June 28, 1945 - Graduation Day
Four men and a woman are standing in an open field. Another man is kneeling and smiles broadly under his graduation cap. All seem relaxed and upbeat as they pose in the sunshine for the photographer. In the background is Harvard Hall, with its domed white cupola rising above the building's solid brick facade.
At least three of the men have just obtained a Master of Architecture degree from Harvard's Graduate School of Design (GSD). I know this because of my mother's notes that accompanied this photo.
The one kneeling: Gabriel Solano from Colombia. To his left: Eduardo Catalano from Argentina. And the tallest: Alvaro Ortega, also from Colombia, and the star of the picture. He has black hair and intense dark eyes, and exudes a quiet elegance in his cap and gown.
Each has absorbed the Bauhaus principles of beauty, simplicity, functionality, and social responsibility, as taught by Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and the other luminaries at Harvard. And each will make their own mark on modernist architecture in their home countries and abroad.
Standing on Alvaro's left and smiling is a young woman with shoulder length dark hair. She is also wearing a cap and gown—no doubt lent to her as a joke. The woman is my mother, Rose Marie Sorell. She is 20 years old and not an architecture student. She is a college drop-out and works at a bookstore in Cambridge. She is also a refugee from Vienna of Jewish descent, and a polyglot—fluent in French, German, and English, and conversant in Spanish.
My mother is turned ever so slightly towards the tall South American, with whom she is very much in love. I know this because she told me so. They had been introduced by a friend, Sonia Westerman—probably the photographer—when my mother moved to Cambridge the year before. Alvaro and my mother look slightly apart from the rest and seem well-matched with their comely features and physical chemistry.
But this day, which marks the end of Alvaro Ortega's architectural training, will also mark the beginning of the end of their relationship. For he will go back to Bogota to begin his career without her, and after a few months of correspondence, there will be no more letters.
I know this because my mother kept everything Alvaro wrote to her tied with a purple velvet ribbon, and after she died those mementos came to me. Although the ribbon has lightened and frayed with age, his letters and postcards, the photos and other ephemera from that period, including the ticket that allowed my mother to attend this graduation, feel immediate. It's as if I've been transported back in time and I almost feel rooted there. Perhaps because these experiences of my mother also foretell the future, my future, long before I was born.
May 1945 (day unknown) - Visit with Walter & Ise Gropius
During the month before graduation, this group as well as other students and their friends, including my mother, were invited to the home of Walter Gropius, Chair of the Department of Architecture at the GSD.
Gropius was the German modernist architect and visionary who founded the iconic design school known as the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany, in 1919. He was not Jewish, but shared a similar fate with my mother for different reasons. He was harassed by the Nazis and their followers because of his avant-garde designs, unorthodox teaching philosophy, and the ever-widening reach of his faculty and students.
In 1933, the newly installed Nazi regime shut down the Bauhaus, but Gropius continued to live under their threat. Eventually he could no longer work in Germany, so in 1936, after a stint in England, he accepted the offer from Harvard. The following year he and his wife Ise immigrated to the U.S., and soon afterward he built this home on a small hill in Lincoln, Mass., surrounded by an apple orchard and not far from Walden Pond.
The year 1933, which marked the end of Germany's fourteen year experiment in democracy known as the Weimar Republic, also meant the beginning of the end of my mother's childhood in grand, glorious Vienna. She lived with her family in the center of the city and enjoyed all it had to offer in the arts, while being surrounded by its majestic parks and buildings. After Nazi Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, life became untenable and my mother and her family finally fled that summer when she was fourteen. Gropius was well acquainted with Vienna. It was the birthplace of his first wife, the beautiful and brilliant femme fatale, Alma Mahler.
In one of my mother's photos from her May 1945 visit to Gropius' house in Lincoln, she can be seen outside, cozily locking arms with Alvaro—who is smoking and looking rakish and remote—and José Firpi, an architecture student from Puerto Rico.
In another photo, my mother and Ise Gropius, who I imagine have been conversing in German, stand amiably close to each other. Except that at the moment the shutter clicks, they are looking in different directions. Mom and Alvaro, who is also in the picture, are regarding the photographer, and Ise Gropius has turned her head towards handsome Alvaro.
The two women are a generation apart and a contrast in styles. My mother is dressed like a schoolgirl in a skirt, blouse, cardigan, and bobby socks. Whereas Ise, then 48, looks elegant and sophisticated in wool slacks, a belted sweater, and a white chunky necklace. Known as "Frau Bauhaus" because of her close partnership with her husband, Ise Gropius was a writer, editor and highly effective promoter of his work and of keeping the memory and inspiration of the Bauhaus alive, long after it was forced to close. She was also a gifted jeweler, photographer, and gardener.
