Contents:
Searching for my father's Leica, 2025
The Robot of Prague, 2017
Kafka and Cubism, 2025
Honzík and Yorke: How a Czech Architect Became the Prime Mover in the Accent of Modern Architecture in Great Britain, 2017
Paul Jaray: The genius with Prague roots, 2025
Searching for my father's Leica, 2025
The Robot of Prague, 2017
Kafka and Cubism, 2025
Honzík and Yorke: How a Czech Architect Became the Prime Mover in the Accent of Modern Architecture in Great Britain, 2017
Paul Jaray: The genius with Prague roots, 2025
Searching for my father's Leica
When one loses a parent at an early age, one clutches at opportunities to find important ties to bring the missing person back to one’s life.
In our family history, apart from losing many loved ones, scores of our possessions got lost, confiscated, stolen … They disappeared in the flow of disastrous history of Central Europe of the last century with so many moves and changes of locations. Both my parents, together with my maternal grandparents, were deported to the Lodz Ghetto in 1941 and only allowed to take a small case each. Then, they were moved to Auschwitz and further labour camps, carrying no personal possessions. Miraculously, both my parents returned in separate ways after the war but had to start again to gather the few items secretly held for them by dear friends and then slowly acquire again the essential objects needed for everyday being and to satisfy their hours of leisure.
Another calamity descended at the beginning of 1952 when my father was arrested suddenly, imprisoned and then unlawfully murdered by the Czechoslovak state in December 1952. After his arrest, our apartment was invaded by the State Security agents. Many of our possessions were taken away, and most were never seen again. For example, our Škoda 1101 Tudor faux cabriolet, bought second-hand in 1948, was taken from our privately rented garage, as well as bank savings books, cash, identity, membership and ministry entry cards, photographs, diaries, private correspondence, keys, father’s leather briefcase, many books, and my father’s 1938 Leica IIIb (with an unfinished film inside!), which he so dearly treasured, being a keen photographer. Luckily the State Security agents left a detailed list of all the items taken, which noted the camera serial number.
I cannot be sure when Rudolf obtained his Leica IIIb delivered to Prague by the Leitz factory in Wetzlar, Germany in January 1939. It is possible that Rudolf bought it second hand on return from the concentration camps, because how would the camera have survived the war unless it belonged to the few items kept for the uncertain future in their absence by dear friends of my parents?
Was my father aware that as soon as the formation of the Third Reich occurred in 1933, Ernst Leitz II (1871-1956), son of the head of the company from 1920 to 1956, began receiving calls from his Jewish employees, asking for help to get them and their families out of Germany? As Protestants, Leitz and his family, were unaffected by Nuremberg Laws. However, the Laws restricted the movement of Jews and limited their professional activities.
To help his Jewish workers and colleagues, Leitz established what has become known as the 'Leica Freedom Train', a covert means of allowing Jews to leave Germany in the guise of Leitz employees being sent overseas. Employees, retailers, family members, even friends of family members were assigned to Leitz sales offices in France, Britain, Hong Kong, Canada and the United States. Leitz did what he did because he felt responsible for his workers, their families, and for his neighbours in Wetzlar.
Those sent to the USA went to Leitz's Manhattan office, where they were helped to find jobs. Each new arrival was given a Leica as financial security because it could be easily exchanged for cash. The refugees were also paid a Leitz allowance until they could find work. Out of this migration came designers, repair technicians, salespeople, marketers and writers for the photographic press. They worked in the Leica showroom on Fifth Avenue or at distributors across the US.
Rudolf could not have known, because this incredible event came to light only fairly recently, and because the Leitz family did not wish it to be publicised. From Ernst Leitz II’s point of view, he was only doing what any decent person would have done in his position.
Another interesting fact is that the Leica camera was a preferred tool for many Jewish photographers such as Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, André Kertész, Elliot Erwitt, Yevgeny Khaldei, Ilse Bing, Robert Frank, Irving Penn, Fritz Block, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Henri Dauman, Garry Winogrand, Lou Reed, Jucia Moholy, Joel Meyerowitz and others.
Leica history started in 1849, when Carl Kellner founded the Optical Institute (Optisches Institut) in Wetzlar, Germany. Here, he produced microscopes and telescopes. Kellner died at the age of 29 and his apprentice, Friedrich Belthle, who married Kellner’s widow, assumed responsibility for the company. In 1864, Ernst Leitz I, who studied mechanics, began working at the Optical Institute and a year later would become a partner in the company. Belthle died in 1869 and Leitz I took over the business. Leitz I changed the name of the company to Ernst Leitz-Optische Werke-Wetzlar. Oskar Barnack, the Leica camera designer, was a brilliant mechanic who trained at Carl Zeiss, whom Emil Mechau, his former colleague at Zeiss, asked to join the Leitz company in 1911. Dr Max Berek, who came to Leitz a year later, constructed the Leica lenses.
The first Leica camera prototype was built by Barnack in 1913. The original Leica Ur was intended as a camera for test exposures with a 35mm cine picture film. Barnack took a few photos with the new camera in 1914. The Leica was further developed into several prototypes, and in 1923, Barnack convinced Ernst Leitz II to make a Leica 0 preproduction series (nos. 100 to 125) of 25 cameras for the factory personnel and outside photographers to test. Although the prototypes received mixed reception, Ernst Leitz II decided in 1924 to produce the new camera.
The Leica I camera (no. 126) was made late in 1924 and already sold in January 1925, but the official Leica launching was staged at the March 1925 Leipzig Spring Fair. The Leica was one of the first cameras to combine high-quality lenses with a compact, portable and easily pocket-able body.
For many years I was very keen to replace the missing Rudolf’s Leica IIIb. But where to find the closest model to the one that was stolen? Once having decided I really wanted it, I searched many internet auction sites and only recently managed to locate one from the same series delivered to Prague in January 1939. Surprisingly, it was located in Brookline, a suburb of Boston, where my mother and stepfather, Pavel Kovály, resided while in exile in the USA from 1968 to 1996. Surely a chance coincidence? The seller did not know the camera’s history, but perhaps it was brought over also by a Czechoslovak émigré after the Soviet occupation in 1968 …
So now this Leica is with me, with the correct Summitar 5cm f2 lens as supplied by Leitz originally, and I can have it on my writing desk and take a few shots now and then to keep my father’s memory alive.
October 2025
copyright © 2026 Ivan Margolius and Margolius Family Archive
In our family history, apart from losing many loved ones, scores of our possessions got lost, confiscated, stolen … They disappeared in the flow of disastrous history of Central Europe of the last century with so many moves and changes of locations. Both my parents, together with my maternal grandparents, were deported to the Lodz Ghetto in 1941 and only allowed to take a small case each. Then, they were moved to Auschwitz and further labour camps, carrying no personal possessions. Miraculously, both my parents returned in separate ways after the war but had to start again to gather the few items secretly held for them by dear friends and then slowly acquire again the essential objects needed for everyday being and to satisfy their hours of leisure.
Another calamity descended at the beginning of 1952 when my father was arrested suddenly, imprisoned and then unlawfully murdered by the Czechoslovak state in December 1952. After his arrest, our apartment was invaded by the State Security agents. Many of our possessions were taken away, and most were never seen again. For example, our Škoda 1101 Tudor faux cabriolet, bought second-hand in 1948, was taken from our privately rented garage, as well as bank savings books, cash, identity, membership and ministry entry cards, photographs, diaries, private correspondence, keys, father’s leather briefcase, many books, and my father’s 1938 Leica IIIb (with an unfinished film inside!), which he so dearly treasured, being a keen photographer. Luckily the State Security agents left a detailed list of all the items taken, which noted the camera serial number.
I cannot be sure when Rudolf obtained his Leica IIIb delivered to Prague by the Leitz factory in Wetzlar, Germany in January 1939. It is possible that Rudolf bought it second hand on return from the concentration camps, because how would the camera have survived the war unless it belonged to the few items kept for the uncertain future in their absence by dear friends of my parents?
Was my father aware that as soon as the formation of the Third Reich occurred in 1933, Ernst Leitz II (1871-1956), son of the head of the company from 1920 to 1956, began receiving calls from his Jewish employees, asking for help to get them and their families out of Germany? As Protestants, Leitz and his family, were unaffected by Nuremberg Laws. However, the Laws restricted the movement of Jews and limited their professional activities.
To help his Jewish workers and colleagues, Leitz established what has become known as the 'Leica Freedom Train', a covert means of allowing Jews to leave Germany in the guise of Leitz employees being sent overseas. Employees, retailers, family members, even friends of family members were assigned to Leitz sales offices in France, Britain, Hong Kong, Canada and the United States. Leitz did what he did because he felt responsible for his workers, their families, and for his neighbours in Wetzlar.
Those sent to the USA went to Leitz's Manhattan office, where they were helped to find jobs. Each new arrival was given a Leica as financial security because it could be easily exchanged for cash. The refugees were also paid a Leitz allowance until they could find work. Out of this migration came designers, repair technicians, salespeople, marketers and writers for the photographic press. They worked in the Leica showroom on Fifth Avenue or at distributors across the US.
Rudolf could not have known, because this incredible event came to light only fairly recently, and because the Leitz family did not wish it to be publicised. From Ernst Leitz II’s point of view, he was only doing what any decent person would have done in his position.
Another interesting fact is that the Leica camera was a preferred tool for many Jewish photographers such as Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, André Kertész, Elliot Erwitt, Yevgeny Khaldei, Ilse Bing, Robert Frank, Irving Penn, Fritz Block, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Henri Dauman, Garry Winogrand, Lou Reed, Jucia Moholy, Joel Meyerowitz and others.
Leica history started in 1849, when Carl Kellner founded the Optical Institute (Optisches Institut) in Wetzlar, Germany. Here, he produced microscopes and telescopes. Kellner died at the age of 29 and his apprentice, Friedrich Belthle, who married Kellner’s widow, assumed responsibility for the company. In 1864, Ernst Leitz I, who studied mechanics, began working at the Optical Institute and a year later would become a partner in the company. Belthle died in 1869 and Leitz I took over the business. Leitz I changed the name of the company to Ernst Leitz-Optische Werke-Wetzlar. Oskar Barnack, the Leica camera designer, was a brilliant mechanic who trained at Carl Zeiss, whom Emil Mechau, his former colleague at Zeiss, asked to join the Leitz company in 1911. Dr Max Berek, who came to Leitz a year later, constructed the Leica lenses.
The first Leica camera prototype was built by Barnack in 1913. The original Leica Ur was intended as a camera for test exposures with a 35mm cine picture film. Barnack took a few photos with the new camera in 1914. The Leica was further developed into several prototypes, and in 1923, Barnack convinced Ernst Leitz II to make a Leica 0 preproduction series (nos. 100 to 125) of 25 cameras for the factory personnel and outside photographers to test. Although the prototypes received mixed reception, Ernst Leitz II decided in 1924 to produce the new camera.
