The Lost Architecture of Jean Welz - Softcover

Wyeth, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1954600003 ISBN 13: 9781954600003

Publisher: DoppelHouse Press, 2022

Synopsis

A deserted Paris house holds the mystery of a brilliant Viennese modernist who worked alongside Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos before vanishing.

Wyeth takes readers on a deeply personal and revelatory journey. This research process, which readers experience vicariously, makes Wyeth’s prose exhilarating as tiny details become breakthroughs of grand proportions. […] For late architect and painter Jean Welz, designs should reflect one’s aesthetic and political commitments. This narrative will resonate with anyone interested in the politics of architecture, or the pursuit of knowledge at large.
—Hyperallergic "BEST ART BOOKS OF 2022"

Welz’s having been “lost” is indeed a travesty of architectural history to which the book serves as a welcome antidote.
—Artforum

A leading painter still highly regarded in South Africa, Jean Welz's prior architectural career has been virtually unknown until a string of discoveries unfolded for author and filmmaker Peter Wyeth, allowing him to narrate this amazing true tale of genius. Trained in ultra-sophisticated, but conservative Vienna, Welz was sent to Paris for the 1925 Art Deco exhibition by his influential employer, renowned architect Josef Hoffmann. There he met preeminent modern architects Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos. The latter employed him to assist in building a house for the founder of Dada, Tristan Tzara. They all mixed in avant-garde circles at the Dôme Café in Montparnasse along with Welz’s classmate from Vienna, later Chicago-based architect Gabriel Guevrekian; Welz’s future employer Raymond Fischer, whose archive was mostly destroyed by Nazis; and photographer André Kertész.

Through Welz’s South African family archive, author Wyeth retrieves stories, letters, portfolios, and photographs generations after Welz’s death that unravel his heroic designs, his stunning built critique of Corbusier’s “Five Points of Architecture,” a gravestone for Marx’s daughter, and the many ways that Welz disappeared amongst his collaborators, intentionally and not. This account of why Jean Welz did not become a famous name in architecture takes us through his brother’s Nazi-art-dealings, illness, betrayal, emigration, and an uncompromising artist’s vision at the same time sifting through significant, literally-concrete evidence of Welz’s built projects and visionary designs.

About this title

About the Author

Peter Wyeth has been making films since the 1970s, including several with the Arts Council of Great Britain, one of which about a modernist block of flats in London, inspired by Hokusai (“12 Views of Kensal House”) was runner-up for best documentary. He started a forgotten film-mag North by North West, and in 1994 directed “The Diary of Arthur Crew Inman,” based on the 17-million-word and longest diary in America and named a London Times “Film of the Week.” From 1999–2003, Wyeth was head of the film school at University of the Arts London, where he taught for ten years and set up the student-run channel Xplore.tv. His short film “Pane” won a Turner Classic Movies award in 2003. His book The Matter of Vision: Effective Neurobiology and Cinema was published by Indiana University Press in 2015 (in the UK by John Libbey Media) and over the past twelve years he has written dozens of articles on architecture and design for The Modernist. He continues to direct, including for television. He lives between Paris and London.

Excerpt. Š Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

It is practically unheard of these days to discover a genuinely unknown talent of the highest level in any art. With architecture, the objects loom so large and visible, so present in the world, that the idea of an unknown world-class architect is even less likely.

I came across the Maison Zilveli almost a decade ago. While it was a very unusual design, even among modern architecture, I was not sure what to make of it. Its parlous state, unmaintained and derelict, held up by a forest of sturdy but anachronistic wooden beams, with the street front leaning at a worrying angle, were all at the opposite extreme from the crisp lines of modernist architecture at its best.

My initial thought was that it could be a worthy attempt by an amateur fan of modernism that aped Le Corbusier but didn’t quite get it. However, it was sufficiently puzzling to encourage me to try to find out who built it. Nine years have slipped by since then, a rare case that kept getting more interesting rather than the initial enthusiasm running out of steam, and finally I present here what I discovered about the architect, Jean Welz.

It turns out to be an extraordinary story. Welz was born in Salzburg, literally around the corner from Mozart’s house. He began a course in architecture in Vienna under Josef Hoffmann, a month before the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the end of the thousand-year Habsburg regime. He went on to work for Hoffmann until he was sent to the Art Deco exhibition in Paris in the summer of 1925. His trip was for two months, but he decided to stay on, leaving behind a wife he had married on the rebound and a prestigious job, despite having neither work nor the ability to register as an architect in France. 

At the exhibition, Welz not only sees the most avant-garde architecture but meets some of the key figures, including Robert Mallet-Stevens and Albert Jeanneret, the business-partner and cousin of the single figure that hugely dominates modernism: Le Corbusier. Around the turn of the year, Welz is recommended to the leading Viennese modernist architect, Adolf Loos. He had heard much from his tutors about Loos, with whom they would have preferred to work, but contemporary architecture in Vienna was dominated by the extremely successful Hoffmann, whose practice was by far the main source of work for any modern-minded architect. 

The younger generation, however, regarded Hoffmann as belonging to a past of artistic craftsmanship for the rich, whereas Adolf Loos was the man of the future. Welz leant towards the ideas of Loos, but Loos had little work to offer young architects. It was only in Paris that the young Viennese transplant finally met and worked with Loos, a most welcome piece of good fortune. 

Loos also introduced him to a Parisian architect passionate about modernism and Loos’s work, Raymond Fischer, who gave Welz the opportunity of which a young architect could only dream. Fischer had managed to obtain a commission for a modernist house, the last in a small but extremely distinguished row of three. The first, built in 1925–26, was by Mallet-Stevens; the second, the Maison Cook, built in 1926, was by Le Corbusier, and the house in which Corbusier set out his “Five Points of Modern Architecture” that would become the Commandments of young architects for generations to come. The third was to be Jean’s first modern design.

Fischer also gave Welz the chance to concentrate all his energies solely on design. Fischer found the commissions, Welz focused on the architecture. The downsides were that he was neither paid a great deal, nor did the designs bear his name. Although that kept him in the shade, he was freed of the distractions involved in having your name over the door.

The exciting part of the story is what Welz made of that opportunity. Put simply, from the first house, starting in late 1927, to his final one in Paris, the Maison Zilveli, built in 1933 (an independent commission), my belief is that Jean Welz set out, with a rigor unparalleled in modern architecture, to contradict Le Corbusier’s Five Points with a Loosian philosophy, not just taking those ideas as inspiration, but developing them in his own highly distinctive way. 

Edition details

• Publisher: DoppelHouse Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1954600003
• ISBN 13: 9781954600003
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 346