The Lost Architecture of Jean Welz
English
By (author): Peter Wyeth
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 Wyeths prose exhilarating as tiny details become breakthroughs of grand proportions. [] For late architect and painter Jean Welz, designs should reflect ones 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
Welzs 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 Welzs classmate from Vienna, later Chicago-based architect Gabriel Guevrekian; Welzs future employer Raymond Fischer, whose archive was mostly destroyed by Nazis; and photographer André Kertész.
Through Welzs South African family archive, author Wyeth retrieves stories, letters, portfolios, and photographs generations after Welzs death that unravel his heroic designs, his stunning built critique of Corbusiers Five Points of Architecture, a gravestone for Marxs 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 brothers Nazi-art-dealings, illness, betrayal, emigration, and an uncompromising artists vision at the same time sifting through significant, literally-concrete evidence of Welzs built projects and visionary designs.
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