The Leica I camera (no. 126) was made late in 1924 and already sold in January 1925, but the official Leica launching was staged at the March 1925 Leipzig Spring Fair. The Leica was one of the first cameras to combine high-quality lenses with a compact, portable and easily pocket-able body.
For many years I was very keen to replace the missing Rudolf’s Leica IIIb. But where to find the closest model to the one that was stolen? Once having decided I really wanted it, I searched many internet auction sites and only recently managed to locate one from the same series delivered to Prague in January 1939. Surprisingly, it was located in Brookline, a suburb of Boston, where my mother and stepfather, Pavel Kovály, resided while in exile in the USA from 1968 to 1996. Surely a chance coincidence? The seller did not know the camera’s history, but perhaps it was brought over also by a Czechoslovak émigré after the Soviet occupation in 1968 …
So now this Leica is with me, with the correct Summitar 5cm f2 lens as supplied by Leitz originally, and I can have it on my writing desk and take a few shots now and then to keep my father’s memory alive.
October 2025
copyright © 2026 Ivan Margolius and Margolius Family Archive
The Robot of Prague
Whenever in Prague my first steps lead me to Říční Street, a quiet backwater in the Malá Strana quarter by the Vltava river, seen above as it appeared in 2003. Always, when I stand in front of number 11, I am amazed at the lack of tourists who flock to the city yearly to satisfy their cultural and travel cravings. Why do they miss the most important spot in Prague if not the whole world? Surely this is the centre of the universe.
An ordinary old, plain three-storey apartment house, half-way up a narrow cobbled street with a gateway into a yard at the rear: what is the fuss about, you ask? If you visit at present there is a clue in a bronze plaque fixed to the front façade just below the run of first-floor windows: ‘V tomto domě žili a tvořili bratři Josef a Karel Čapkové v letech 1907 – 1925’ (Brothers Josef and Karel Čapek lived and worked in this house between 1907 and 1925).
Nowadays the world public is aware of Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hašek and more recently Milan Kundera and Josef Škvorecký as authors who have originated from the Czech lands, while both Čapeks are now nearly forgotten. However, before the Second World War it was the Anglophile Karel Čapek who was the best known. In the 1930s Karel became the foremost candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature mainly for his plays R.U.R., The Makropulos Affair (turned into an opera by Leoš Janáček) and novel War with the Newts, but he never received it. Čapek visited Britain in 1924 and made friends with G. B. Shaw, H. G. Wells and G. K. Chesterton and became an honorary member of the London PEN Club. Čapek also admired T. G. Masaryk and published Conversations with T. G. Masaryk. Karel’s brother Josef was an acclaimed painter, graphic artist, writer and poet.
On August 6th, 1907 Karel Čapek (1890-1938) and Josef Čapek (1887-1945) moved to Říční 532/11 from Úpice, a small town under the Krkonoše Mountains in northern Bohemia where their father Dr Antonín Čapek (1855-1929) had his own house. The Prague flat was found by Božena (1866-1924) their mother, after Antonín had to abandon his Úpice medical practice due to illness.
The Říční house had six windows in the upper storeys with a yellow-painted façade. Josef had the larger corner room, where he had his easel, which had one window looking into the yard, and two street windows. After his marriage in 1919, Josef’s and his wife Jarmila’s bedroom was in the middle and the shared living room with two street windows was at the end. The kitchen next to Karel’s room faced the yard through the glazed, access walkway. Karel’s room was furnished with simple furniture from the previous century. It was a narrow room with one window facing the yard and his writing desk underneath. His brother’s paintings hung on the walls.
Karel had just finished the play The Outlaw (Loupežník), submitting the manuscript to his publisher Otakar Štorch-Marien. At the same time, Karel started on his new project. Karel was preoccupied with the contemporary difficult conditions of the factory workers and the hard-line attitude of their bosses ever since writing the story Systém together with his brother Josef, published first in the weekly Národní obzor on October 3rd, 1908. The memory of the Úpice textile workers on strike whom he had witnessed, seeing their march through the town, and the knowledge of newly introduced mass production and scientific management methods of manufacturing became his inspiration. In Systém the Čapek brothers described the action of a greedy factory owner who tried to employ workers devoid of human needs, ideas and emotions, purely to be used as automata and working machines to achieve the most efficient manufacturing means. However, after one worker had a visit by a pretty woman in his accommodation cell, his passions were aroused and having affected his fellows, the workers revolted, killed the owner’s family and set fire to the factory buildings.
A further impetus came, as Karel explained in an article in London’s Evening Standard in 1924. One day he had to take a tram from Prague’s suburbs to the city centre. The tram was uncomfortably overcrowded. He was astounded how modern living situations made people unconcerned about their normally accustomed living comforts. People were pressed together inside, even spilling outside on to the tram steps, appearing not like herded sheep, but like machines. He started to think about people not as individuals but as machines and during the journey thought about an expression which would describe a human being only able to work but not able to reason.
With that in mind, Karel began to write a drama about the manufacture of artificial people from man-made organic material who would free humans of work and drudgery, but finally due to overproduction those labouri would lead humankind to destruction and annihilation. He chose names of characters that carried symbolic meaning: Domin from dominus for the general manager of Rossum’s (derived from the Czech word rozum: mind, intelligence, sense, reason), Alquist, head of the works department, from the Latin aliquis, Fabry, engineer general from fabrika (factory), Busman, general commercial manager from ‘businessman’, Dr Gall, head of the physiological and experimental department from Galen and names from antiquity for the artificial beings such as Marius and Sulla.
For what to call the artificial workers he turned for help to his brother Josef. Karel described the occasion some 13 years later in the newspaper Lidové noviny of December 24th, 1933, in Kulturní kronika column, on page 12:
‘The author of the play R.U.R. did not, in fact, invent that word; he merely ushered it into existence. It was like this: the idea for the play came to said author in a single, unguarded moment. And while it was still fresh he rushed immediately to his brother Josef, the painter, who stood before an easel, vigorously painting at a canvas.
"Listen, Josef," the author began, "I think I have an idea for a play."
"What kind?" the painter muttered (he really did mutter, because at the moment he was holding a brush in his mouth). The author told him as concisely as he could.
"Then write it," the painter said, without taking the brush from his mouth or stopping to work on the canvas. His indifference was almost insulting.
"But," the author said, "I don't know what to call those artificial workers. I could call them labouri, but that strikes me as a bit literal."
"Then call them robots," the painter muttered, brush in mouth, and carried on painting.’
In the summer of 1920 Karel decided to fine-tune the play at his parents’ place in Trenčianské Teplice and to have complete peace rented an attic room in the next door house. Despite the tropical heat of that summer, after a week of intensive work, he completed the play. By the beginning of August 1920 he was back in Prague. In November the play was published by Aventinum in a large run of 2000 copies with the cover in purple-brown designed by Josef, hardly four weeks after signing the contract.
The first premiere was at Klicperovo divadlo in Hradec Králové by the local amateur players on January 2nd and 3rd, 1921 followed by the National Theatre's official production in Prague on January 25th, 1921 with the stage set designed by architect Bedřich Feuerstein and directed by Vojta Novák, with costumes by Josef Čapek. The play, according to a review in Lidové noviny on January 27th, had a thunderous reception and many stage calls were requested of the author at the end of the show.
The play describes the activities of Rossum’s Universal Robots company that makes artificial people from synthetic, organic matter. These beings are not mechanical creatures, they may be mistaken for humans and can think for themselves. Initially they seem happy to work for humans, but that changes with time, and at the end a hostile robot revolt points to the extinction of the human race, perhaps to be saved by a male robot and a female robot acting as Adam and Eve. Karel wrote that all the characters in the play had the right to exist, this circumstance must be carried through even if it ends in tragic consequences, otherwise greatness would not be attained. After the reality of conflicts life carries on, if there is no faith in life it is not worth to continue living.’ In my works nothing ends in death. I do not mean that life is a solution and purpose of everything, but is an eternal culmination, continuation and reconciliation of everything.’
Since then, and almost immediately, the robot word (other Czech contributions to the English dictionary are pistol, polka) explained as deriving from the Czech word robota (‘hard work’) by the quick-witted Josef, has become a universal expression in most languages for artificial intelligence machines invented by humans to help in their endeavours. Artificial human-like beings or intelligent machines have been thought of and written about before Čapek, such as the Golem, Frankenstein, the Steam Man, Tik-Tok, etc., but only now there was a word that described aptly the ‘new species’. This word, coming out in the first two decades of the twentieth century, joined other important discoveries and inventions as cornerstones of the rise of Modernism in the arts and sciences, such as X-rays, radiotelegraphy, radium, polonium, quantum theory, relativity theory, four-dimensional geometry, Cubism, aeroplane flight, etc. A new spirit was thought to have arrived, a spirit of the synthesis of new concepts, of a new human élan, of multiple views of reality, ambiguity of meaning as in Kafka’s works, leading towards new humanity and a new kind of people with a burning desire for sunlight, clean air and clear thought, a new attitude to life. Čapek's robots were a pure example of modernity not just in the name but by being ambiguous between the real being and the artificial machine. It prompted and inspired contemporary artists, writers and architects to create novel ideas based on new thinking and not on an imitation of the past, as had happened before.
So do me a favour when next in Prague: please pay homage to the birth of the most famous Czech word in worldwide use in the place of its conception.
First published in the Newsletter, The Friends of Czech Heritage, Issue 17, Summer/Autumn 2017, pp. 3 - 6.
copyright © 2017 and © 2026 Ivan Margolius
An ordinary old, plain three-storey apartment house, half-way up a narrow cobbled street with a gateway into a yard at the rear: what is the fuss about, you ask? If you visit at present there is a clue in a bronze plaque fixed to the front façade just below the run of first-floor windows: ‘V tomto domě žili a tvořili bratři Josef a Karel Čapkové v letech 1907 – 1925’ (Brothers Josef and Karel Čapek lived and worked in this house between 1907 and 1925).
Nowadays the world public is aware of Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hašek and more recently Milan Kundera and Josef Škvorecký as authors who have originated from the Czech lands, while both Čapeks are now nearly forgotten. However, before the Second World War it was the Anglophile Karel Čapek who was the best known. In the 1930s Karel became the foremost candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature mainly for his plays R.U.R., The Makropulos Affair (turned into an opera by Leoš Janáček) and novel War with the Newts, but he never received it. Čapek visited Britain in 1924 and made friends with G. B. Shaw, H. G. Wells and G. K. Chesterton and became an honorary member of the London PEN Club. Čapek also admired T. G. Masaryk and published Conversations with T. G. Masaryk. Karel’s brother Josef was an acclaimed painter, graphic artist, writer and poet.
