The Lost Architecture of Jean Welz

INVISIBLE

PART I

JEAN WELZ DOES NOT EXIST

LE CHÂTEAU MOCHE

— PARIS, CHRISTMAS DAY 2012

THE TRADOUW PASS

— 1940

1

JEAN 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.

Maison Zilveli long facade, 2013. Photo: Jean-Louis Avril.

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.

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 saying she had come across a letter with what appeared to be the word Welz in it.² The letter was in German, in a sprawling hand that suggested it was written in a rush. It was found in an obscure part of the Sorbonne university library hidden behind the Pantheon, in a collection donated via the leading couturier of the 1920s, the very wealthy Paul Poiret. It was addressed to one of the founders of the Dada art movement, a relation of surrealism and similarly prompted by the madness of the Great War, Tristan Tzara, who, at the time, was having Adolf Loos build his house. Tzara had married well and was spending his wife’s money on a striking, almost Romanesque, castle-like structure below Sacre Coeur on the hill of Montmartre.

The date was April 1926, and the content was banal, the writer apologizing that he wouldn’t be able to find more builders until next week as he had only got the letter from Welz that night. That scrap connected Welz to the Tzara house, to Adolf Loos — note it was not to Loos that it was written, but the client, as Loos was perhaps too grand (or too absent) to deal with such matters.

The name of the author of the letter, Gabriel Guevrekian, came up again a couple of years later when I was leafing through the class records of Welz’s Vienna university course. There was quite a group of famous names in his year, including the first Austrian woman architect, known for designing the Frankfurt kitchen, Margaret Schütte-Lihotzky; Ernst Plischke; Josef Hoffmann’s son, Wolfgang; and Welz’s great rival on the course, Oswald Haerdtl, who shared a motorbike with Hoffmann junior. Gabriel Guevrekian, the connection from 1920 in Vienna to that one-word mention of Welz in 1926 in Paris, was among the final-year students — so it emerged how it was and in what context that he knew Jean Welz.

Back to Welz’s friend, Jean Ginsberg, architect of the 25 Ave de Versailles flats in the photograph where Welz is pictured in the long coat, we find another connection. Ginsberg’s father, the wealthy industrialist, had commissioned the block of flats from his son, a helpful way for a modern architect to get a start. Jean Ginsberg’s uncle, whose name was Landau, was even bigger in the chemical industry, in Germany, and helped to found in Paris the international science congress center, the Maison de la Chimie.

As I ascertained from a portfolio of Welz’s work, encountered later in South Africa, in the same year that 25 Ave de Versailles was finished and photographed, Welz got his first independent commission, a small house just outside Paris on a very modest budget, but with an interesting internal layout. The client’s name was Landau; I know nothing about this Landau, whether it was the same man who was the client, or a son or daughter.

Course record from 1919 with Professor Strnad. Courtesy of the Technical University of Vienna.

My resulting inquiry into more of Welz’s work was complicated by the absence of the usual corroborative evidence and meant that I was forced to really look at everything visual I could find of the designs, the buildings, the photographs. They were, after all, primary evidence, but often that gets lost in the words, the documentation, the letters, the articles and books, the memories of associates, which duty-bound are studied as scholarship. None of those were available in this case. The architecture is the real resource, and here, thankfully in some ways, there was little option but to investigate it as closely as possible. It sounds obvious but, like crowds at an exhibition, most people stand reading text on a wall rather than looking at the pictures. Pictures are both easier and more difficult to look at than buildings. How many people stand before a painting and feel they don’t really know what they are looking for? With plans, photographs and drawings we don’t even have a painting before our eyes, but only various ways of representing space.

Reading plans is difficult and mostly a bore. Translating plans into the reality of a building is a transformation most of us find hard if not impossible.

The fascination for me lay in the story behind the plans, one that only gradually emerged through forming some kind of understanding of Welz’s ideas. I was forced, in a way, towards unearthing the conflicts between ideas, cultures, cities, and the famous architects who wielded their names in their various causes. The information opened up like secret messages for which I was only gradually able to work out the code, and in so doing offering up clues as to what Welz was for and what he was against. They were not just plans now, but vital arguments in graphic form that were the pen and ink battleground of twentieth-century architecture.

