Paul Engelmann

Paul Engelmann was born in 1891 in Olomouc

Engelmann was born in 1891 in Olomouc, Moravia, then part of Austria-Hungary. He finished a secondary school in his hometown and then moved to Vienna.

In Vienna he studied for 2 years at the technical college and studied with the modernist architect Adolf Loos. He also worked as private secretary to the writer Karl Kraus.

After World War I he designed private houses in several European cities, following the design ideas of Loos. In November 1925 Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein asked him to design her Vienna town house, and her brother Ludwig Wittgenstein later took over as its architect. He was friends with Wittgenstein from 1916 to 1928.

In 1934 he emigrated to the Land of Israel and settled in Tel Aviv. He did less architecture there and wrote about Loos, Kraus and Wittgenstein, though in 1947 he designed interiors for the Jordanian Parliament and the throne hall of King Abdullah in Amman. He died in Tel Aviv in 1965, and his archive is kept at the National Library.