Wiener, Paul Lester, 1895-1967

Paul Lester Wiener was born in Leipzig, Germany, in 1895. He was educated in the Royal Academy of Berlin with post graduate study in Vienna and Paris. He came to the United States in 1913 and became a citizen in 1919. He returned to Europe for further study and work until 1927. With Bruno Paul, Wiener founded Contempora, a group of international artists, in 1928. Returning to the United States that year, Wiener took up a comfortable architectural practice and in 1937 designed the U.S. Government building and its interiors for the International Exposition in Paris. For his work, he was awarded three Grand Prix by the Jury of the Exposition.

In 1938, Paul Lester Wiener was commissioned by the governments of Ecuador and Brazil to organize and design interiors and exhibits for these countries' pavilions at the New York World's Fair. The war years found him working with the U.S. Office of Production and Research Development as well as in his own company, Ratio Structures, Inc., to develop prefabricated and demountable housing, suitable for post war housing construction and retail marketing. In 1942, Wiener joined José Luis Sert, formerly of Barcelona, Spain, to form Town Planning Associates which was to operate until 1959 as an architectural, urban planning and site planning consultant firm of international reputation. During this period, Wiener lectured extensively in the United States and Latin America as an expert in urban planning.

With Town Planning Associates, Paul Lester Wiener accomplished his most notable work. Collaborating with Le Corbusier, Wiener and Sert originated a master plan for the city of Bogota and several other city units in Columbia which were based on the principles of planning for expected population and organizing the growth of the city in and efficient manner, as well as reorganizing existing features to provide planned living and recreational space for residents with an eye to preventing the undesirable effects of random growth such as slum housing and inequitable distribution of land, etc.

While Bogota, Cali, Medillin and Chibote were extant cities, Cidade dos Motores, Brazil, was a jungle wilderness near Rio de Janiero, when Wiener and Sert undertook to plan a city for 25,000 persons from the very beginning. Primarily conceived as an industrial community to house workers and supervisors of a huge wartime airplane factory, Cidade dos Motores presented the opportunity for the town planner to organize the total development of the urban unit. The entire plan was completed in 1949 and was widely publicized in planning circles. Other than published records, little in this collection documents Cidade dos Motores.

Wiener continued to work in Latin America, establishing a national planning commission in Havana as a base for five planning projects for the country of Cuba. Examining the work of Town Planning Associates for the three years in Cuba, it is interesting to note the political forces which played a large part in this and any planning project. The actual planning entailed a reconstruction of the core of Havana, several neighborhood and resort areas, and the planning of the Presidential Palace.

Yet another kind of planning was executed by Wiener in the project initiated by the Orinoco Mining Company in Venezuela, where private corporations worked with the government and professional planners and architects to develop two urban units and port for use by the mining company which would last past the life of the business venture as successful communities. This plan took three years to completely develop, beginning in 1951.

In 1958, Wiener accepted his most significant commission in the United States: to plan a neighborhood development in the Washington Square area of New York City, providing several thousand housing units within a six block area. Combining his concepts of clean basic lines an functional form with bold color, he designed a series of high rise apartments which incorporated outdoor patio style living with the convenience of a central urban location and exciting visual environment.

Although Wiener had done some residential designing all during his career, he turned to this more during the sixties, designing summer homes, planning renovations of apartments and houses and creating distinctive interiors for his clients. Employing straight lines relieved by bright colors and pieces of sculpture and paintings, he achieved an amenable compromise between show place and functional home. He continued in this work and as a consultant in residential housing projects until his death in 1967.

Paul Lester Wiener was a gentleman whose home, office and thoughts were open to a variety of world wide associates with whom he met to plan, to build, to discuss, to persuade. he worked to provide a pliable plan for the construction of an environment in which the human could live and work in comfort and confidence of a sustained condition of excellence. In his own words, he describes his reasons for being a planner and architect: "It has been forever my fate to want to bring order into chaos. Consequently whenever a fateful person or situation presents itself, I am compelled to try to right it in the best ways I can. [...] It proceeds from a creative instinct to construct something of balance. [...] Elements are used in designing buildings or objects by means of an idea where its component parts are formed into a homogeneous group. They are satisfying when all the component parts are properly placed in their relation to the whole. Humans are the most difficult materials for the process of the creative urge."

From the guide to the Paul Lester Wiener papers, 1913-1968, (Special Collections and University Archives, University of Oregon Libraries)