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Biography

Marcel Eugen Sedletzky was born March 29, 1923 to Elena and Apollon Sedletzky in Tsaritsyn (now Volgograd), Russia, a port city on the Volga River. Sedletzky's Polish father was an architect who worked primarily in landscape design, while his mother was a physician. In the early 1930's everything changed dramatically for the Sedletzky family when Apollon was taken away by uniformed Bolshevik soldiers and sent to Siberia. Mother and son fled to Poland, where Apollon's family lived. After an unknown length of time there, long enough however for Sedletzky to attend elementary school, they moved south, where he attended the German-run Real Gymnasium for Men in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. He graduated in 1941 with a Matura degree, the equivalent to two years of junior college in the United States.

Not much is known of his activities during World War II, although both Sedletzky and his mother were conscripted into the German army, where the two of them worked behind the front lines. Sedletzky rode a motorcycle, clearing the way for ambulances en route from the front to the field hospital where his mother worked. The war's end found Sedletzky and his mother living near the town of Zell am See in Austria.

In 1946, he entered the Technische Hochschule (today the Technical University) in Graz, Austria, where he began pursuing an interest in engineering and industrial design with a focus on architecture. During his course of study he participated in least one workshop with Le Corbusier, the influential Swiss-born architect who was among the leaders of the International Style. After two years at the school, while working simultaneously in Zell am See as a junior draftsman, Sedletzky and his mother, like thousands of other displaced persons, left Europe on a ship bound for New York. Originally assigned to a sponsoring family in Kansas, they instead went to Indianapolis and worked as domestics for the attorney Warrack Wallace and his wife. With the Wallaces' help, Sedletzky gained admission to the University of Cincinnati, in spite of his limited English skills. In 1950, at the age of 27, he entered an accelerated program established to allow men whose academic pursuits had been interrupted by the war to move more rapidly through course work and on-the-job training. Sedletzky graduated in June 1952 with a B.S. in Architecture. While at the university, he met and married his first wife Gunnel Rodën, a Swedish woman several years his junior who had come to Cincinnati to study art.

Following graduation and a move to California, Sedletzky was hired into planning office of the architectural firm Victor Gruen and Associates in Los Angeles. Run by two other émigrés, Victor Gruen and Rudolf L. Baumfeld, VGA was one of the nation's prime players in urban planning and shopping center design in the 1950's and 1960's. Sedletzky worked first as a designer, then as staff architect, staff planner, and project director at VGA, becoming an associate planner in 1956. He was involved in a number of the firm's large projects in the U.S. and internationally. In addition to his more traditional staff role at VGA, Sedletzky for several years taught a course on perspective drawing to other staff members. His small class met at the office one night a week, and was, according to former colleagues, "the absolutely perfect class on perspective."

Though immersed in the busy world of Victor Gruen and Associates, and perhaps in part because he was frustrated by doing more planning than architecture, Sedletzky found time to explore residential design projects on his own. In 1957, after receiving his California architecture license, he designed a small Hollywood Hills house for a Russian family, the Shevtzoffs, who were friends and camping companions of the Sedletzkys. The Shevtzoffs' house was never built, but his spare, soft pencil, drawings reflect the clean, rectilinear purity of residences designed in mid-century Los Angeles.

Sedletzky left Victor Greun Associates to take a job in Carmel with the small architectural firm of Robert C. Jones. His mother and her second husband, a Russian instructor at the Defense Language Institute, had preceded him in the move to the Monterey Peninsula. Sedletzky rose quickly in the Jones firm, becoming the unofficial principal designer in the office. From the outset, he demonstrated expertise in planning and design innovation, and in the production of presentation drawings. Jones's appreciation of his new employee's talents translated into free reign for Sedletzky. As he had done in Los Angeles, Sedletzky eagerly explored the spectacular environment around Carmel. He hiked more than ever before, alone or with his wife and three children. By the time he left the Jones firm in 1960 to launch a private architectural practice, Sedletzky had acquired a set of skills and experiences that provided a strong underpinning for a bold designer who was not afraid to strike out anew. He had a natural talent at both engineering and drawing, and his European and American architectural training had sharpened those innate skills. The years at Victor Gruen Associates steeped him in the complexities of planning, and the time at Jones gave him confidence in his ability to translate a vision into a practical, buildable set of plans.

Marcel conducted his solo practice in Carmel for fourteen years until he moved to San Luis Obispo in 1974 to teach at California Polytechnic State University. During his Carmel years he had managed to bring fifteen houses to completion and design numerous other projects that never advanced beyond sketches. One house per year was an all consuming job that meant he never made much money and the occassional lulls led to hiring himself out for part-time work. Another added pressure was the dissolution of his marriage to Gunnel. For the first time Sedletzky began think and look beyond Carmel. Paul Neel, a friend who was the director of the architecture program at Cal Poly, invited him to teach a class in January 1972. In spite of some initial trepidation, Sedletzky enjoyed the change of pace and indicated he would like to increase his involvement from lecturer to a full tenured position. This meant he would have to return to school for an advanced degree. He was accepted into UC Berkeley's Masters in Architecture program in January 1973 and graduate the same year in December. In March 1974, he was hired as an Associate Professor of Architecture at Cal Poly. Later that year, Marcel closed his practice in Carmel and moved to San Luis Obispo with his second wife Barbara. Although he would continue to design additions and remodels for previous clients and his own Casa Concha, the days of bold ideas translated into dramatic houses were essentially behind him. He retired from teaching in 1992 and moved permanently to Casa Concha in Bahia Kino, Mexico where he died in 1995.

Sedletzky managed to balance and integrate two powerful, radically different views of architecture, manifest in the writings and work of his two heroes, Le Corbusier the modernist and Wright the proselytizing "organicist," the European and the American. Perhaps because he was an immigrant himself, born in one world and working in another, Sedletzky was able to meld the two visions of the built world, and, over the course of a dozen years, from 1960 until 1973, to translate theoretical notions into distinctive and sometimes extraordinary residences on the Central Coast of California.

Excerpted from Marcel Sedletzky: Architect and Teacher by Bill Staggs.