On August 6th, 1907 Karel Čapek (1890-1938) and Josef Čapek (1887-1945) moved to Říční 532/11 from Úpice, a small town under the Krkonoše Mountains in northern Bohemia where their father Dr Antonín Čapek (1855-1929) had his own house. The Prague flat was found by Božena (1866-1924) their mother, after Antonín had to abandon his Úpice medical practice due to illness.
The Říční house had six windows in the upper storeys with a yellow-painted façade. Josef had the larger corner room, where he had his easel, which had one window looking into the yard, and two street windows. After his marriage in 1919, Josef’s and his wife Jarmila’s bedroom was in the middle and the shared living room with two street windows was at the end. The kitchen next to Karel’s room faced the yard through the glazed, access walkway. Karel’s room was furnished with simple furniture from the previous century. It was a narrow room with one window facing the yard and his writing desk underneath. His brother’s paintings hung on the walls.
Karel had just finished the play The Outlaw (Loupežník), submitting the manuscript to his publisher Otakar Štorch-Marien. At the same time, Karel started on his new project. Karel was preoccupied with the contemporary difficult conditions of the factory workers and the hard-line attitude of their bosses ever since writing the story Systém together with his brother Josef, published first in the weekly Národní obzor on October 3rd, 1908. The memory of the Úpice textile workers on strike whom he had witnessed, seeing their march through the town, and the knowledge of newly introduced mass production and scientific management methods of manufacturing became his inspiration. In Systém the Čapek brothers described the action of a greedy factory owner who tried to employ workers devoid of human needs, ideas and emotions, purely to be used as automata and working machines to achieve the most efficient manufacturing means. However, after one worker had a visit by a pretty woman in his accommodation cell, his passions were aroused and having affected his fellows, the workers revolted, killed the owner’s family and set fire to the factory buildings.
A further impetus came, as Karel explained in an article in London’s Evening Standard in 1924. One day he had to take a tram from Prague’s suburbs to the city centre. The tram was uncomfortably overcrowded. He was astounded how modern living situations made people unconcerned about their normally accustomed living comforts. People were pressed together inside, even spilling outside on to the tram steps, appearing not like herded sheep, but like machines. He started to think about people not as individuals but as machines and during the journey thought about an expression which would describe a human being only able to work but not able to reason.
With that in mind, Karel began to write a drama about the manufacture of artificial people from man-made organic material who would free humans of work and drudgery, but finally due to overproduction those labouri would lead humankind to destruction and annihilation. He chose names of characters that carried symbolic meaning: Domin from dominus for the general manager of Rossum’s (derived from the Czech word rozum: mind, intelligence, sense, reason), Alquist, head of the works department, from the Latin aliquis, Fabry, engineer general from fabrika (factory), Busman, general commercial manager from ‘businessman’, Dr Gall, head of the physiological and experimental department from Galen and names from antiquity for the artificial beings such as Marius and Sulla.
For what to call the artificial workers he turned for help to his brother Josef. Karel described the occasion some 13 years later in the newspaper Lidové noviny of December 24th, 1933, in Kulturní kronika column, on page 12:
‘The author of the play R.U.R. did not, in fact, invent that word; he merely ushered it into existence. It was like this: the idea for the play came to said author in a single, unguarded moment. And while it was still fresh he rushed immediately to his brother Josef, the painter, who stood before an easel, vigorously painting at a canvas.
"Listen, Josef," the author began, "I think I have an idea for a play."
"What kind?" the painter muttered (he really did mutter, because at the moment he was holding a brush in his mouth). The author told him as concisely as he could.
"Then write it," the painter said, without taking the brush from his mouth or stopping to work on the canvas. His indifference was almost insulting.
"But," the author said, "I don't know what to call those artificial workers. I could call them labouri, but that strikes me as a bit literal."
"Then call them robots," the painter muttered, brush in mouth, and carried on painting.’
In the summer of 1920 Karel decided to fine-tune the play at his parents’ place in Trenčianské Teplice and to have complete peace rented an attic room in the next door house. Despite the tropical heat of that summer, after a week of intensive work, he completed the play. By the beginning of August 1920 he was back in Prague. In November the play was published by Aventinum in a large run of 2000 copies with the cover in purple-brown designed by Josef, hardly four weeks after signing the contract.
The first premiere was at Klicperovo divadlo in Hradec Králové by the local amateur players on January 2nd and 3rd, 1921 followed by the National Theatre's official production in Prague on January 25th, 1921 with the stage set designed by architect Bedřich Feuerstein and directed by Vojta Novák, with costumes by Josef Čapek. The play, according to a review in Lidové noviny on January 27th, had a thunderous reception and many stage calls were requested of the author at the end of the show.
The play describes the activities of Rossum’s Universal Robots company that makes artificial people from synthetic, organic matter. These beings are not mechanical creatures, they may be mistaken for humans and can think for themselves. Initially they seem happy to work for humans, but that changes with time, and at the end a hostile robot revolt points to the extinction of the human race, perhaps to be saved by a male robot and a female robot acting as Adam and Eve. Karel wrote that all the characters in the play had the right to exist, this circumstance must be carried through even if it ends in tragic consequences, otherwise greatness would not be attained. After the reality of conflicts life carries on, if there is no faith in life it is not worth to continue living.’ In my works nothing ends in death. I do not mean that life is a solution and purpose of everything, but is an eternal culmination, continuation and reconciliation of everything.’
Since then, and almost immediately, the robot word (other Czech contributions to the English dictionary are pistol, polka) explained as deriving from the Czech word robota (‘hard work’) by the quick-witted Josef, has become a universal expression in most languages for artificial intelligence machines invented by humans to help in their endeavours. Artificial human-like beings or intelligent machines have been thought of and written about before Čapek, such as the Golem, Frankenstein, the Steam Man, Tik-Tok, etc., but only now there was a word that described aptly the ‘new species’. This word, coming out in the first two decades of the twentieth century, joined other important discoveries and inventions as cornerstones of the rise of Modernism in the arts and sciences, such as X-rays, radiotelegraphy, radium, polonium, quantum theory, relativity theory, four-dimensional geometry, Cubism, aeroplane flight, etc. A new spirit was thought to have arrived, a spirit of the synthesis of new concepts, of a new human élan, of multiple views of reality, ambiguity of meaning as in Kafka’s works, leading towards new humanity and a new kind of people with a burning desire for sunlight, clean air and clear thought, a new attitude to life. Čapek's robots were a pure example of modernity not just in the name but by being ambiguous between the real being and the artificial machine. It prompted and inspired contemporary artists, writers and architects to create novel ideas based on new thinking and not on an imitation of the past, as had happened before.
So do me a favour when next in Prague: please pay homage to the birth of the most famous Czech word in worldwide use in the place of its conception.
First published in the Newsletter, The Friends of Czech Heritage, Issue 17, Summer/Autumn 2017, pp. 3 - 6.
copyright © 2017 and © 2026 Ivan Margolius
Kafka and Cubism
Even a hundred years after his death Franz Kafka, the modernist literary genius, still inspires to be studied in search of enduring ideas hidden in his complex oeuvre.
In my memoir Reflections of Prague – Journeys through the 20th century (Wiley 2006) I mentioned Kafka’s interest in Cubism, which was a prevalent trend in the Czech lands between 1910 and 1924 – a contemporary art form ever-present in the writer’s Prague location, which had a profound impact on Kafka’s view of the world.
Those were momentous times. Albert Einstein was in Prague between 1911 and 1912, lecturing at the German University, where he began working on his general theory of relativity. He attended Berta Fantová's discussion salons held in U Bílého jednorožce house on the Old Town Square, which were also frequented by Kafka, Max Brod, Hugo Bergmann, Philipp Frank and others. In Prague, Einstein wrote eleven scientific works, five of them on radiation, mathematics and on quantum theory of solids. Karel Čapek wrote the play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) in 1920.
The new artistic milieu came about as a reaction by artists to the era of scientific discoveries of the early 20th century – X-rays, radiotelegraphy, radium, four-dimensional geometry and the new view down from above afforded by aeroplane travel. Cubism was a reflection of its time, simultaneous, immediate, composite, transparent, condensed, fragmented, reconstructed, operating in different space directions and in different speeds.
In Prague between 1902 and 1914 important influential exhibitions were staged of Rodin, Munch, the French Impressionists, Bourdelle, Les Indépendants, and of the Czech Osma Group and the Group of Creative Artists. These were further supported by illustrations and reproductions in the Umělecký měsíčník and Volné směry magazines. It is certain that Kafka was aware of the new artistic trends as his close friend Max Brod reviewed some shows, such as the Osma Group’s first expressionistic exhibits in Die Gegenwart magazine in 1907.
By perception of his immediate surroundings, Kafka would be among the first writers who would get immersed in this modernistic view of the world around him that Cubism portrayed in response to the precise scientific era. The aim was not to abstract reality but to show simultaneously forms and space in relation to a constantly moving point in time. But Kafka’s reflection of the times was not just in his own limited pictorial art creativity, in his pencil or ink sketches, but primarily expressed uniquely by the style of his writing. This has rarely been discussed.
Kafka’s stories and novels did not reveal explicitly what they were about. His fiction contained many meanings and points of view, dissolving the primary significance into a multiplicity of possibilities: “But simply to get me away from the place they sent me out on useless errand. And they took care not to send me too far away, so that I had some hopes of being able to get back in time if I hurried. And there was I running as fast as I could, shouting the message through the half-open door of the office I was sent to, nearly breathless so that they could hardly make me out, and back again at top speed, and yet the student was here before me, he hadn’t so far to come, of course…” (The Trial, written in 1914-15, chapter 3, pp. 70-71, Penguin Books, 1953).
It is fascinating that Kafka tried uniquely to interpret Cubism by the style and formulation of his writing, its meanings, structure of sentences and flow of his words.
Kafka visited Paris in 1910 and 1911, but primarily he was enveloped daily by Prague’s Cubism, not only by the contemporary paintings and sculptures by Bohemian and foreign artists shown in exhibitions, but by the extraordinary Cubist architecture designed by Czech architects having been erected in the Bohemian capital city, as such a phenomenon hardly flourished elsewhere. Examples of this are Josef Chochol’s 1913 houses at Vyšehrad or the department store ‘At the Black Madonna’, which included the famous Grand Café Orient, designed by Josef Gočár and built between 1911 and 1912 on the corner of Celetná and Ovocný trh. This was on Kafka’s doorstep. He must have frequently passed by on the way to his favourite André bookshop located by the Powder Tower. At that time, Kafka lived on Mikulášská (Parížská) 36, later moving to Staroměstské náměstí 5 (6) and then to Bílková 10. Interestingly also, the exhibitions of the Group of Creative Artists were staged in interiors designed in Cubist style by Pavel Janák and Josef Gočár.
