish delegation who presented their collaborative planning for Warsaw in light of the congress's Functional City theme. The Syrkuses, who both held prominent positions in CIAM and on its executive committee, CIRPAC, are likely unknown even to those who recognize the Patris II at a glance. Helena Syrkus's steady gaze, and her centrality in the photographic frame, offers a direct challenge to the peripheral position of East Central...

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