Kurt Jonas

Kurt Jonas (1914–1942) was a German-South African architect. As a disciple of Modernist architecture, he was part of what Le Corbusier termed Le Groupe Transvaal, together with Harold Le Roith, Rex Distin Martienssen, John Fassler, Bernard Cooke, Duncan Howie, Monte Bryer and Roy Kantorowich. According to the architect and architectural historian, Clive Chipkin, Jonas was "aware of the need that the new architecture and fundamental social change in South Africa should be complimentary." Early life Jonas was born in Johannesburg in the Union of South Africa in 1914 to a German Jewish migrant parents. The family returned to Germany in 1918 and Jonas studied at the Lessing-Gymnasium in Frankfurt. He studied classics and later economics and law at the Royal Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin in Berlin.

Career As a fourth year student in the architecture school, he began to work for the architectural practice of Harold Le Roith. On the back of the model township exhibition, he collaborated on a thesis with Roy Kantorowich, Paul Harold Connell, Charles Irvine-Smith and Frans J. Wepener for a "high-rise" black township set in parklands. Rusty Bernstein, an architecture student and later anti-apartheid activist, first learned through Jonas of "the invisible world of black workers and trade unions which existed on my own doorstep." Jonas had also belonged to the Zionist Socialist Party in South Africa, previously known as Tzeirei Zion.

In 1942 he was awarded a South African government postgraduate research scholarship.

Death Jonas died at the age of 27 from a long illness in Jerusalem, Mandatory Palestine (present-day Israel) in 1942.