Alex Jelinek (1925-2007) was a Czech-born architect and designer best known for one house in Canberra, considered a significant contribution to 1950s experimental modernism in Australia. His father was a master builder from Hradec Kralove, and Jelinek gained a builder’s certificate in that city (noted for its early modernist buildings) before studying architecture at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts under the Czech Functionalist Jaroslav Fragner. Just before completing his degree Jelinek fled the Communist regime in November 1948 by highjacking a light plane to Germany. He arrived in Melbourne in 1950, ending up a “leading hand” building the Guthega Dam in the Snowy Mountains Scheme. Through his relationship with the noted Melbourne painter Lina Bryans he obtained his first commission, a large house for the Melbourne-born philosopher Bruce Benjamin of the Australian National University. Built in 1957 and photographed by Wolfgang Sievers, the house at 10 Gawler Crescent Deakin was awarded “House of the Year” in 1958 by Architecture and Arts (Melbourne) and published in Aujourd’hui (Paris). Based on a Pythagorean spiral with angular rooms radiating from a central glass impluvium, the house dominates a large block with old-growth gums. The cantilevered cement balcony, long blade walls (in concrete blocks) and a hardwood fascia show the influence of Wright and Aalto. Jelinek was remarkable for his inventiveness, his engineering prowess and his fine draftsmanship; his “Round House” remains a Canberra icon and is is one of just two homes on the ACT Heritage Register.
In the early 1960s Jelinek built a steel and glass roadhouse at Peregian Beach near Noosa (demolished 2003) and an extension for the house of Lina Bryans at 39 Erin St Richmond. Several detailed commissions for large houses and an art gallery at Mornington remained unbuilt. From the later sixties the reclusive designer withdrew to make aluminium sculpture and furniture; he travelled regularly to the Simpson Desert and Alice Springs with Bryans. Her portrait of Jelinek dated 1955 was gifts to the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra by Bryans’s heirs in 2015.
- Writers:
-
Rogbenja
- Date written:
- 2015
- Last updated:
- 2015
