MODERNISM, MADNESS AND THE AMERICAN DREAM
In 1934 a nineteen-year-old adventurer, Patrick Leigh Fermor, crossed Europe from the hook of Holland to Constantinople. He travelled mostly on foot. He was the same age as my father. A passage from his beautiful travel memoir, written years later, inspired this blog post. Fermor wrote, in Between The Woods and The […]
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 […]
There is one machine that my father would have relished explaining to Madeleine Friedli, the woman who would become my mother: The lift that carried passengers from the ground to the second stage of the Eiffel Tower. During 1937 my parents met for romantic weekends in Paris when they could scrape together the train […]
Previously, in The Pavilion of New Times, Paul encountered the work and ideas of the great French architect, Le Corbusier at the 1937 Paris International Exposition. A few months later he is given the chance to apprentice to the master… In London Pál worked happily for Moholy-Nagy for a year, (as described in Beauty, Art, and The […]
While apprenticed to the famous architect Le Corbusier in Paris, Paul struggled to formulate his own ideas on architecture, amid the cacophony of theories and slogans being bandied about by Modernists. Scribbling in cafes and on park benches, on long summer evenings and weekends, he wrote a rambling manifesto. Its introduction is a […]
I visit a remote railroad station looking for clues regarding my parent’s immigration to Bolivia in 1939. The video at the end of the blog post documents the journey. My father never admitted to me that he was a Jew. This fact, as well as his denial, is important subtext in the story […]
My father was part of a group of thirteen Hungarians Jews who had been classmates at the German Technical institute in Brunn. They all immigrated to Bolivia in 1939 and 1940. They called themselves “The Gang of 13.” Arriving in La Paz they immediately put into practice their idea of a utopian communist community. They […]
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 […]
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: […]
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 […]