Home city's fitting tribute to architect

THE grave of a famous architect, who nobody knew was buried in Allerton, has been found and refurbished.

- By EVELINA BLACK

A ceremony took place at Allerton Cemetery on Wednesday to unveil a new memorial stone added to his grave to commemorate his life and work.

Ernst Wiesner was born on January 21, 1890 in Malacky, Slovakia, and was one of the leading architects of the interwar period in Brno, a city in the Czech Republic. He graduated from the Vienna Academy in 1913, under the tutelage of renowned Austrian architect Friedrich Ohmann, known for his major contributions to monumental and institutional architecture in Vienna and Prague.

During WWI, Ernst Wiesner served in an engineer brigade in Poland, Dalmatia and southern Tyrol. After the war, he set up his own atelier and his work ranged from private villas to major public buildings including the city crematorium, built from 1925-1930, which remains a national cultural monument.

He designed other landmark buildings in Brno including the Villa Stiassni, the Villa Neumark, the headquarters of Czech Radio Brno, and the Morava Palace.

Wiesner was of German-Jewish descent and left Brno with the arrival of the Nazis in 1939, when he fled to London. He was employed there by the Czech government in exile and supervised the reconstruction of damaged buildings. He was also an active member of the foreign antifascist resistance during the war.

From 1948 to 1950 he was a lecturer in the School of Architecture at the University of Oxford, before going on to lecture at the University of Liverpool until 1960. He stayed in the city for the rest of his life and was buried in Allerton Cemetery following his death on July 15, 1971.