Out of Sight Andrew Leach

Andrew Leach Professor of Architecture

About one year ago, I received a call from a number that came up as originating in Cornwall (where I don’t believe I know anybody). I screened it, as I’m wont to do, but an email exchange started up soon thereafter. The caller, now writer, was the granddaughter of one Cäcilie Smetana, born Neumann, who spent much of her life in Vienna. The caller’s mother had escaped to England in 1938 and made her life there. The family story is tragic, but my caller has written about it in a book called A Silence That Speaks: A Family Story Through and Beyond the Holocaust. Since I’ve recalled her book, I’ll identify my caller as Susan Soyinka, an educational psychologist and social historian.

The Smetana family home was designed by her elder brother, an architect named Alexander Neumann who cut his teeth on opera houses and theatres at various scales across the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the 1880s and 90s, and an important architect of banks and office buildings across the same territory in the years that followed. He designed several villas, including what is now called the Villa Low Beer in Brno, which sits at the opposite end of the Tugendhat property on which Mies also later famously built. Besides all this work for the wealthy, Neumann was something of a property developer, and his own son eventually extended that practice when the elder Neumann (first cousin to Susan’s mother) entered retirement. Hardly a prophet of modernism, Neumann’s work is nonetheless prominent in his hometown of Vienna—many of the banks and insurance house buildings remain standing, if modernised and repurposed; his Palais Fanto (designed with Ernst Gotthilf-Miskowlczy) houses the Arnold Schönberg Center. He was, in his time, a big deal.

The Anschluß made life dangerous for Vienna’s Jews—even as it made Jews out of Austrians who had hitherto been secular, modern, and cosmopolitan beyond all else. Neumann’s son, Friedrich, was doubly in danger, having followed Hannes Meyer to Moscow more than a decade earlier to advance projects on the first Soviet five-year plans and thereby acquiring a red stain, too, in

the eyes of the Nazi regime.

Friedrich escaped to England, as did his cousin (though I know not who went first). He was granted permission to travel to Colombia but landed closer to home before finding passage and opportunities further afield in New Zealand, securing work and a refugee’s visa through the storied Department of Housing Construction. Alexander Neumann left nearly a year later, well into 1939, escaping by way of Switzerland with his wife Hedwig Pisling-Neumann (an accomplished painter), and likewise arriving, eventually, to Wellington, stopping at Sydney en route. Others of the extended family left for other places. Some didn’t. Some died.

Both took with them a lot of stuff. Furniture, books, china, glassware, silver—the materials of a life they hoped to transplant in what was in that moment being celebrated as an experiment in social democracy (not least by Friedrich’s new fishing buddy, the American sociologist Lesley Lipson). They took with them, too, evidence of their working lives: Hedwig, her paintings; Alexander, his drawings, photographs, and even his draughting table and stool.

I worked at that table, sitting on that stool, for a spell at the end of the 1990s, doing research among the private papers of Friedrich Neumann (who anglicised his name to Frederick Newman in 1947, the same year in which Alexander passed away). I was interested in his involvement as a senior architect in New Zealand’s post-war hydroelectricity generation program, designing dams and powerhouses, substations and public information collateral. I found the relationship of his background and experience to his current work entirely compelling. And he wrote, a lot, and taught. I ended up making my first book on him. He had himself died in 1964, but his daughter Maria held his memory and legacy close.

At some point in 1999, I visited Maria only to learn that she had been contacted by the family who had bought the (then) Newman family home years earlier, who were moving elsewhere. In the attic they had found several paintings as well as a worn folio of aged drawings—dozens of prints of architectural drawings, mixed in with a smaller number of original ink drawings, all of which ranged across plans, sections, construction details and (even) a rudimentary air conditioning diagram from the 1890s. They had been taken from Vienna with the elder Neumanns as evidence of their lives as architect and artist respectively.

After I worked through them with the architect’s granddaughter, I became their custodian, and on a couple of occasions wrote about this portfolio in exile, as I once called it. It was one of these pieces, written together with a former student, that Susan Soyinka had encountered, and which prompted her to pick up the phone. As of 1939, nobody of her grandmother’s family knew what had happened to Alexander and his family. And the converse also held. The escape from Vienna had simply broken those ties. This article had alerted her to lives lived elsewhere, and to the possibility of knowing something about the world into which her mother was born, and which her grandmother had lived.

It was a confronting story to encounter. No less shocking than any other that survives from those years, but closer because I had with me some of its material. And so I took those drawings that were safely sitting under my expansive desk in Wilkinson and started spreading them out, scanning them, ordering them, and talking to a publisher, thinking about what a book might look like, and do. I took a pile of prints and photographs (the robust pieces that stand apart from those sheets that are fragile and feeling their age) to share with students in my graduate seminar — a first step in talking about this work once more.

For the most part, I now think of it as an obligation to tell the story and share the evidence, much of which will no longer have its corollary in Europe. To say something that will not only form a kind of monument to Alexander Neumann—something his family can appreciate, including family that, I learned, had made their way to Australia—but which can help to account for a moment that happened long before I was born and yet feels close.

My desk has been covered with these drawings, tracings and photographic prints for much of the year as I sort through them afresh, but nothing has moved since June. One day I was in my routine; the next not so much. But this is the work that suits me best, and I look forward to a new year in which I can literally dust off these papers and return to the task of delivering on a commitment that is now decades old, and which suddenly feels larger.