Gabriel Solano walks towards the group while Gropius stands still with his back to the camera, seemingly lost in thought. He is looking up at the corner of his house as if he were inspecting some flaw.
These views of the exterior of the house reveal rectangular borders, a white facade, and large glass panes that invite the landscape in—reflecting aspects of the modernist style that Gropius helped pioneer and that swept Europe and other parts of the globe during the interwar period. It is in bold contrast with the traditional New England clapboard houses and their small tidy windows designed to keep nature at a safe distance during the tough winters.
In the last of my mother's photos, the great Master can be seen with his wife and their guests—all immigrants—facing the camera. Behind this group is a screened-in porch where the Gropiuses loved to sit and enjoy the surroundings. Alvaro is again watching the photographer as he places his foot insouciantly on the stone wall. Mom, Ise and Walter Gropius, and José Firpi stand side-by-side, with Ise holding court, talking and gesturing. Perhaps she is describing her efforts in the garden. She seems animated and friendly, and her husband looks thoughtful and content to let her lead the conversation. My mother has turned her head politely towards Ise but her body language suggests her mind is elsewhere.
Perhaps this is because she is thinking of Alvaro and their relationship. She is also grieving. Her mother died earlier in that month of May, at age 42, of cancer in New York. In April, her hero, FDR, succumbed at age 63 to a brain hemorrhage. Soon Alvaro will be gone and my mother will return to New York to live with her newly widowed father.
There is one bit of very good news. The six-year war in Europe is over, having finally concluded on May 8, three and one-half years after my mother's escape and eight years after Walter and Ise Gropius came to the U.S., also under duress. My mother will get a job in the Spanish literature section of Brentano's, a bookstore in Manhattan, and, a year later, in 1946, also in New York, she will meet another refugee, Ernest Newman, from Brno, Czechoslovakia—her future husband and my dad.
The Stars Align
Brno
An invisible thread tugs at my imagination and pulls me back even further than 1945. For it's the star of this website—my paternal Jewish grandparents Alfred and Rosa Neumann's 1937 prewar Bauhaus-style apartment building in Brno, Czechoslovakia—that will eventually get me hooked on researching my family's history and interwar modernism with their interlocked stories and characters. That building in Brno, a contemporary of the house in Lincoln, was completed in the summer of 1938, less than a year before the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia and my grandparents were forced to flee their country.
That it still stands in a city carpet bombed by the Allies in 1944 and 1945, and is still in the family after being stolen first by the Nazis and then the Communists, is a miracle. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989 finally restored democracy to his homeland following forty years of Communist oppression, my father was able to reclaim the building and it is now mine. This all feels very personal.
During the interwar period when my father was growing up, Brno was a multi-cultural city and a hub of the new architecture, often known as functionalism. He recalled in his memoir having watched over the fence from his parents' property as a neighbor's "glass house" was being built. Despite his young age (he was born in 1920), he readily soaked up the novel style and aesthetics of buildings going up all around the city.
His parents' apartment building, with its copper-colored tile and gently rounded bay windows on the façade, and its more classical modernist style on the rear, is a well-preserved example of that fertile period. And this is where Walter Gropius enters my life as more than a dim historical figure. My grandparents' architect has been identified as Otto Eisler, who trained in Walter Gropius' studio in Weimar in the early years of the Bauhaus. Gropius came to lecture in Brno in December 1924 around the time Eisler returned there to set up his own studio. Eisler undoubtedly attended those lectures of his former mentor.
Eisler was a prolific architect during the 1920s and 30s. His own home in Brno, which he designed, is the only building by a Czech architect included in the Museum of Modern Art's 1932 exhibit in New York, "Modern Architecture: International Exhibition." Walter Gropius' work was prominently featured in that same exhibit along with other pioneers of the 'International Style,' including Mies van der Rohe, another German modernist who moved to the U.S., Richard Neutra, a Viennese who also made his mark in America, and J.J.P. Oud, from the Netherlands.
Paris
The invisible thread keeps tugging me back in time, long before the apartment house in Brno. I'm thinking of the 1920s, when my mother's grandmother, Hélène Reifenberg, a wealthy widow in Paris, commissioned the French modernist architect, Robert Mallet-Stevens, to design a new home for her and her family. My mother knew it well for it was completed in 1927, three years after she was born, and she and her family frequently visited there. After fleeing Vienna in 1938, they lived for a year in one of the apartments in the house—until the Germans arrived and they were forced to leave Paris for the temporary safety of Vichy and then Nice. The house still exists in the rue Mallet-Stevens, and was mentioned in a retrospective of Mallet-Stevens' work at the Pompidou Center in 2005.
