Polish Modernism’s Essentialist Claim
The Hansens and Open Form Architecture

This paper traces the continuities between the post-war Polish husband-and-wife architect duo of Oskar and Zofia Hansen, and their predecessors from the interwar avant-garde, the husband-and-wife artist duo of painter Władysław Strzemiński and sculptor Katarzyna Kobro. It argues that the Hansens’ Open Form (1958) approach extended the essentialism of Strzemiński and Kobro’s theory of Unism […]

Architecture as a Pedagogical Object: What to preserve of the Przyczółek Grochowski Housing Estate by Oskar & Zofia Hansen in Warsaw?

In 1990 a newsreel which documented the emergence of new types of services arising after the fall of socialism in Poland showed a private company working on a security scheme for the Przyczółek Grochowski Housing Estate in Warsaw. Bending over the plan of meandering buildings, the guards tried to establish effective procedures for protecting the […]