Time for another book giveaway! We've got two great titles from DoppelHouse Press. The first is the first English edition of Adolf Loos, A Private Portrait by Claire Beck Loos, who was the last wife of Austrian modern architect Adolf Loos. The 140-page biography was originally published in German in 1936 to help pay for Loos' tombstone.

The second title is Escape Home, Rebuilding a Life After the Anschluss, a memoir about Vienna-born architectural designer and Frank Lloyd Wright apprentice Charles Paterson, who was the nephew of Claire Loos. Charles co-wrote the family memoir with his daughter Carrie Paterson.

For a chance to win both titles, fill out this survey by Wednesday, July 2nd. Two winners will be selected at random. Good luck!

Read on for more about each book:

Adolf Loos, A Private Portrait

"Lively and often humorous vignettes provide 'Snapshots' of the last years of Loos’ life (1929-1933), and reveal the personality and philosophy that helped shape Modern architecture in Vienna and the Czech lands. Claire Beck Loos was a photographer and writer, born in 1904 in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia. Her immediate and extended families were Jewish industrialists and early clients of Loos.

An introduction and afterword frame the first English translation of the work. A contribution by Janet Beck Wilson, Claire’s surviving niece, and never-before-seen photographs supplement the text. This unusual, literary biography has also become a self-portrait of a vibrant young woman who died a tragic and untimely death at Riga, a Nazi concentration camp, in 1942."

Escape Home, Rebuilding a Life After the Anschluss

"The memoir of 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 1940s, 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."

For a chance to win both titles, fill out this survey by Wednesday, July 2nd. Two winners will be selected at random. Good luck!