Category: Art of Engineering

PAUL AND LÁSZLÓ MOHOLY-NAGY

László Moholy-Nagy was an important person in my father’s life.  Moholy-Nagy or just Moholy as he often called, was one of the key figures of the Bauhaus Movement and School, founded by German architect Walter Gropius.  The Bauhaus ideal was to foster a culture in which ordinary, everyday utilitarian objects, buidings, furniture, textiles, utensils were designed […]

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BOLIVIA’S FIRST MODERNIST BUILDING

I am in possession of two curious drawings made my by father in late 1939. They are cartoon sketches of Pouqui and Mouqui, the love names my parents gave each other. The drawing shows them settled into their apartment in La Paz, Bolivia. Furniture and personal effects are carefully labeled in French. By naming these […]

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THE STRENGTH BEHIND THE BEAUTY: THE WALKER ART CENTER

What is the relationship between architect and structural engineer?  How do they work together?  Architects conceive the form. Engineers are the mediators between the idea of the form and its physical realization in concrete, glass, steel, brick, stone, and wood. As I traverse the country looking at buildings that my father engineered I keep asking: […]

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TWO CHURCHES BY BREUER

Early in 1961 Paul Weidlinger received an urgent call from the architect Marcel Breuer.  Something had gone horribly wrong during the construction of the Abbey Church that Breuer had designed for the community of Benedictine Monks in Collegeville, Minnesota. Breuer, like my father, was Hungarian.   Both were influenced by the Bauhaus Movement and they knew […]

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THE HANDMADE CATHEDRAL

    “There is an old story of how the cathedral of Chartres was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. Then thousands of people came from all points of the compass, like a giant procession of ants, and together they began to rebuild the cathedral on its old site. They worked until the […]

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CHICAGO’S PICASSO

On August 15, 1967 – thousands attended the unveiling of Chicago’s most monumental work of public art. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra was on hand to perform George Gershwin’s symphonic poem, “An American in Paris.” On the sidelines pickets denounced the event on the grounds of incomprehensibility. Chicago Mayor Daley pulled on a white ribbon and […]

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