Karel Járay

   

  • architect

    Karel Járay

  • Date of birth

    14. 3. 1878 Vienna

  • Date of death

    29. 11. 1947 Buenos Aires
Karl Jaray, also known as Karel Járay, was born in Vienna into a Jewish family originally from Budapest who had moved to Vienna shortly before Karl's birth. He studied architecture between 1895 and 1901 at the Vienna University of Technology. A year after graduation, he began teaching at the German Technical School in Prague, where he was appointed associate professor in 1908 and full professor nine years later. In addition to his teaching activities and his own architectural practice during his stay in Prague, he also worked for four years as editor-in-chief of the journal Technische Blätter, to which he contributed mainly articles on reinforced concrete buildings, the theory of which he was intensively involved in. Together with his wife, Margit, he converted to Catholicism before their marriage.

Jaray designed several tenement houses in Prague. For other Czech cities, he also designed sanatoriums (in Cvikov) and factories (in Lovosice). From Prague, he designed villas for clients from Bohemia (in Loučovice), as well as for those from his native Vienna, with whom he had stayed in touch. From the beginning of the 1920s, he designed buildings for the Czech Eskompt Bank (Česká eskomptní banka), whose Jihlava branch he designed together with Rudolf Hildebrand and Eduard Endler in 1926–1927. Hildebrand was Jaray's long-time close collaborator, with whom he ran an architectural office in Prague. Even before the completion of the bank in Jihlava, Jaray returned to Vienna, apparently because of the strong anti-Semitic mood at the Prague Technical University. In Vienna, he continued to design for both Austrian builders and clients from Czechoslovakia.

Jaray's buildings represent a conservative stream of interwar architecture that uses simplified elements of Neoclassicism. One aspect of his work consisted of distinctively plastic façades with historicist motifs, the other of rather purist tendencies, but he was able to combine both of these approaches harmoniously. He also devoted himself to literature, which he was very fond of. He was friends with the writers Karel Kraus and Adolf Loos and helped to publish their texts. After the Anschluss of Austria, he lived again in Prague for a short time, and then emigrated to London after the Protectorate was established. During the war, he moved from Britain to Argentina, where he designed several largely industrial buildings. He died in Buenos Aires.

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