Yet this important Prague Cubist architectural landscape input into Kafka’s consciousness of the times as well as his specific texts exploring cubist perception of space failed to be mentioned in the recent study Očima Franze Kafky (Marie Rakušanová et al.,Kant 2024), which surveyed Kafka’s connection with Cubist art in Bohemia during his lifetime. Detlev Schöttker in Vielfältiges Sehen: Franz Kafka und der Kubismus in Prag (in Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte, Heft IV/4 Winter 2010, pp. 85-98), mentioned the additional effect of Prague Cubist architecture on Kafka and commented on his stories On the Tram (The Passenger) and Absent-minded Window Gazing in Meditation collection (1913) that described scenes similarly to the structure of Cubist artworks. But there is much more complexity in Kafka’s writing than these brief glimpses.
In fact, there are many more numerous instances of Kafka’s output based on the Cubist, fractured vision, multi-perception of space and objects and representation of movement in the field of vision inspired by Cubist architectural façades and multi-layered interiors in his published novels and fragments.
Here follow just three further examples. In The Castle (written in 1922, p. 17, Penguin Books, 1957) he illustrates the puzzling disjointed approach to the Castle:
“… He felt irresistibly drawn to seek out new acquaintances, but each new acquaintance only seemed to increase his weariness. If he forced himself in his present condition to go on at least as far as the Castle entrance, he would have done more than enough. So he resumed his walk, but the way proved long. For the street he was in, the main street of the village, did not lead up to the Castle hill, it only made towards it and then, as if deliberately, turned aside, and though it did not lead away from the Castle it got no nearer to it either. At every turn K. expected the road to double back to the Castle, and only because of this expectation did he go on; he was flatly unwilling, tired as he was, to leave the street, and he was also amazed at the length of the village, which seemed to have no end; again and again the same little houses, and frost-bound window-panes and snow and the entire absence of human beings – but at last he tore himself away from the obsession of the street and escaped into a small side-lane, where the snow was still deeper and the exertion of lifting one's feet clear was fatiguing; he broke into a sweat suddenly came to a stop, and could not go on …”
In one fragment from Kafka’s The Lost Writings, assembled by Reiner Stach (pp. 17-18, New Direction Books, 2020) Kafka describes the multifaceted situation the protagonist found himself in:
“… Sometimes when I came home at night, with my head bonging with the din of the big city, I was unable to find the hotel entrance right away. It's true, the entrance does seem to have been very small, it's even possible – though this would have been odd – that there was no proper entrance as such, but to go into the hotel you first had to make your way through a restaurant. It may have been that way, but then even the door of the restaurant wasn't always easy to find. Sometimes I thought I was standing in front of the hotel, but I was actually standing in front of the barracks, in a completely different square, quieter and cleaner than the one in front of the hotel, yes, deathly quiet and awesomely clean, but somehow it was able to be taken for the other. Then you had to go around the corner to find yourself in front of the hotel. It seems to me now that sometimes, only sometimes admittedly, you could get from the quiet square – say, with the help of an officer who was going the same way – and find the hotel entrance right away, and not a second or back entrance either, but the one through the restaurant …”
In the second fragment (p. 62) Kafka observes:
“…You entered the outer courtyard, and from there two arches roughly ten yards apart led into a second courtyard, you passed through an archway, and then, far from being, as expected, in a further large expanse, you found yourself in a dark little space with walls reaching up into the heavens, it was only way up that you saw some illuminated balconies. So you thought you had taken a wrong turn and wanted to return to the first courtyard, and chanced not to go back through the arch you had entered by but the one next to it. Only to find you weren't in the original courtyard at all, but in a different one, much larger, full of music and noise, and the lowing and bleating of animals. You had made a mistake, so you went back into the dark little courtyard and then through the first archway. It was no use, again you were in the second courtyard, and you had to ask for directions through a whole series of other courtyards before you were back in the original courtyard, which it had taken you just a few steps to leave …”
These writings are expressions of confusion, chaos and bewilderment, a modernistic futuristic view of the world from a hundred years ago. And we still endure the same perplexing concept of the world nowadays, which is reinforced by continued unsettling political events that pursue us presently. Thank you, Franz Kafka, for your deep foresight.
And how appropriate that architect Leopold Ehrmann, who was on friendly terms with the author, and is mentioned in Kafka’s last letter, chose a Cubist form for Kafka’s gravestone.
First published in the Newsletter, The Friends of Czech Heritage, Issue 33, Summer/Autumn 2025, pp. 9 – 11.
copyright © 2026 Ivan Margolius
Even a hundred years after his death Franz Kafka, the modernist literary genius, still inspires to be studied in search of enduring ideas hidden in his complex oeuvre.
In my memoir Reflections of Prague – Journeys through the 20th century (Wiley 2006) I mentioned Kafka’s interest in Cubism, which was a prevalent trend in the Czech lands between 1910 and 1924 – a contemporary art form ever-present in the writer’s Prague location, which had a profound impact on Kafka’s view of the world.
Those were momentous times. Albert Einstein was in Prague between 1911 and 1912, lecturing at the German University, where he began working on his general theory of relativity. He attended Berta Fantová's discussion salons held in U Bílého jednorožce house on the Old Town Square, which were also frequented by Kafka, Max Brod, Hugo Bergmann, Philipp Frank and others. In Prague, Einstein wrote eleven scientific works, five of them on radiation, mathematics and on quantum theory of solids. Karel Čapek wrote the play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) in 1920.
The new artistic milieu came about as a reaction by artists to the era of scientific discoveries of the early 20th century – X-rays, radiotelegraphy, radium, four-dimensional geometry and the new view down from above afforded by aeroplane travel. Cubism was a reflection of its time, simultaneous, immediate, composite, transparent, condensed, fragmented, reconstructed, operating in different space directions and in different speeds.
In Prague between 1902 and 1914 important influential exhibitions were staged of Rodin, Munch, the French Impressionists, Bourdelle, Les Indépendants, and of the Czech Osma Group and the Group of Creative Artists. These were further supported by illustrations and reproductions in the Umělecký měsíčník and Volné směry magazines. It is certain that Kafka was aware of the new artistic trends as his close friend Max Brod reviewed some shows, such as the Osma Group’s first expressionistic exhibits in Die Gegenwart magazine in 1907.
By perception of his immediate surroundings, Kafka would be among the first writers who would get immersed in this modernistic view of the world around him that Cubism portrayed in response to the precise scientific era. The aim was not to abstract reality but to show simultaneously forms and space in relation to a constantly moving point in time. But Kafka’s reflection of the times was not just in his own limited pictorial art creativity, in his pencil or ink sketches, but primarily expressed uniquely by the style of his writing. This has rarely been discussed.
Kafka’s stories and novels did not reveal explicitly what they were about. His fiction contained many meanings and points of view, dissolving the primary significance into a multiplicity of possibilities: “But simply to get me away from the place they sent me out on useless errand. And they took care not to send me too far away, so that I had some hopes of being able to get back in time if I hurried. And there was I running as fast as I could, shouting the message through the half-open door of the office I was sent to, nearly breathless so that they could hardly make me out, and back again at top speed, and yet the student was here before me, he hadn’t so far to come, of course…” (The Trial, written in 1914-15, chapter 3, pp. 70-71, Penguin Books, 1953).
It is fascinating that Kafka tried uniquely to interpret Cubism by the style and formulation of his writing, its meanings, structure of sentences and flow of his words.
Kafka visited Paris in 1910 and 1911, but primarily he was enveloped daily by Prague’s Cubism, not only by the contemporary paintings and sculptures by Bohemian and foreign artists shown in exhibitions, but by the extraordinary Cubist architecture designed by Czech architects having been erected in the Bohemian capital city, as such a phenomenon hardly flourished elsewhere. Examples of this are Josef Chochol’s 1913 houses at Vyšehrad or the department store ‘At the Black Madonna’, which included the famous Grand Café Orient, designed by Josef Gočár and built between 1911 and 1912 on the corner of Celetná and Ovocný trh. This was on Kafka’s doorstep. He must have frequently passed by on the way to his favourite André bookshop located by the Powder Tower. At that time, Kafka lived on Mikulášská (Parížská) 36, later moving to Staroměstské náměstí 5 (6) and then to Bílková 10. Interestingly also, the exhibitions of the Group of Creative Artists were staged in interiors designed in Cubist style by Pavel Janák and Josef Gočár.
Yet this important Prague Cubist architectural landscape input into Kafka’s consciousness of the times as well as his specific texts exploring cubist perception of space failed to be mentioned in the recent study Očima Franze Kafky (Marie Rakušanová et al.,Kant 2024), which surveyed Kafka’s connection with Cubist art in Bohemia during his lifetime. Detlev Schöttker in Vielfältiges Sehen: Franz Kafka und der Kubismus in Prag (in Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte, Heft IV/4 Winter 2010, pp. 85-98), mentioned the additional effect of Prague Cubist architecture on Kafka and commented on his stories On the Tram (The Passenger) and Absent-minded Window Gazing in Meditation collection (1913) that described scenes similarly to the structure of Cubist artworks. But there is much more complexity in Kafka’s writing than these brief glimpses.
In fact, there are many more numerous instances of Kafka’s output based on the Cubist, fractured vision, multi-perception of space and objects and representation of movement in the field of vision inspired by Cubist architectural façades and multi-layered interiors in his published novels and fragments.
Here follow just three further examples. In The Castle (written in 1922, p. 17, Penguin Books, 1957) he illustrates the puzzling disjointed approach to the Castle:
“… He felt irresistibly drawn to seek out new acquaintances, but each new acquaintance only seemed to increase his weariness. If he forced himself in his present condition to go on at least as far as the Castle entrance, he would have done more than enough. So he resumed his walk, but the way proved long. For the street he was in, the main street of the village, did not lead up to the Castle hill, it only made towards it and then, as if deliberately, turned aside, and though it did not lead away from the Castle it got no nearer to it either. At every turn K. expected the road to double back to the Castle, and only because of this expectation did he go on; he was flatly unwilling, tired as he was, to leave the street, and he was also amazed at the length of the village, which seemed to have no end; again and again the same little houses, and frost-bound window-panes and snow and the entire absence of human beings – but at last he tore himself away from the obsession of the street and escaped into a small side-lane, where the snow was still deeper and the exertion of lifting one's feet clear was fatiguing; he broke into a sweat suddenly came to a stop, and could not go on …”
In one fragment from Kafka’s The Lost Writings, assembled by Reiner Stach (pp. 17-18, New Direction Books, 2020) Kafka describes the multifaceted situation the protagonist found himself in:
“… Sometimes when I came home at night, with my head bonging with the din of the big city, I was unable to find the hotel entrance right away. It's true, the entrance does seem to have been very small, it's even possible – though this would have been odd – that there was no proper entrance as such, but to go into the hotel you first had to make your way through a restaurant. It may have been that way, but then even the door of the restaurant wasn't always easy to find. Sometimes I thought I was standing in front of the hotel, but I was actually standing in front of the barracks, in a completely different square, quieter and cleaner than the one in front of the hotel, yes, deathly quiet and awesomely clean, but somehow it was able to be taken for the other. Then you had to go around the corner to find yourself in front of the hotel. It seems to me now that sometimes, only sometimes admittedly, you could get from the quiet square – say, with the help of an officer who was going the same way – and find the hotel entrance right away, and not a second or back entrance either, but the one through the restaurant …”
In the second fragment (p. 62) Kafka observes:
“…You entered the outer courtyard, and from there two arches roughly ten yards apart led into a second courtyard, you passed through an archway, and then, far from being, as expected, in a further large expanse, you found yourself in a dark little space with walls reaching up into the heavens, it was only way up that you saw some illuminated balconies. So you thought you had taken a wrong turn and wanted to return to the first courtyard, and chanced not to go back through the arch you had entered by but the one next to it. Only to find you weren't in the original courtyard at all, but in a different one, much larger, full of music and noise, and the lowing and bleating of animals. You had made a mistake, so you went back into the dark little courtyard and then through the first archway. It was no use, again you were in the second courtyard, and you had to ask for directions through a whole series of other courtyards before you were back in the original courtyard, which it had taken you just a few steps to leave …”
These writings are expressions of confusion, chaos and bewilderment, a modernistic futuristic view of the world from a hundred years ago. And we still endure the same perplexing concept of the world nowadays, which is reinforced by continued unsettling political events that pursue us presently. Thank you, Franz Kafka, for your deep foresight.
