The lost architecture of Jean Welz / Peter Wyeth.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Wyeth, Peter, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Modern movement (Architecture).

Architects--South Africa--Biography.

Architects.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (395 pages)

Place of Publication:

[Place of publication not identified] : DoppelHouse Press, [2022]

Summary:

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 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.

Contents:

Intro

Title Page

Contents

Copyright

The Mystery of Jean Welz

Part I: Invisible

Jean Welz Does Not Exist

Le Château Moche: - Paris, Christmas Day 2012

The Tradouw Pass: - 1940

Part II: Vienna

Finis Austriae: - Vienna, October 1918

Josef Hoffmann and the First Wave

Adolf Loos and the second wave

Hans Welz: Architect

Part III: Paris

Art Deco: - Paris, 1925

The Guevrekian Letter

The Third Man: Mallet-Stevens / Le Corbusier / Jean Welz

Raymond Fischer

Le Chemin Aérien: (The Aerial Way)

"Un Nègre Viennois"

Part IV: Oeuvre

The Portfolio

House For an Artist

Inondation: - Montauban, 1931

Maison Landau: A Minimum House

Villa Darmstadter: - 1932

Oswald Haerdtl: - 1932

Maison Zilveli: - 1933

Mont D'or and Pavillon D'autriche: The Unbuilt

Part V: Tales

A Tale of Two Balconies

A Tale of Two Brothers: The Dealer and the Artist

Corbusier's Note

The Martienssen Affair

A Tale of Three Monuments

Part VI: Jean

House on the Lake

The Dialogues of Jean Welz

Pains and Pleasures of Anonymity

A Solitary Adventure: The Character of Jean Welz

Christensen Gallery: Inger Welz

Zilveli Destroyed

Appendices

After Architecture: South Africa Addendum

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Plates

Back Cover.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781954600096

1954600097

OCLC:

1319223696