The Lost Architecture of Jean Welz
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The Lost Architecture of Jean Welz

Peter Wyeth

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eBook - ePub

The Lost Architecture of Jean Welz

Peter Wyeth

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About This Book

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

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 DÎme 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.

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Information

Publisher
DoppelHouse Press
Year
2022
ISBN
9781954600096
Topic
Philosophie
Subtopic
Histoire de l'architecture

INVISIBLEPART I

  1. JEAN WELZ DOES NOT EXIST
  2. LE CHÂTEAU MOCHE
  3. — PARIS, CHRISTMAS DAY 2012
  4. THE TRADOUW PASS
  5. — 1940
Images
Maison Zilveli street facade, 2013. Photo: Jean-Louis Avril.

1JEAN WELZ DOES NOT EXIST

THE TALE BEGINS ON THE AFTERNOON of Christmas Day 2012, walking by an extraordinary avant-garde house abandoned on a Paris hillside. There was something about the occasion, perhaps Christmas cheer, that prompted me to try to find out who was behind the design. It was quite a casual commitment at the time, but would soon become anything but.
It is the dream of the curious to come upon an enigma that never runs out of steam. It rarely happens, more likely it never happens. But the most extraordinary fact about this case, by contrast, was that it never seemed exhausted, and it would renew itself just when I thought it might have finally died down. As I was finalizing the bibliography, almost two years after I felt I had finally finished this book, a key discovery came to light on the structure of Welz’s Maison Zilveli, providing for the heart of the final chapter. Then just before publication, a shocking betrayal by the France he loved — the threat to raze that house by the new owner, claiming admiration only in order to destroy the last Welz masterpiece, and with full bureaucratic approval.
In the normal course of research, one would be poring over dozens of books, magazines, newspapers, photographs, biographies, letters — the usual panoply of source materials. In this case, a significant development in my investigation had been the discovery of a letter with the single handwritten word “Welz,” not even by the man himself, but merely referring to him in a businesslike way. The idea of writing a full-length book on such a shadow seemed absurdly optimistic.
Welz was not just “unknown” as an architect but in effect, invisible. There was that single word, just the name, and there were a few other small clues, but that “existence,” the handful of traces, were so scarce that he seemed hardly to exist, except in rare interstices of other lives.
The contrast with the ineluctable presence of buildings, houses, architecture with which he had been involved in one capacity or another, the undeniable material facts — not just a garden wall or lesser remains that could be a feast to an archaeologist, but whole houses, reinforced concrete and glass, walls and flat roofs, massive in a modest way — belied the paucity of his appearances in the historical record.
How could there be a list of buildings, that eventually numbered in the twenties, actual buildings, on the ground, before your eyes, not destroyed or erased, and hardly a word about the Welz that was involved? The massive facts versus the invisible trail was a quandary at the heart of the pursuit.
That very fact of architecture, the physical scale of a building, even of a single house, is such a large presence that it seems impossible that it can exist without a trail of papers, stories, photographs, that document who brought it into existence.
On the other hand, we are used to hearing of whole cities that have disappeared under shifting sands for millennia, so we should not be too surprised by, in this case, a ruined modernist house listed under the wrong architect.
That Christmas afternoon when I found the Maison Zilveli was, unbeknownst to me at the time, the start of what would turn out to be a very long haul.
It was a striking building but in a ruinous state, apparently on the edge of collapse. Pure lines do not age well when not looked after. Zilveli appeared to have had little attention since it was built, which I discovered was in 1933, and however daring its design had originally been, today it looked decidedly disreputable, a slum in an otherwise lovingly-maintained quarter.
The difference between 2013 and 1933 was, indeed, extraordinary. How wrong my first impression had been. It might have been a low-cost project, but it was daring and, in those pure lines, to my eyes, beautiful.1 Even at this quick glance there was rather more to it than I had first thought. Little did I know the scale of just how much more.
The process of finding information about the house and the architect was challenging, but I soon realized that what had puzzled me initially about the design came from Vienna rather than Paris. It took me years to understand how that combination of influences had helped to produce Jean Welz’s architecture. It was as complicated a matter as the two cities involved might suggest, but that in itself was far less interesting than eventually realizing that Welz had made a contribution of the highest quality to modern architecture, one that ought to have raised him from almost complete anonymity to an honored position. The reasons why he has remained unknown are not too mysterious but are a salutary reminder that greatness is not always, as we would like to think, bound to be discovered.