Among the obstacles to this challenging but exciting quest was the fact that most of the designs Welz worked on were credited to his boss, Raymond Fischer. That is not so unusual, the name over the door often takes the credit, but at a distance of ninety years, with all the principle players dead, it made poring over the evidence in order to work out who did what more complicated. Welz also worked on the black in Paris — not registered as an architect — which meant that even the abandoned Zilveli house that set me off was listed in the Town Hall as by his boss. There was nothing underhand in that, quite the opposite, in that his boss Fischer was probably kindly lending his name as a registered architect in order to get official building permission for the house, from which he did not profit, as it was an independent commission for Welz. However, as I found out that Welz had only two commissions actually in his own name, I had to question first: To what degree was Welz responsible for the designs he produced for Fischer?

Again, the absence of corroboration meant that I had to try to deduce from the sparse clues potentially available in plans and photographs, and a few words from interviews with Fischer, what was the truth. Much of the evidence was circumstantial and interpretation inevitably involved a degree of speculation. That sounds too risky, in terms of writing an architectural history, but as I learned more about Welz’s background in Vienna and pieced together the elements of his time in Paris, the circumstantial became rather well-supported by context, and the process felt more like justifiable extrapolation than unfounded speculation.

It was only in the last stages of research that I finally saw a clear pattern emerge, although most of the elements of that pattern had been present from early on. Sometimes, one needs a step back to see what in retrospect should have been clear, and in this case I was allowed that permission by the very factor of time.

Upon first seeing the 1931 Maison Landau image, I had the sense that Welz had set himself against the dominant architect in Paris, Le Corbusier (see Chapter 17, Maison Landau); I speculated that he had done this through other architectural work and his unbuilt designs (and not at all in words) — an absolutely unique effort which could only have come from a quite extraordinary determination and confidence. I began to see that Welz’s designs were his personal response to Le Corbusier — a kind of silent dialogue that pitched a contrasting and conflicting set of ideas against a huge dominance, one that few, if any young architects would dare to stand against. And it seemed to me that Jean Welz had done so profoundly.

Jean Welz, Maison Landau (1931). Courtesy Welz family.

In the period Welz was active in Paris, there were loud voices raised against Le Corbusier, but mainly from the conservative Beaux Arts tradition. A famous debate in 1931 had ended in uproar, with hundreds of his opponents, who had not been able to get into the hall, shouting and demonstrating in the street outside. At the same time, there were arguably no effective critiques of Le Corbusier from any side — modern or traditional. His achievement was dazzling — he’s still widely regarded as the greatest architect of the twentieth century — and although he was terribly depressed by those who sought to constantly tear him down, one may fairly say that intellectually and aesthetically he had no real challengers.

But I discovered that the unknown Jean Welz constituted that challenger, although invisible, confined to the backroom, and with many of his achievements quietly credited to his employer.

There were two elements to this opposition he mounted anonymously. The first was true to his background and training in Vienna, but seemed to me very likely indeed to have been considerably influenced and strengthened by his personal contact with perhaps the one figure who could provide the intellectual backing for an alternative and conflicting approach, namely Adolf Loos. Welz claimed a close friendship with Loos, an association that began early in 1926 and went on until at least September 1931. Loos, according to Jean, often stayed with the Welz family in their tiny basement flat when he visited Paris, after Loos had returned to live in Vienna in 1928.

From Welz’s first major design, upon which he began work in December 1927, until his last built design in France, of 1933, I gradually developed the strong feeling that there was a consistent and highly sophisticated opposition to the ideas of Le Corbusier’s manifesto, the Five Points of Modern Architecture. He effectively contradicted those five commandments in the way of building a modernist building; for example, retaining solid load-bearing walls instead of creating the curtain wall of the Corbusian manifesto. None of this was, as far as I know, written down anywhere by Welz, but his methods strongly reflected the deeper ideas of Adolf Loos and Second Wave Viennese Modernism. Loos had developed a philosophy that was arguably at least equal to that of the Parisian avant-garde, and in fact could be seen as more solidly founded. Loos’s close circle included Wittgenstein, regarded as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century; Schoenberg, of twelve-tone music fame; Oskar Kokoschka, painter and expressionist playwright; and writer Karl Kraus, the least known in the English-speaking world, but by some way the most famous in the Vienna of the time, which all together suggest Loos’s intellectual standard and standing.