And how appropriate that architect Leopold Ehrmann, who was on friendly terms with the author, and is mentioned in Kafka’s last letter, chose a Cubist form for Kafka’s gravestone.
First published in the Newsletter, The Friends of Czech Heritage, Issue 33, Summer/Autumn 2025, pp. 9 – 11.
copyright © 2026 Ivan Margolius
Honzík and Yorke: How a Czech Architect Became the Prime Mover in the Ascent of Modern Architecture in Great Britain.
On November 8, 1934 King George V and Queen Mary opened the new building for the Royal Institute of British Architects at 66 Portland Place, London. In 1931 architectural competition conditions were issued for the new headquarters to be completed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the founding of the RIBA. By 1932, 284 submissions had been received. The winning design was by George Grey Wornum and the construction began in June 1933.
The Czech architect Karel Honzík travelled to the opening as a delegate to represent Czechoslovakia and for the evening reception had been requested to wear a tailcoat. Honzík forgot to bring the tailcoat and had to telegraph his mother to send him one via airmail. In the morning of the opening day all the delegates were invited to meet the King at Buckingham Palace.
The invitation to the opening was received by the editorial office of the Stavba magazine in Prague which was the publication of the Czechoslovak Architects’ Club, but there was no finance to fund the trip. Luckily at the same time Honzík was invited to visit Britain by a young English architect, F.R.S. Yorke, whom he had befriended on his visit to Prague three years before, and despite being very busy in the office of Havlíček & Honzík decided to come together with his wife Marie.
Karel Honzík (1900–1966) was an architect and author, member of Devětsil. He studied at the Czech Institute of Technology (1918-25) in Prague and established an architectural practice with Josef Havlíček (1899-1961) in 1928, becoming an early protagonist of International Functionalism. F.R.S. Yorke (1906–1962), an architect and author, was born in Stratford-on-Avon, son of an Arts & Crafts architect F.W.B. Yorke. He studied at the Birmingham School of Architecture (1924-30). He was influenced by writings of architect W.R. Lethaby and by architectural critic and journalist P. Morton Shand. Yorke contributed to the Architects’ Journal and was the editor of annual Specification publication. From 1935 he practised together with the émigré architect Marcel Breuer in London before Breuer departed to the United States in 1937.
Twenty-five-year old Yorke started to work for The Architectural Press publisher in 1931. Its editor, Christian Barman, steered the Press’s contributor Shand toward commenting on modern architecture to bring it forth to the consciousness of British practitioners. Shand in turn, encouraged Yorke to travel and make contacts with European architects practising the new movement. In April 1933 Shand, together with architects Wells Coates, Maxwell Fry and Yorke were the founding members of the MARS – Modern Architectural Research Group – promoting and representing new architectural thinking in Britain.
On his way through Europe, visiting France, Belgium, Italy and Germany, keen to discover new architecture, Yorke arrived in Prague in 1931. In a bookshop window he saw the publication of Mezinárodní soudobá architektura no. 3 issued by Odeon with Karel Teige’s cover displaying the model of the General Pensions Institute building (1929-34) proposed by Havlíček & Honzík, which was then being planned on the site of the former gasworks in Žižkov off Karlova street (now Winston Churchill Square). In the telephone directory he found the address of their studio and came knocking on the door at Štěpánská 35.
The Institute design, which Shand described later as ‘the white cathedral of Prague’, was Yorke’s first acquaintance with Functionalist architecture in large building projects. In fact the building was faced in ‘beige’ Rakodur ceramic tiles and initially the client resisted this finish for cost reasons. However, the tile was readily accepted after the architects had demonstrated how quickly the cheaper render would discolour in the close proximity to the sooty Main Railway station when leaving a render sample half exposed and showing in contrast the other clean half which had been covered up.
Honzík welcomed Yorke and gave him a list of other buildings to visit while in Prague. Later in 1937 Yorke wrote: ‘From photographs such buildings had looked a little inhuman, and it was difficult to visualise their insides. But to see the work as a reality, to go into the buildings, was to be reassured that here was the architecture for modern life, free plan, free façade and the logical use of new materials.’ Prague became an important milestone in Yorke’s development into an expert on European Modernism.
Yorke also met writer, painter and cartoonist Adolf Hoffmeister on his Prague visit. When he arrived again the following year, Hoffmeister offered him to stay in his flat in central Prague located in the Cubist Diamant House on Spálená 82/4.
Yorke, was very enthusiastic about what he had seen and decided, on the prompting from The Architectural Press, to inform British public about the new architectural movement. On Yorke’s return to Britain, at Yorke’s request and offer of book collaboration, Honzík sent Yorke a number of drawings, notes and photographs of modern architecture in Czechoslovakia and abroad which formed the basis of the forthcoming book. On The Modern House publication by The Architectural Press Yorke acknowledged Honzík’s help: ‘I wish to place on record my extreme indebtedness to Architekt Ing. Karel Honzík, who has supplied me with much of the material that has made the production of this book possible.’
However, due to ‘a sudden influx of work in his Prague office’ Honzík was not able to devote more time to the offered collaboration, but had hoped the intended publication would incorporate, apart from family houses and villas, also larger residential projects. In the end Yorke decided to limit the content of his first book to family houses architecture leaving modern flats design to a later publication, The Modern Flat, which came out in 1937 written together with his architect friend Frederick Gibberd. Later Honzík conceded that even just the architecture of family houses would illustrate the principles of the new style and their dispositions would embody the elements needed in residential blocks design.
The first edition of The Modern House book published in May 1934 had 128 pages and shown 57 house designs from 14 countries. It included texts and illustrations on plans, wall and window and roof elements, construction details, use of new materials and prefabrication. It was aimed at the British readers, mainly architects in need of weaning off the contemporary usage of neo-Tudor or neo-Georgian styles.
Almost immediately on its appearance the book was recognized as one of the most important documents of its time. Its success was huge. The book was widely reviewed. In The Architectural Review of July 1934 Shand said: ‘This is a memorable book, for it is the first in English which liberates architecture from its narrower self, and shows us the modern house as the technical product it really is against a background of the crystallizing discoveries and resultant complications of modern life.’ The Spectator of August 17, 1934 commented: ‘Mr Yorke’s book is by far the best on its subject that has yet appeared … It would be expensive folly for any layman to think of building a house today without first reading this book … or seeing that his architect had done so.’
Architect and author Maxwell Fry wrote in the memoir on Yorke in 1962: ‘I find it hard to overestimate the value of that book, especially for someone like myself that had not the money to travel; it was a real eye-opener and, appearing as early as 1934, gave us a conspectus of the movement at the time we most needed it.’
The book’s reputation endured appearing at the right time to inspire the young generation of British architects keen to break the barriers of the contemporary conservative attitudes to the introduction of something new in architectural design. It went through three editions before 1939, two editions during the war and three after, being updated, revised with new house designs added.
It included six villas (the number being amended in various editions) in Czechoslovakia: Heinrich Lauterbach’s Villa Hásek in Jablonec nad Nisou (wrongly labelled being in Germany), villas in Prague: Havlíček & Honzík’s Villa Jíše, Ladislav Žák’s Villa Hain, Evžen Linhart’s Villa Linhart, Adolf Benš’s Villa Diviš, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat in Brno.
In The Modern Flat several examples of apartment blocks from Czechoslovakia were also included designed by Eugene Rosenberg, Richard Ferdinand Podzemný, Josef Polášek and Havlíček & Honzík and again Honzík’s help for supplying information had been acknowledged. In his following book, A Key to Modern Architecture, written with Colin Penn in 1939 Yorke said: ‘Czechoslovakia was one of the first countries to adopt whole-heartedly the new style … Prague had been made a rendezvous for students of modern architecture.’
When in London Honzík and his wife stayed first in a hotel belonging to a Czech émigré. London was foggy and cold as it had been usual in those late autumn days and the hotel bathroom window was impossible to close. When they complained to the hotel owner he replied: ‘It’s like that to prevent bathroom steaming up which is not good for you.’ Yorke, informally known to his friends as Kay (as a result of being addressed in the army as ‘Yor-kay’) rescued them the next day and moved them to Lyons’ owned Regent Palace Hotel on Piccadilly Circus. This accommodation was much better and to the Honzíks satisfaction.
Yorke took them to visit his parents living at 36 Calthorpe Road, Edgbaston, Birmingham and they had a trip from there to Stratford. Honzíks were rather dismayed by the state of British housing and were surprised on visiting Yorke’s apartment in Old Church Street, Chelsea, London where Yorke’s wife Thelma was preparing a dinner for them in their bathroom. A wooden board placed over an old-fashioned bathtub served as the kitchen worktop and cupboards over the bath stored kitchen utensils, plates and cooking pots and this arrangement had not been in any way excused and everything had been done without any need for explanation or apology.
More surprises continued with the wooden communal toilet standing in the back yard three storeys down from the apartment. Yorke said: ‘When you come again in two or three years’ time we shall live in a new modern house which will have all in-built facilities and conveniences fully tiled and hygienic.’ In fact it was as late as in 1947 when he built a house for himself and his family at Luccombe on Isle of Wight but usually he resided a floor above his architectural studio in London.
In 1938 Yorke met the Slovak born architect Eugene Rosenberg (1907-1990) who had worked for a while for Havlíček & Honzík on the General Pensions Institute building. Rosenberg began his own practice in Prague designing and building apartment blocks, the largest being the infill between Štěpánská and Ve Smečkách, which included a retail mall passageway. In 1939 Rosenberg left for Britain to continue his career in architecture. In 1944 at Café Royal on Regent Street together with Yorke and the Finn Cyril Mardall they founded Yorke Rosenberg Mardall studio (1944-2011). Rosenberg continued in Honzík’s footsteps by bringing aspects of Czechoslovak architecture into Britain this time as real examples. Many notable buildings resulted including the Gatwick Airport, University of Warwick and St Thomas’ Hospital.