Images
Above: Maison Zilveli long facade, 2013. Photo: Jean-Louis Avril.
Below: Maison Zilveli, 1933. Women in the window not identified. The woman on the left could be Mrs. Elizabeth Kertész. The photographer is possibly André Kertész. Courtesy Welz family.
The scarcity of evidence made research a slow process, and the discovery of even a single word — or photograph — became an exciting event.
A tall figure in an innocuous winter coat, stands on a sundeck above a block of flats. It was the innocuousness that caught my eye. That man looks too tall. What is he doing there? The image is slightly surreal, the poor chap is cold when he should be hot.
There must be a purpose to the photo, perhaps at a distance they thought it would look better, more nautical with a tall chap. Perhaps he was deliberately chosen, cast almost, or maybe he just happened to be around — let’s put him there, it will look better with a person in the picture, even if he is perhaps a bit too tall. Or maybe they thought tall was good, it would emphasize the heights they had carefully designed.
Images
Ginsberg & Lubetkin, 25 Ave de Versailles, Paris (1931). Courtesy RIBA Collections.
I was looking for material about someone Jean Welz worked with, another young architect at the time, Jean Ginsberg. There was even something odd about their names, something quite significant. The Jean part was very French, but the surnames were not. Welz sounds Germanic, while Ginsberg’s father was Polish and his uncle was German. So both these architects had adopted France, as it were, with their first names. In fact, Ginsberg was born in France, but Welz was not. Even in cosmopolitan Paris it was often cultured Jews or arty foreigners who were the ones to commission modern architecture, rather than the French — who often preferred Louis XVI style to that modern stuff, called by some French architects “Boche-style.” A Boche was a German, uncouth, a soldier, and any German was still not good a decade after the Great War.
The name change, in Welz’s case, was symbolic of a commitment to his new home, and perhaps also a rejection of the militaristic aspect of the Austria he had left behind, another echo of the 1914–18 war. Welz changed his name to Jean shortly after he decided to stay in Paris in 1925, the year of the Art Deco exhibition where he was sent by his employer, the famous Austrian architect Josef Hoffmann. Hang on, you might be thinking. If this unknown chap worked for the famous Hoffmann and was sent by him to Paris, there is no way he was unknown. I did find a clue to Welz’s time chez Hoffmann, I have to admit. In Vienna’s Architekturzentrum archive there is a surprisingly slim record-book of the practice from 1920–1930, a workbook with every day recorded and who did what on that day, each one signed at the end of the line. Welz signed 191 times between July 1921 and June 1925 (I counted). Each task performed was hand-written, line by line. All in German, of course, and in the later days often illegible. In particular, Welz’s signature at the end of each day’s record was hardly recognizable. Of course, he wasn’t Jean Welz then, but “Hans,” so each signature had a rough approximation of “HW” in an increasingly casual scrawl. It was almost as though, by the summer of 1925, he had had enough and each mark was a record of his alienation.
In Paris, Welz discovered, as he put it, that he had a “French soul,” and the name change was also partly a result of that, a vote for the freedom he declared that he had loved since he was a boy, which had been frustrated by his homeland.
The two Jeans — Welz and Ginsberg — had worked together, at one time or another, for a well-connected Parisian modern architect, Raymond Fischer, not himself a famous name, but someone who seemed to know everyone, and who mixed with the artists of Montmartre and was passionate about modernism. They were the backroom boys, the design office, and when Fischer had no work, they would go elsewhere, including to Ginsberg, who had started up on his own with the Russian emigre, Berthold Lubetkin — Lubetkin later became famous in England for his design of the penguin pool at the London zoo, with curved concrete ramps in mid-air for the penguins to carefully shuffle up and down.
Ginsberg and Lubetkin’s first building together was this block of flats pictured at 25 Avenue de Versailles, commissioned by Ginsberg’s father, a chemicals-industrialist. It was completed in 1931, which is when the photos were taken. After coming across this one during an internet search for Ginsberg, I immediately sent the photo five thousand miles away with the big question and barely moments later the answer came back, yes, it was the six-foot-five Jean; she — a daughter-in-law of Welz — was certain. The photo, meanwhile, had no mention of who was in the picture, what the building was, when or where, just the tall man in an overcoat who had caught my eye.
That moment was itself symbolic. There is no record of “Jean Welz” in the archives in Vienna or in Paris. It is too easy to claim the subject of a book is ‘unknown’. It makes for good copy, recommends the book as some kind of detective story: but Welz is genuinely unknown, even to the most knowledgeable scholars and architects.
As mentioned, the biggest breakthrough on my quest was when a generous researcher sent a note...

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