The second, and for this tale, more important element of what I will call Welz’s critique, was that Welz showed himself, through the close visual examination of his designs which I was to eventually undertake, to be a particularly strong creative force in his own right. In other words, he was not only working with several sets of ideas, but bringing something personal to them that put him on a level approaching that of his strongest two examples or ‘mentors’, Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos, each recognized as the most important architect of the twentieth century within their own cultural spheres.

That a complete unknown should even be approaching their status would be a remarkable find, in fact, almost incredible. Be that as it may, I have come around to the view that with Welz’s last two houses, of 1932 and 1933, he achieved two masterpieces — and of quite different character. While the latter house goes out, almost literally, on a limb that puts Welz arguably beyond the most avant-garde architects anywhere at the time, on the other hand I regard the former as perhaps his greatest design, and the best modern house that I know. In that house, Welz has gone past, as it were, both Le Corbusier and Loos, ironically by returning to an even bigger name in the history of architecture — Andrea Palladio. Le Corbusier told a foreign modernist that his houses of the 1920s were an attempt to recreate the spirit of Palladio, and Welz’s take is both a contrast and a way forward for modern architecture when the heroic era of the 1920s had to some extent run out of steam. But it is much more than that, in being an exquisite design that both respects Palladio whilst transforming him for the modern age with a creative power and strong judgment.

Even that anecdote has a final kick in the tail, in that the foreign modernist talking to Le Corbusier about Palladio was a South African who later worked alongside Welz at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Rex Martienssen. In 1938, he was designing a modern house that, in a number of important particulars, bears a strong resemblance to Welz’s 1933 masterpiece. Martienssen wrote an article on his sources for that house that numbered over two dozen pages, but without acknowledgment of his colleague Jean Welz. In more than one sense, and on more than one continent, the architecture of Jean Welz has (been) disappeared.

Soon after his move to South Africa, Jean Welz was forced to give up his profession, his passion, his life so far, due to tuberculosis, and was left with just his drawing skills and his intellect to eke out a living for his wife and children. Somehow he survived and prospered when the odds were on his death as the outcome. When he actually died, more than thirty years later, he had five boys and an outstanding reputation as a painter. But Jean Welz’s achievement as an architect was no mere aside.

NOTES

1As attractive as a gorgon’s head is how many view modern architecture — Summerson’s memorable phrase from The Classical Language of Architecture, London: Thames & Hudson, 1980, p. 10.

2Cecile Poulot, researching Adolf Loos in Paris.

2

LE CHÂTEAU MOCHE

— PARIS, CHRISTMAS DAY, 2012

I COULD HARDLY HAVE BEEN MORE WRONG — I like to think I have an eye for design, but my Christmas postprandial saw me walk past the sorely-declined modernist concoction with two reactions.

The first was the patronizing sense that whoever had designed this house was only semi-skilled. I thought the person to be untutored, a bit ham-fisted and clumsy. It could be a worthy attempt by an amateur fan of modernism that aped Le Corbusier but didn’t quite get it. The windows on the street facade looked as though holes had been cut in the blank wall and crude metal frames inserted, without any practical concern for dispersing rainwater from above or providing a ledge below. Holes in the wall. Below, a squarish pillar was at angle and cracked, suggesting a serious lean to the side away from its neighbors.

The side elevation was even worse; the pillars showed rust marks from the reinforcement-bars which had suffered from water-penetration into the concrete, which in turn had expanded and burst the concrete, leading to the pillars failing. There were messy washes of faded paint all over the walls and most of all a stunning balcony was gone, leaving an incongruous hole in the wall ten meters in the air with what was left of the door poorly wedged into the opening.

That whole side was visible from the street, as it was next to a small community park that always seemed to be closed, accessible only to residents and tumbling down the hillside, with a few vines and distant views across Paris. The far end of the house hovered precariously over the steep hill, in mid-air, pointing in the same direction towards Sacre Coeur cathedral above Montmartre.

A long period of neglect was obvious, and the temporary inserted wooden framework under the raised floor made it look as though the whole thing would collapse, were it taken away.

It was a bit Miss Havisham, the wooden forest below the raised floor, the broken door in the aerial wall,