One of Rosenberg’s main contributions was his conscious import of the use of ceramic tile façades – a very permanent surface, easily cleaned and maintained without deterioration designed with very careful discipline aiming for full tile size without any tile cutting necessary – such façades, dictated by the tile dimensions, had to be projected from the outside to the inside thus determining the form of the building. Suddenly modern ‘Prague architecture’ stood prominently facing Barry’s and Pugin’s Parliament in the form of the new St Thomas’ Hospital (1966-75) – quite an immense cultural accomplishment achieved by the people of Czechoslovakia in the heart of the United Kingdom capital. Even after Brexit the legacy of Czech and Slovak architects will remain.
First published in The British Czech and Slovak Review, no. 157, Winter 2017, pp. 6 – 7. (First Prize in the 2017 BCSA International Writing Competition)
copyright © 2017, 2026 Ivan Margolius
On November 8, 1934 King George V and Queen Mary opened the new building for the Royal Institute of British Architects at 66 Portland Place, London. In 1931 architectural competition conditions were issued for the new headquarters to be completed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the founding of the RIBA. By 1932, 284 submissions had been received. The winning design was by George Grey Wornum and the construction began in June 1933.
The Czech architect Karel Honzík travelled to the opening as a delegate to represent Czechoslovakia and for the evening reception had been requested to wear a tailcoat. Honzík forgot to bring the tailcoat and had to telegraph his mother to send him one via airmail. In the morning of the opening day all the delegates were invited to meet the King at Buckingham Palace.
The invitation to the opening was received by the editorial office of the Stavba magazine in Prague which was the publication of the Czechoslovak Architects’ Club, but there was no finance to fund the trip. Luckily at the same time Honzík was invited to visit Britain by a young English architect, F.R.S. Yorke, whom he had befriended on his visit to Prague three years before, and despite being very busy in the office of Havlíček & Honzík decided to come together with his wife Marie.
Karel Honzík (1900–1966) was an architect and author, member of Devětsil. He studied at the Czech Institute of Technology (1918-25) in Prague and established an architectural practice with Josef Havlíček (1899-1961) in 1928, becoming an early protagonist of International Functionalism. F.R.S. Yorke (1906–1962), an architect and author, was born in Stratford-on-Avon, son of an Arts & Crafts architect F.W.B. Yorke. He studied at the Birmingham School of Architecture (1924-30). He was influenced by writings of architect W.R. Lethaby and by architectural critic and journalist P. Morton Shand. Yorke contributed to the Architects’ Journal and was the editor of annual Specification publication. From 1935 he practised together with the émigré architect Marcel Breuer in London before Breuer departed to the United States in 1937.
Twenty-five-year old Yorke started to work for The Architectural Press publisher in 1931. Its editor, Christian Barman, steered the Press’s contributor Shand toward commenting on modern architecture to bring it forth to the consciousness of British practitioners. Shand in turn, encouraged Yorke to travel and make contacts with European architects practising the new movement. In April 1933 Shand, together with architects Wells Coates, Maxwell Fry and Yorke were the founding members of the MARS – Modern Architectural Research Group – promoting and representing new architectural thinking in Britain.
On his way through Europe, visiting France, Belgium, Italy and Germany, keen to discover new architecture, Yorke arrived in Prague in 1931. In a bookshop window he saw the publication of Mezinárodní soudobá architektura no. 3 issued by Odeon with Karel Teige’s cover displaying the model of the General Pensions Institute building (1929-34) proposed by Havlíček & Honzík, which was then being planned on the site of the former gasworks in Žižkov off Karlova street (now Winston Churchill Square). In the telephone directory he found the address of their studio and came knocking on the door at Štěpánská 35.
The Institute design, which Shand described later as ‘the white cathedral of Prague’, was Yorke’s first acquaintance with Functionalist architecture in large building projects. In fact the building was faced in ‘beige’ Rakodur ceramic tiles and initially the client resisted this finish for cost reasons. However, the tile was readily accepted after the architects had demonstrated how quickly the cheaper render would discolour in the close proximity to the sooty Main Railway station when leaving a render sample half exposed and showing in contrast the other clean half which had been covered up.
Honzík welcomed Yorke and gave him a list of other buildings to visit while in Prague. Later in 1937 Yorke wrote: ‘From photographs such buildings had looked a little inhuman, and it was difficult to visualise their insides. But to see the work as a reality, to go into the buildings, was to be reassured that here was the architecture for modern life, free plan, free façade and the logical use of new materials.’ Prague became an important milestone in Yorke’s development into an expert on European Modernism.
Yorke also met writer, painter and cartoonist Adolf Hoffmeister on his Prague visit. When he arrived again the following year, Hoffmeister offered him to stay in his flat in central Prague located in the Cubist Diamant House on Spálená 82/4.
Yorke, was very enthusiastic about what he had seen and decided, on the prompting from The Architectural Press, to inform British public about the new architectural movement. On Yorke’s return to Britain, at Yorke’s request and offer of book collaboration, Honzík sent Yorke a number of drawings, notes and photographs of modern architecture in Czechoslovakia and abroad which formed the basis of the forthcoming book. On The Modern House publication by The Architectural Press Yorke acknowledged Honzík’s help: ‘I wish to place on record my extreme indebtedness to Architekt Ing. Karel Honzík, who has supplied me with much of the material that has made the production of this book possible.’
However, due to ‘a sudden influx of work in his Prague office’ Honzík was not able to devote more time to the offered collaboration, but had hoped the intended publication would incorporate, apart from family houses and villas, also larger residential projects. In the end Yorke decided to limit the content of his first book to family houses architecture leaving modern flats design to a later publication, The Modern Flat, which came out in 1937 written together with his architect friend Frederick Gibberd. Later Honzík conceded that even just the architecture of family houses would illustrate the principles of the new style and their dispositions would embody the elements needed in residential blocks design.
The first edition of The Modern House book published in May 1934 had 128 pages and shown 57 house designs from 14 countries. It included texts and illustrations on plans, wall and window and roof elements, construction details, use of new materials and prefabrication. It was aimed at the British readers, mainly architects in need of weaning off the contemporary usage of neo-Tudor or neo-Georgian styles.
Almost immediately on its appearance the book was recognized as one of the most important documents of its time. Its success was huge. The book was widely reviewed. In The Architectural Review of July 1934 Shand said: ‘This is a memorable book, for it is the first in English which liberates architecture from its narrower self, and shows us the modern house as the technical product it really is against a background of the crystallizing discoveries and resultant complications of modern life.’ The Spectator of August 17, 1934 commented: ‘Mr Yorke’s book is by far the best on its subject that has yet appeared … It would be expensive folly for any layman to think of building a house today without first reading this book … or seeing that his architect had done so.’
Architect and author Maxwell Fry wrote in the memoir on Yorke in 1962: ‘I find it hard to overestimate the value of that book, especially for someone like myself that had not the money to travel; it was a real eye-opener and, appearing as early as 1934, gave us a conspectus of the movement at the time we most needed it.’
The book’s reputation endured appearing at the right time to inspire the young generation of British architects keen to break the barriers of the contemporary conservative attitudes to the introduction of something new in architectural design. It went through three editions before 1939, two editions during the war and three after, being updated, revised with new house designs added.
It included six villas (the number being amended in various editions) in Czechoslovakia: Heinrich Lauterbach’s Villa Hásek in Jablonec nad Nisou (wrongly labelled being in Germany), villas in Prague: Havlíček & Honzík’s Villa Jíše, Ladislav Žák’s Villa Hain, Evžen Linhart’s Villa Linhart, Adolf Benš’s Villa Diviš, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat in Brno.
In The Modern Flat several examples of apartment blocks from Czechoslovakia were also included designed by Eugene Rosenberg, Richard Ferdinand Podzemný, Josef Polášek and Havlíček & Honzík and again Honzík’s help for supplying information had been acknowledged. In his following book, A Key to Modern Architecture, written with Colin Penn in 1939 Yorke said: ‘Czechoslovakia was one of the first countries to adopt whole-heartedly the new style … Prague had been made a rendezvous for students of modern architecture.’
When in London Honzík and his wife stayed first in a hotel belonging to a Czech émigré. London was foggy and cold as it had been usual in those late autumn days and the hotel bathroom window was impossible to close. When they complained to the hotel owner he replied: ‘It’s like that to prevent bathroom steaming up which is not good for you.’ Yorke, informally known to his friends as Kay (as a result of being addressed in the army as ‘Yor-kay’) rescued them the next day and moved them to Lyons’ owned Regent Palace Hotel on Piccadilly Circus. This accommodation was much better and to the Honzíks satisfaction.
Yorke took them to visit his parents living at 36 Calthorpe Road, Edgbaston, Birmingham and they had a trip from there to Stratford. Honzíks were rather dismayed by the state of British housing and were surprised on visiting Yorke’s apartment in Old Church Street, Chelsea, London where Yorke’s wife Thelma was preparing a dinner for them in their bathroom. A wooden board placed over an old-fashioned bathtub served as the kitchen worktop and cupboards over the bath stored kitchen utensils, plates and cooking pots and this arrangement had not been in any way excused and everything had been done without any need for explanation or apology.
More surprises continued with the wooden communal toilet standing in the back yard three storeys down from the apartment. Yorke said: ‘When you come again in two or three years’ time we shall live in a new modern house which will have all in-built facilities and conveniences fully tiled and hygienic.’ In fact it was as late as in 1947 when he built a house for himself and his family at Luccombe on Isle of Wight but usually he resided a floor above his architectural studio in London.
In 1938 Yorke met the Slovak born architect Eugene Rosenberg (1907-1990) who had worked for a while for Havlíček & Honzík on the General Pensions Institute building. Rosenberg began his own practice in Prague designing and building apartment blocks, the largest being the infill between Štěpánská and Ve Smečkách, which included a retail mall passageway. In 1939 Rosenberg left for Britain to continue his career in architecture. In 1944 at Café Royal on Regent Street together with Yorke and the Finn Cyril Mardall they founded Yorke Rosenberg Mardall studio (1944-2011). Rosenberg continued in Honzík’s footsteps by bringing aspects of Czechoslovak architecture into Britain this time as real examples. Many notable buildings resulted including the Gatwick Airport, University of Warwick and St Thomas’ Hospital.
