That man, Jean Welz, is the subject of a new book by filmmaker Peter Wyeth, The Lost Architecture of Jean Welz. Wyeth takes readers on a deeply personal and revelatory journey, digging through photographs and blueprints, interviews with Welz’s relatives, and his own experience piecing it all together. From Welz’s earliest commissions in Paris to his final days in South Africa before his death in 1975, Wyeth’s paper trail forms a history in which the most vociferous modernists often received the highest honors.1

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• 1. “Jean Welz does not exist,” Wyeth despairs early on, lamenting that an architect who rubbed elbows with the likes of Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos could seemingly vanish into thin air. For Wyeth, the potential demolition of Welz’s renowned Maison Ziveli in Paris reflects a deeper erasure of his stylistic merits and political sympathies — including a gravestone he designed for Karl Marx’s daughter that was destroyed by Nazi occupiers. Despite his mentor, Josef Hoffmann, and brother, Max, embracing the spread of fascism, Welz worked in a socially engaged style that transcended individual pursuits for glory. “[Welz’s] story,” Wyeth writes, “is an intriguing case of reading between, not even lines, which would be a luxury in this context, but sometimes around a single word — and that, just his name.” To prove this, the author presents a series of signed correspondences that connect Welz’s written initials with a commission for Zurich Dada co-founder, Tristan Tzara. This research process, which readers experience vicariously, makes Wyeth’s prose exhilarating as tiny details become breakthroughs of grand proportions.