Magda Cordell McHale

Magda Cordell McHale (née Lustigova; June 24, 1921 – February 21, 2008) was a Hungarian artist, futurist, and educator. She was a founding member of the Independent Group which was a British movement that originated Pop Art which grew out of a fascination with American mass culture and post-WWII technologies. Later, she was a faculty member in the University at Buffalo School of Architecture & Planning.

"I was filled with pain and I hoped for a better world," she recounted later. This expression of hope came to define her working practices for the rest of her life. "Society needs to know where it has been before it can know where it is going," was her oft-cited mantra.

Early life Born Magda Lustigova to a prominent family of grain merchants in Hungary, she fled to Egypt and then Palestine as a refugee during World War II to escape Nazi persecution. Here, she found work as a translator for British intelligence and met her first husband, Frank Cordell, who was also working for British intelligence. According to British architect Peter Smithson, Magda Cordell was "a force who had the capacity to turn her willpower to anything." Encouraged by their dialogue with the American intellectual Buckminster Fuller, the McHales dedicated themselves to sociological research and published extensively on the impact of technology and culture, mass communications and the future. They moved from university to university propounding their ideas, teaching and publishing. During this time Magda published five books (three in collaboration with her husband) on future trends, and sat on numerous editorial boards. and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York.

Academic work and teaching John and Magda moved from the UK to Southern Illinois University where John managed the World Resources Inventory with Buckminster Fuller, then to SUNY Binghamton where John completed his PhD and, with Magda, started the Center for Integrative Studies. Later, they moved to Texas, where the center was operated under the aegis of University of Houston.

After the death of John McHale in 1978, Magda Cordell McHale was invited to Buffalo, New York, where she established and became director of the Centre for Integrative Studies at the State University of New York. The main focus of the centre was global trends, inter-generational shifts in thought and the impact of new technologies on contemporary culture.

Magda Cordell McHale was on faculty in the Design Studies department in the School of Architecture & Planning at the University at Buffalo (also referred to as SUNY Buffalo). The department was dissolved in the late 1980s, at which point, she moved to the Department of Planning (later the Department of Urban and Regional Planning). Her areas of scholarship included future studies; long-range consequences of social, cultural, and technological change on global societies.

In 2000 she endowed the McHale Fellowship at the University of Buffalo School of Architecture & Planning to support design work that speculates on the impact of new technologies. She worked "tirelessly" as vice-president of the World Futures Federation and the World Academy of Art and Science.