One of Rosenberg’s main contributions was his conscious import of the use of ceramic tile façades – a very permanent surface, easily cleaned and maintained without deterioration designed with very careful discipline aiming for full tile size without any tile cutting necessary – such façades, dictated by the tile dimensions, had to be projected from the outside to the inside thus determining the form of the building. Suddenly modern ‘Prague architecture’ stood prominently facing Barry’s and Pugin’s Parliament in the form of the new St Thomas’ Hospital (1966-75) – quite an immense cultural accomplishment achieved by the people of Czechoslovakia in the heart of the United Kingdom capital. Even after Brexit the legacy of Czech and Slovak architects will remain.
First published in The British Czech and Slovak Review, no. 157, Winter 2017, pp. 6 – 7. (First Prize in the 2017 BCSA International Writing Competition)
copyright © 2017, 2026 Ivan Margolius
Paul Jaray – The genius with Prague roots
In Britain as a child you surely played with toy car models like many others, or even treasured them as an adult collector later in life. The most striking models bravely embracing the new automobile design trends were the futuristic streamlined cars issued from the mid-1930s onward.
These were cars such as the Auto Union Type B racer, the British Thunderbolt and MG Magnette land speed record cars, the ‘Speed of the Wind’ record car – all by Dinky Toys made by Meccano, the Tri-ang Minic MG Magic Midget record car, and both making streamlined saloons and tourers, then came Corgi with Campbell’s Proteus or the later issued Blue Bird and Railton Mobil Special speed record cars made by Lledo.
Liverpool-based Meccano described their Dinky Toys, introduced in 1934, as providing one of the most fascinating of collecting hobbies and splendid fun could be had in playing with them.
The London-located Lines Bros Ltd created the Tri-ang Minic range of small clockwork powered tinplate vehicles and was first registered in 1935. The name ‘Minic’ was thought to have been derived from the models two main features being ‘mini’ size and the clockwork mechanism.
There were also Johillco of Islington established in 1898, Timpo Toys began in 1938 in London, Corgi Toys started in Swansea in 1956 and Lledo was founded in Enfield in 1982. Among others was also Lesney Products of Hackney making Matchbox models from 1953.
Thus already from the first decades of the 20th century the numerous British made toy models, being amongst the world’s first, helped to popularise pioneering aerodynamic car design principles and important predictions that these ideas would conserve our planet’s limited energy resources.
But who was the mysterious creator of these attractive streamlined cars? In fact, most of them were designed using ideas devised by an engineer and designer Paul Jaray (1889-1974).
Although Jaray was born in Vienna, his ascendants originated in Prague and he even studied there. From 1932 Jaray advised Czech Wikov, Tatra, Jawa and FRM automobile manufacturers on streamlining and a number of British racing and speed record car makers used his licences such as MG of Oxford, and others consulted him on the designs of Malcolm Campbell’s Blue Birds for example.
There are many world-renown celebrities with Prague roots: Kafka, Brod, Reinerová, Ježek, Seifert, Toyen, Hoffmeister, Teige, Werich, Havel and others. It was a surprise to discover that also Jaray, such an important personality of the 20th century automobile design, although now almost forgotten, had strong connections with Prague.
Marcus Jeiteles, Paul’s grandfather, descended from a distinguished Jewish family (Jeiteles, Jeitteles, Jajteles) based in Prague. This scholarly Prague dynasty brought into being many respected physicians, writers and scientists, such as Jonas, Baruch, Juda, Isaac, Aron Jeitteles and others who were documented from the 17th century onwards. Another distinguished relation was the writer Arthur Koestler, whose mother was Adele Jeiteles, a native of Prague.
Paul Jaray was born on March 11, 1889, the youngest of his five siblings. His immediate family came from the Hungarian part of Austria-Hungary. Paul’s father, Adolf Jeiteles, was born in Temesvár (then in Hungary), the son of Marcus Jeiteles, and his mother, Therese Schönberg, was born in Makó in the Hungarian Csongrad county. She was a relative of the composer Arnold Schönberg, the daughter of Markus Schönberg.
Adolf changed his name to Járay to avoid the rising anti-Semitism in the 19th century Hungary before moving to Vienna to improve his family’s living conditions.
Jaray studied at the Maschinenbauschule in Vienna from 1906 and attended
courses at the Technische Universität. In 1911, at the same heady time as Albert Einstein resided in Prague, Jaray went there to be an assistant to Professor Rudolf Dörfl at the mechanical engineering laboratory of the German Technical University.
Then he moved to Friedrichshafen in Germany, first working at the Zeppelin-associated Kober Flugzeugbau factory designing seaplanes and from 1914 becoming an engineer at Luftschiffbau Zeppelin. There Jaray worked on practical experiments in Zeppelin's wind tunnel to finalise his ideas of the ideal body with the lowest air resistance.
In 1919, Jaray designed the innovative Bodensee airship, on which further airships such as the Graf Zeppelin and the Hindenburg were based. In 1920, he submitted a patent for a design of an airship and its gondola, followed by a design of an airship hangar.
In 1920 his investigations led to the discovery of the least air resistant body close to the ground. Jaray used the resulting teardrop form with a flattened underside as the basis for his influential development work in automobile design.
Jaray was not only one of the first to propagate the fluid mechanics of the vehicle body for its energy efficiency, but was already, at the end of the 1920s, putting forward ideas about energy conservation which he considered to be essential in view of the anticipated reduction in fossil fuel.
The first of Jaray’s streamlined automobile design sketches in his notebook date from October 1920, followed in the early 1921 by a saloon car design in an enclosed streamlined body later confirmed by wind tunnel testing. His first patent for a Kraftwagen was filed in Germany on September 8, 1921, and a further twenty or so patents followed on similar themes.
Having left Zeppelin, Jaray arrived in Switzerland and aimed to construct a new vehicle type that would include novel chassis and engine designs. Because of the impossibility of financing this actual development he concentrated on further theoretical studies in what was the most important factor in the rationality of a new automobile: its aerodynamic properties.
Jaray’s 1922 German Ley car body design, its streamlined shape built by Spohn of Ravensburg, represented the beginning of true aerodynamics of ground-based vehicles. It remained, with the Audi and the Dixi of the following year, and the Apollo of 1925, his most radical design.
He placed two teardrop forms stacked on top of each other with a body enveloping the wheels, adding a rounded windscreen, in-built headlamps and without expressed fenders avoiding any additional aesthetic styling. Among Jaray’s later car body proposals were also streamlined designs for Mercedes-Benz, Ford, Maybach, Opel, DKW, Chrysler and others.
In 1924 Jaray published an article clarifying the common misconception that in nature a falling drop of water was of a teardrop shape. Water is an unstable substance, so when it falls it is essentially spherical. Only when it is about to fall, just about suspended from an object, it assumes a pear-like form.
In contrast to the conservative attitudes to passenger car forms, the public's passion for racing cars speeds, particularly welcomed Jaray’s 1934 design of the streamlined Auto Union Type B Rekordwagen. On February 15, 1935, one of these cars ran in a successful flying mile record attempt on the Autostrada Firenze-Mare near Lucca in Italy, which is why the car was later nicknamed as the Lucca-Wagen.
With the German racing driver Hans Stuck at the wheel, it was the first automobile to exceed 199mph (320km/h) on a public road. Then two units ran on the Avus circuit in Berlin on May 26, 1935, competing for the last time.
The car was shown at the 1935 International Automobile and Motorcycle Exhibition in Berlin and subsequently one Lucca-Wagen was proudly displayed as Nazi propaganda in the National Hall of Honour in Nuremberg to celebrate the achievements of the Third Reich. However, that the Rekordwagen was designed by a Jewish engineer, the Nazi regime supressed right from the outset. Only recently the authorship of Jaray was fully revealed.
At the beginning of Jaray’s automobile design career, Edmund Rumpler, the Austrian designer of the 1921 Tropfenwagen, opposed Jaray’s streamlined Kraftwagen patent application submitted in 1921. Rumpler’s objection cost Jaray nearly six crucial years of possible licence income as his patent approval date came only in the end on March 9, 1927. It took that long until the objection was rejected.
Afterward though, most of the manufacturers waited for Jaray's rights to expire instead of investing early in the new technology and Jaray’s income through licence payments was heavily reduced. Other circumstances that stood in the way of Jaray’s success and the use of his copyrights were the world financial crisis and the temporary abandonment of international law during the rise of Nazi power and during World War II.
In 1923, Jaray and businessman Paul Susmann, founded the ‘Stromlinien Karosserie Gesellschaft’ based in Zürich, operating till 1933, which presented numerous designs for streamlined car bodywork. It endeavoured to issue licences to major vehicle manufacturers.
A similar company, the ‘Jaray Streamline Corporation’, was established in the USA in 1931 to issue patent licences but it only existed until 1938.
Jaray’s own car was built on a 1934 Audi Front chassis with a streamlined body built by Huber and Brühwiler of Luzern, which Jaray used extensively, travelling through Europe and even visiting Jawa and Tatra design offices in Prague to advise on the use of his patents. Tatra Works was one of the few manufacturers officially paying for and applying Jaray’s inventions in its extensive streamlined car production.
However, Jaray's insistence on the scientifically ideal body form with the lowest airflow resistance ignored the need of car manufacturers to differentiate their products, seeking their own specific marque identities. Regardless of the competition they faced, Jaray prescribed the same form he had found. A car design intended for Maybach by Jaray looked no different than almost the same one for Opel, for example, which displeased both contenders seeking uniqueness and created reluctance to approach Jaray for designs.
For Jaray there was no ‘styling’ tinkering to adjust his perfect teardrop forms, his motto was: ‘Eliminate or streamline!’ While lamenting on the poor contemporary automobile forms in the early 1920s, Jaray used to say: “Did you ever see a rectangular swan gliding across a pond? So why put a box on wheels and shove it through the air at high speeds?”
Jaray’s situation changed suddenly for the worse around 1940, when Franckh'sche Verlagshandlung, which had previously been close to him, published an inflammatory article titled ‘Die Technik und der Jude’ in Die Welt der Technik 1941-42 yearbook. This article hardly differed from the racism of the contemporary political propaganda campaigns directly aimed against Jaray.
Previously, Jaray's creations were celebrated as the triumphs of the streamline: "The designer Jaray played a major role in the aerodynamic development of the Zeppelin airships. He created his flawless streamlined shape on an Audi chassis more than 10 years ago, in 1923."
Despite his contribution of significant innovations, Jaray remained relatively unknown and died in obscurity in St. Gallen on September 22, 1974.
In the early 21st century, after several recent publications and exhibitions devoted to Paul Jaray’s important advances in transport design, it is commendable that his name is again gaining well-deserved recognition. Correct design attributions are now given and his streamlining principles, which have been successfully employed in all forms of transport since the 1920s, continue to conserve energy and fuel.
However, having been nominated last year (2024), Jaray is yet to be inducted in the Automotive Hall of Fame, which honours personalities that have advanced automobile design. Jaray’s last sentence of his unpublished autobiography reads: “The majority of people did not want to understand that perfect practicality is identical with beauty.”
