Online database launch: The RIBA Refugee Committee

Join us at the Library for the launch of the RIBA Refugee Committee online database.

From 1938 the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) received a fast-growing number of requests for assistance from architects working in Nazi-occupied Central Europe. The Papers of the RIBA Refugee Committee, specially set up by the institute in January 1939, include documents and correspondence related to more than 200 individuals (mostly architects) who became known to the RIBA between 1938 and 1941.

A result of groundbreaking research on the RIBA Refugee Committee Papers, the database will include entries for each one of these individuals, whatever their fate or their stature. Their lives, their work, their often extraordinary stories will be shared and celebrated through this new international research hub.

About the speakers

Oliver Urquhart Irvine is Executive Director of Architecture Programmes and Collections at the Royal Institute of British Architects. He leads RIBA’s exhibitions and public programmes, awards and honours, library and collections, partnerships and fundraising, and is overseeing the long-term transformation of access to RIBA’s collections. Oliver has over 25 years’ experience working across cultural, heritage and higher education organisations, with a particular focus on libraries, archives, collections, education and digital access. Before joining RIBA, he was Director of the SOAS National Research Library and Director of Learning, Research and Enterprise Services at SOAS University of London, where he was also a Trustee and Principal Investigator on major externally funded research and digitisation programmes.

Valeria Carullo is Curator of the Robert Elwall Photographs Collection at the Royal Institute of British Architects. Her principal area of research is the relationship between modern photography and modern architecture in the inter-war years. An architect by background, she lectures and writes on both architectural and photographic subjects. In 2019 she published Moholy-Nagy in Britain 1935-1937 (Lund Humphries). Valeria has curated and co-curated several exhibitions, including her latest Wide Angle View: architecture as social space in the Manplan series 1969-70 (RIBA London, 2023-24, and RIBA Liverpool, 2026). She is the lead researcher of the ongoing RIBA Refugee Committee project and in June 2024 she organised the international conference Displaced Lives: Architects Seeking Refuge on the Brink of WWII.

Dr Irena Žantovská Murray HonFRIBA is an architectural historian and curator. In her work, she has focused primarily on exploring aspects of 20th century architecture, with emphasis on the Modern Movement. Professionally, she devoted most of her career to building, advancing and making accessible art and architectural collections, first at McGill University in Montreal and, from 2004 to 2013, as Sir Banister Fletcher Director, British Architectural Library, at the Royal Institute of British Architects. She is currently a Research Fellow at the Faculty of Architecture, Czech Technical University, in Prague. As an editor, co-editor or translator, she has been responsible for publications such as Moshe Safdie: Buildings and Projects (1996), Karel Teige, Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia (2000), Le Corbusier and Britain (2009) and Guido Beltramini, The Private Palladio (2012). She is the principal external contributor to the RIBA Refugee Committee research project.