I was in Paris in June 2023 and was very graciously given a tour by the current owners of great-grandmother Helene's former apartment in the house. Here are some of my photos from that visit.
Los Gatos
With this rich heritage on both sides going back to the 1920s and 30s, I have a new perspective on my parents' 1964 house in Los Gatos, California. As designed by my father in collaboration with my mother and their architect, our house had a flat roof and a two-story glass-enclosed living room that looked out on the surrounding hills and valley beyond. It no longer exists, having been torn down in 1998 by the subsequent owner. But thanks to the apartment building in Brno, which sparked my interest in interwar modernism, I can now see where my parents' taste in architecture originated and how that has been imprinted on me.
Postscript
My mother's South American friends in the 1945 photos went on to distinguish themselves in their home countries and abroad. A brief sampling: Eduardo Catalano's designs include the Julliard School of Music at New York's Lincoln Center, and the U.S. embassies in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Pretoria, South Africa.
Gabriel Solano and Alvaro Ortega's collaborations on a workshop and bus stop in Bogota, and baseball stadium in Cartagena, appeared in the 1953-54 exhibit, Architecture in Latin America since 1945, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
José Firpi is known for the Hotel el Convento in San Juan, the "Torre del Norte', a 23-story dormitory at the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan, and his efforts to preserve Spanish colonial architecture in old San Juan.
Walter Gropius' legacy extends throughout Europe, America, and the Middle East. In addition to the house in Lincoln and other private homes such as the Auerbach House in Jena, Germany, an abbreviated listing of his work includes the Fagus Factory in Alfeld, Germany, the MetLife Building in New York, the Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, the JFK Federal Building in Boston, the U.S. Embassy in Athens, and the University of Baghdad, as well as public housing, schools, a monument, and Temple Oheb Shalom synagogue in Baltimore. Towering over everything in fame and historical significance is the Bauhaus building in Dessau, which housed the revolutionary design school during the second phase of its short life. The school sought to unite all the arts in the service of living well and in harmony with nature, and it continues to inspire. Gropius was one of the original influencers.
We visited the Bauhaus in Dessau in June. It was a dream come true.
The house in Lincoln where my mother and her friends visited in 1945 still stands and is now a National Historic Landmark. My husband Don and I visited it on September 25, 2022. There we learned that Gropius sought to integrate European modernist design elements with local longstanding building traditions. For example, he turned the classic New England horizontal wooden clapboard siding 90 degrees and incorporated such vertical lines inside and outside the house.
The sign at the bottom of the driveway for Walter Gropius' House in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
As we toured the house, I thought of my mother, her friends, and Walter and Ise Gropius who had shared a few hours together that day nearly 80 years ago. And I remembered something else that links my youth with my mother's.
On September 1, 1973, I stepped off a plane in Boston after a year of living with my parents in Holland. My father had been transferred there for work but it was time for me to come home. I was on my way to Berkeley to find a job and a place to live while applying to graduate schools in clinical psychology. But first I made plans to visit a college friend who was about to start a Master's program in education at Harvard. After a few days, we decided I should remain in Cambridge and pursue my goals from there. Jean offered me a place to stay which she had rented with... three male graduate students in architecture at the GSD.
I now know why I am so obsessed with the apartment house in Brno and what it represents. It connects me to both sides of my family. It's about continuity against all odds and a shared sense of beauty. It's a reminder that if we pay enough attention, our lives can be enriched by the mysterious "coincidences" that connect each generation to the next. And maybe, also, the gods have had a hand in it.
Whitford, F. (1984). Bauhaus. Thames and Hudson: New York.
MacCarthy, F. (2019). Walter Gropius: Visionary Founder of the Bauhaus. London: Farber &
Faber Ltd.
Chiasson, Dan. (2009, April 22). "The Man Who Built the Bauhaus". The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/29/the-man-who-built-the-bauhaus
Robert Mallet-Stevens: L’oeuvre complet (2005). Ouvrage publié à l’occasion de l’exposition
“Robert Mallet-Stevens, architecte (1886-1945).” Paris: Centre Pompidou.
Riley, T. (1992). The International Style Exhibition 15 and The Museum of Modern Art. Rizzoli:
New York.
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