It is heart-warming to know that Jaray had a strong bond with Prague and the Czech lands and that his progressive ideas influenced British as well as Czech and other car manufacturers and designers and will be doing so long into the future.
First published in The British Czech and Slovak Review, no. 200, February/March 2025, pp. 8 – 9. (Second Prize in the 2024 BCSA International Writing Competition)
copyright © 2026 Ivan Margolius
In Britain as a child you surely played with toy car models like many others, or even treasured them as an adult collector later in life. The most striking models bravely embracing the new automobile design trends were the futuristic streamlined cars issued from the mid-1930s onward.
These were cars such as the Auto Union Type B racer, the British Thunderbolt and MG Magnette land speed record cars, the ‘Speed of the Wind’ record car – all by Dinky Toys made by Meccano, the Tri-ang Minic MG Magic Midget record car, and both making streamlined saloons and tourers, then came Corgi with Campbell’s Proteus or the later issued Blue Bird and Railton Mobil Special speed record cars made by Lledo.
Liverpool-based Meccano described their Dinky Toys, introduced in 1934, as providing one of the most fascinating of collecting hobbies and splendid fun could be had in playing with them.
The London-located Lines Bros Ltd created the Tri-ang Minic range of small clockwork powered tinplate vehicles and was first registered in 1935. The name ‘Minic’ was thought to have been derived from the models two main features being ‘mini’ size and the clockwork mechanism.
There were also Johillco of Islington established in 1898, Timpo Toys began in 1938 in London, Corgi Toys started in Swansea in 1956 and Lledo was founded in Enfield in 1982. Among others was also Lesney Products of Hackney making Matchbox models from 1953.
Thus already from the first decades of the 20th century the numerous British made toy models, being amongst the world’s first, helped to popularise pioneering aerodynamic car design principles and important predictions that these ideas would conserve our planet’s limited energy resources.
But who was the mysterious creator of these attractive streamlined cars? In fact, most of them were designed using ideas devised by an engineer and designer Paul Jaray (1889-1974).
Although Jaray was born in Vienna, his ascendants originated in Prague and he even studied there. From 1932 Jaray advised Czech Wikov, Tatra, Jawa and FRM automobile manufacturers on streamlining and a number of British racing and speed record car makers used his licences such as MG of Oxford, and others consulted him on the designs of Malcolm Campbell’s Blue Birds for example.
There are many world-renown celebrities with Prague roots: Kafka, Brod, Reinerová, Ježek, Seifert, Toyen, Hoffmeister, Teige, Werich, Havel and others. It was a surprise to discover that also Jaray, such an important personality of the 20th century automobile design, although now almost forgotten, had strong connections with Prague.
Marcus Jeiteles, Paul’s grandfather, descended from a distinguished Jewish family (Jeiteles, Jeitteles, Jajteles) based in Prague. This scholarly Prague dynasty brought into being many respected physicians, writers and scientists, such as Jonas, Baruch, Juda, Isaac, Aron Jeitteles and others who were documented from the 17th century onwards. Another distinguished relation was the writer Arthur Koestler, whose mother was Adele Jeiteles, a native of Prague.
Paul Jaray was born on March 11, 1889, the youngest of his five siblings. His immediate family came from the Hungarian part of Austria-Hungary. Paul’s father, Adolf Jeiteles, was born in Temesvár (then in Hungary), the son of Marcus Jeiteles, and his mother, Therese Schönberg, was born in Makó in the Hungarian Csongrad county. She was a relative of the composer Arnold Schönberg, the daughter of Markus Schönberg.
Adolf changed his name to Járay to avoid the rising anti-Semitism in the 19th century Hungary before moving to Vienna to improve his family’s living conditions.
Jaray studied at the Maschinenbauschule in Vienna from 1906 and attended
courses at the Technische Universität. In 1911, at the same heady time as Albert Einstein resided in Prague, Jaray went there to be an assistant to Professor Rudolf Dörfl at the mechanical engineering laboratory of the German Technical University.
Then he moved to Friedrichshafen in Germany, first working at the Zeppelin-associated Kober Flugzeugbau factory designing seaplanes and from 1914 becoming an engineer at Luftschiffbau Zeppelin. There Jaray worked on practical experiments in Zeppelin's wind tunnel to finalise his ideas of the ideal body with the lowest air resistance.
In 1919, Jaray designed the innovative Bodensee airship, on which further airships such as the Graf Zeppelin and the Hindenburg were based. In 1920, he submitted a patent for a design of an airship and its gondola, followed by a design of an airship hangar.
In 1920 his investigations led to the discovery of the least air resistant body close to the ground. Jaray used the resulting teardrop form with a flattened underside as the basis for his influential development work in automobile design.
Jaray was not only one of the first to propagate the fluid mechanics of the vehicle body for its energy efficiency, but was already, at the end of the 1920s, putting forward ideas about energy conservation which he considered to be essential in view of the anticipated reduction in fossil fuel.
The first of Jaray’s streamlined automobile design sketches in his notebook date from October 1920, followed in the early 1921 by a saloon car design in an enclosed streamlined body later confirmed by wind tunnel testing. His first patent for a Kraftwagen was filed in Germany on September 8, 1921, and a further twenty or so patents followed on similar themes.
Having left Zeppelin, Jaray arrived in Switzerland and aimed to construct a new vehicle type that would include novel chassis and engine designs. Because of the impossibility of financing this actual development he concentrated on further theoretical studies in what was the most important factor in the rationality of a new automobile: its aerodynamic properties.
Jaray’s 1922 German Ley car body design, its streamlined shape built by Spohn of Ravensburg, represented the beginning of true aerodynamics of ground-based vehicles. It remained, with the Audi and the Dixi of the following year, and the Apollo of 1925, his most radical design.
He placed two teardrop forms stacked on top of each other with a body enveloping the wheels, adding a rounded windscreen, in-built headlamps and without expressed fenders avoiding any additional aesthetic styling. Among Jaray’s later car body proposals were also streamlined designs for Mercedes-Benz, Ford, Maybach, Opel, DKW, Chrysler and others.
In 1924 Jaray published an article clarifying the common misconception that in nature a falling drop of water was of a teardrop shape. Water is an unstable substance, so when it falls it is essentially spherical. Only when it is about to fall, just about suspended from an object, it assumes a pear-like form.
In contrast to the conservative attitudes to passenger car forms, the public's passion for racing cars speeds, particularly welcomed Jaray’s 1934 design of the streamlined Auto Union Type B Rekordwagen. On February 15, 1935, one of these cars ran in a successful flying mile record attempt on the Autostrada Firenze-Mare near Lucca in Italy, which is why the car was later nicknamed as the Lucca-Wagen.
With the German racing driver Hans Stuck at the wheel, it was the first automobile to exceed 199mph (320km/h) on a public road. Then two units ran on the Avus circuit in Berlin on May 26, 1935, competing for the last time.
The car was shown at the 1935 International Automobile and Motorcycle Exhibition in Berlin and subsequently one Lucca-Wagen was proudly displayed as Nazi propaganda in the National Hall of Honour in Nuremberg to celebrate the achievements of the Third Reich. However, that the Rekordwagen was designed by a Jewish engineer, the Nazi regime supressed right from the outset. Only recently the authorship of Jaray was fully revealed.
At the beginning of Jaray’s automobile design career, Edmund Rumpler, the Austrian designer of the 1921 Tropfenwagen, opposed Jaray’s streamlined Kraftwagen patent application submitted in 1921. Rumpler’s objection cost Jaray nearly six crucial years of possible licence income as his patent approval date came only in the end on March 9, 1927. It took that long until the objection was rejected.
Afterward though, most of the manufacturers waited for Jaray's rights to expire instead of investing early in the new technology and Jaray’s income through licence payments was heavily reduced. Other circumstances that stood in the way of Jaray’s success and the use of his copyrights were the world financial crisis and the temporary abandonment of international law during the rise of Nazi power and during World War II.
In 1923, Jaray and businessman Paul Susmann, founded the ‘Stromlinien Karosserie Gesellschaft’ based in Zürich, operating till 1933, which presented numerous designs for streamlined car bodywork. It endeavoured to issue licences to major vehicle manufacturers.
A similar company, the ‘Jaray Streamline Corporation’, was established in the USA in 1931 to issue patent licences but it only existed until 1938.
Jaray’s own car was built on a 1934 Audi Front chassis with a streamlined body built by Huber and Brühwiler of Luzern, which Jaray used extensively, travelling through Europe and even visiting Jawa and Tatra design offices in Prague to advise on the use of his patents. Tatra Works was one of the few manufacturers officially paying for and applying Jaray’s inventions in its extensive streamlined car production.
However, Jaray's insistence on the scientifically ideal body form with the lowest airflow resistance ignored the need of car manufacturers to differentiate their products, seeking their own specific marque identities. Regardless of the competition they faced, Jaray prescribed the same form he had found. A car design intended for Maybach by Jaray looked no different than almost the same one for Opel, for example, which displeased both contenders seeking uniqueness and created reluctance to approach Jaray for designs.
For Jaray there was no ‘styling’ tinkering to adjust his perfect teardrop forms, his motto was: ‘Eliminate or streamline!’ While lamenting on the poor contemporary automobile forms in the early 1920s, Jaray used to say: “Did you ever see a rectangular swan gliding across a pond? So why put a box on wheels and shove it through the air at high speeds?”
Jaray’s situation changed suddenly for the worse around 1940, when Franckh'sche Verlagshandlung, which had previously been close to him, published an inflammatory article titled ‘Die Technik und der Jude’ in Die Welt der Technik 1941-42 yearbook. This article hardly differed from the racism of the contemporary political propaganda campaigns directly aimed against Jaray.
Previously, Jaray's creations were celebrated as the triumphs of the streamline: "The designer Jaray played a major role in the aerodynamic development of the Zeppelin airships. He created his flawless streamlined shape on an Audi chassis more than 10 years ago, in 1923."
Despite his contribution of significant innovations, Jaray remained relatively unknown and died in obscurity in St. Gallen on September 22, 1974.
In the early 21st century, after several recent publications and exhibitions devoted to Paul Jaray’s important advances in transport design, it is commendable that his name is again gaining well-deserved recognition. Correct design attributions are now given and his streamlining principles, which have been successfully employed in all forms of transport since the 1920s, continue to conserve energy and fuel.
However, having been nominated last year (2024), Jaray is yet to be inducted in the Automotive Hall of Fame, which honours personalities that have advanced automobile design. Jaray’s last sentence of his unpublished autobiography reads: “The majority of people did not want to understand that perfect practicality is identical with beauty.”
It is heart-warming to know that Jaray had a strong bond with Prague and the Czech lands and that his progressive ideas influenced British as well as Czech and other car manufacturers and designers and will be doing so long into the future.
First published in The British Czech and Slovak Review, no. 200, February/March 2025, pp. 8 – 9. (Second Prize in the 2024 BCSA International Writing Competition)
copyright © 2026 Ivan Margolius