The Lost Architecture of Jean Welz

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.

List of contents

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

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.

Summary

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.

Foreword

• Endorsements by leading architectural scholars
  

• International Print and Broadcast Campaign
  

• Social Media Campaign
  

• Targeted outreach to art and architecture bookstores and libraries
  

• Unique cover and book design appeals to art magazines and bookstores
  

• Promotion through the Society of Architectural Historians/Southern California Chapter
  

• DRCs available through Edelweiss
  

• ARCs available upon request
  

Additional text

Praise

Thanks to a dense corpus of unpublished materials, Peter Wyeth has masterfully charted architect Jean Welz’s work and trajectory from Vienna to Paris and South Africa, as well as his contacts with remarkable clients, colleagues, artists and photographers. He has at last paid homage to his striking designs, such as the Zilveli villa built in Paris in 1933, which deserves to be inscribed in the narrative of European Modernism.  

—Jean-Louis Cohen, Sheldon H. Solow Professor in the History of Architecture, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

 

Thanks to the investigation of Peter Wyeth and his book, the lost architecture of Jean Welz is finally discovered. Jean Welz and his architecture does exist! Let's hope his architecture survives and defies ignorance. 

—Richard Klein, architect, professor, chair of docomomo France

 

Jean Welz was a true artist, who created some of the most valuable buildings of modern architecture and absorbed the most important influences from Loos and Le Corbusier . As a filmmaker, Peter Wyeth has written a sharp analysis and refreshing monograph of this nearly forgotten, highly gifted personality of interwar Paris' artistic immigrant scene. The story is fluid and easy to read, resulting in a vivid picture.

—Burkhardt Rukschcio, author of Adolf Loos: Leben und Werk

History has generally been unkind to architects who failed to hit the headlines with publications and an effective publicity machine. Peter Wyeth is to be commended not only for rediscovering Jean Welz and his work but also for reconstructing the network of interactions, innovations and transmission of ideas that constitute the real history of architecture. Our understanding of modern architecture in Paris and South Africa has been enriched.
—Tim Benton, author of The Villas of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret 1920–1930

Peter Wyeth's vivid and remarkable excavation of the life and work of the Viennese-born architect Jean Welz is a splendid contribution to the history of modernism. Welz, who had been all but forgotten till now, was closely connected with two of the titans of the age, Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos, but, even more, he was an excellent architect whose work was sensitive, beautiful, and inventive. Wyeth tells his story well, bringing known aspects of the tale of modern architecture into sharper focus, while adding much that is new.
— Christopher Long, author of The New Space: Movement and Experience in Viennese Modern Architecture

Praise for Welz's Maison Zilveli

One of the last testimonies of modernism in intramural Paris is the the Maison Zilveli by the Viennese architect Jean Welz, near Adolf Loos and the Roche du Corbusier house. […] British filmmaker Peter Wyeth, very involved in the preservation of the house, explains that “it is very rare to have a modernist house that has remained unchanged: it is a real case study.”

—Le Journal des Arts

The future of this avant-garde masterpiece of the architect Jean Welz remains in the balance.

—Iconic Houses

Product details

• Authors: Peter Wyeth
• Publisher: Ingram Publishers Services
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Release: 28.06.2022, delayed
• EAN: 9781954600003
• ISBN: 978-1-954600-00-3
• No. of pages: 346
• Illustrations: Farb., s/w. Fotos, Abb.
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > Architecture; Non-fiction book > Politics, society, business > Biographies, autobiographies; ARCHITECTURE / Criticism, HISTORY / Europe / Austria & Hungary