GradDiplTrop(AA) PlanDipl(AA)
The following obituary was written by the family of the deceased diplomat and architect Alfred Wells to be shared with AA community.
"Alfred Wells, born in White Plains, NY, always wanted to become an architect but thought that law and diplomacy were more proper careers. It wasn’t until 1966, when he retired after 25 years in the US Foreign Service, that he began his lifelong career dream and graduated in 1970 from The Architectural Association (AA) with two degrees in tropical architecture and in urban planning. He went on to work on several continents over the next thirty years.
While studying law at Yale in the 1930s, Wells treasured his classes about architecture and kept detailed notes. He entered the Foreign Service in 1941 and served in Buenos Aires, Colombo, Paris, Rangoon, Vienna, Bremen, Bonn and London. In Rangoon, he lived in a houseboat that he himself built. When in Vienna, he built a small wooden house for his daughter Gully and then had the whole structure dismantled, shipped to Mt. Riga, near Salisbury, Connecticut, and rebuilt for her. Wherever he went, he took dozens of photos of churches, façades, pagodas, statues and other beauties of architecture. In his last post, at the US Embassy on Grosvenor Square in London, he served as executive assistant to Ambassador David Bruce. During that period Wells, picking up information at cocktails, warned the ambassador about the Profumo affair before it became public.
When in Paris in 1949, he married Dee Wells, who later became author of bestseller novel “Jane.” In 1960, he subsequently married Melissa Wells, who served as ambassador to several African countries and Estonia. He would go on to do architectural work in several of the countries where she was posted.
Upon retirement in 1966, Wells began studying at The AA in London. He was 50 years old, in class with much younger colleagues who had very strong opinions about the war in Vietnam. At one point, his friends convinced him to go to a protest in front of the US Embassy, where his wife was working that day, but he quietly slipped out while the students clashed with the police.
The first structure that he built, as an AA student, was a wooden cube to serve as a vacation home for the family in Carriacou, an island belonging to Grenada. He tested the structure by asking his AA student friends to help set up the cube in Brompton Square, much to the puzzlement of the neighbors. The cube was permanently built in Carriacou, survived several hurricanes but was blown away by US Marines in 1983 when they invaded the island. The Department of Defense reimbursed Wells for the lost cube, in probably the only such case for an AA project.
In 1969, he published his first work on architecture in the AA Quarterly, about low-cost housing in Casablanca. Upon moving to Washington, DC, in 1971 he worked for Doxiadis Associates (2 years), John Portman Associates (3 years) and for Habitat in Haiti. In 1978, he was a senior planner in the New York City Economic Development Administration. From 1980 to 1981, Wells worked as a consultant to United Nations Development Program (UNDP) on housing for UN employees in the poorest countries of Africa and Asia, where rent can be high and quality housing scarce. In 1989, he did a study for the Mozambican government to determine the correct value for compensating owners of traditional caniço homes in Maputo, as part of projects in the capital. In 2001, at the age of 85 and with free time on his hands as Melissa served as ambassador to Estonia, he wrote a guide on the many manor houses that litter that lovely country. The guide is one of the most popular tourist books about Estonia and is available on Amazon.com.
He applied his skills to motor vehicles as well. In 1968, he adapted a VW Kombi so that the family of four could sleep in it and cook. The family would often sleep on the weekends in the fields of England and France, and cook their own breakfast. They also took the Kombi to the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. In 1981, he adapted a Toyota Hilux to the same effect, so that the family could move overland from the posting in Nairobi to Geneva, via the Sudan and Egypt. The two-month trip through the Sudan was the best trip the family has ever taken.
In the seventies, he built a spacious two-story treehouse in Mt. Riga, Connecticut and a proper vacation house in Carriacou, both of which survived hurricanes without need of repair. In the eighties, he refurbished a 200-year-old manor house, La Tour, in Cessy, France, just outside of Geneva. The former owner of La Tour sold it to the Wellses under the condition that they would not change the outside aspects of the property. Starting in 1969 all the way until 2005, he constantly worked on a home in the small town of Agulo, on the island of La Gomera, in the Canaries, where the couple would live after Melissa retired. Alfred and Melissa were the first couple in the US diplomatic corps who both exercised full diplomatic careers.
Wells is survived by Melissa, who lives in Agulo, and their sons Christopher and Gregory, and his daughter Gully."
