Jan Olaf Chmielewski

Jan Olaf Chmielewski (born February 8, 1895 in Nizhny Novgorod , † December 1, 1974 in Warsaw ) was a Polish urban planner and university professor.

Life

Chmielewski was born in Russia because his father and grandfather were exiled here. After the father's death, the family moved back to Warsaw. During the First World War , the 19-year-old enlisted in the Piłsudski unit of the Polish Legions and was taken prisoner by the Russians in 1916. When the October Revolution broke out he was in St. Petersburg ; Chmielewski enlisted in the Red Army Navy and did not return to Poland until September 1919. In Warsaw he then studied - interrupted by a long illness - civil engineering under Oskar Sosnowski, Rudolf Świerczyński and Tadeusz Tołwiński .

From 1930 he worked under Stanisław Różański in the Warsaw Regional Planning Office (Polish: Biuro Planu Regionalnego Warszawy ); at the same time he held an assistant position at the Technical University of Warsaw with Sosnowski and later with Tołwiński. While working on a new urban development concept, Chmielewski got to know the CIAM representative Szymon Syrkus , who was about the same age . Together, the two city planners presented the “Warszawa funkcjonalna” (Polish: Functional Warsaw ) project to the CIRPAC group in London in 1934.

Biuro Planu Regionalnego Warszawy

In 1936, Chmielewski took over the management of the Warsaw Regional Planning Office. The project Dzielnica Marszałka Piłsudskiego (DMP, District of Marshal Piłsudski) was developed together with Bohdan Pniewski , but it was not implemented. Later, under Chmielewski, the Warszawski Zespoł Miejski (WZM) model was created , which is intended to loosen up the densely populated inner city. After the beginning of the Second World War and the following occupation , Chmielewski, although still employed by the city's magistrate, could no longer be involved in planning. During private, often secret, meetings of Polish town planners, the idea arose to widen Ulica Marszałkowska and develop it as the city's central north-south axis. He also worked in Szymon and Helena Syrkus ' "PAU" office.

At the end of 1942, Chmielewski was arrested in a street raid. He was taken to the Majdanek concentration camp , but was ransomed by friends in the spring of 1943. When he returned to Warsaw, he did his doctorate underground. During the war he joined the Polish Workers' Party (PPR) and from 1944 worked for the later politician Michał Kaczorowski, who worked for the Lublin government .

BOS, GUPP and teaching

Shortly after the Germans had left Warsaw, Chmielewski joined the newly established office for the reconstruction of the capital BOS as head of the urban development department . His earlier considerations about the machine tool were now the basis for the new planning and reconstruction. In June 1945 he took over the newly formed State Central Office for Spatial Planning (Polish: Glówny Urząd Planowania Przestrzennego GUPP ), which dealt with national planning for all of Poland.

From 1947 he was head of the Department of Spatial Planning at the Technical University in Warsaw; In 1949 he was appointed professor there. A short time later, the new rulers liquidated GUSS and subsequently also Chmielewski's chair. With like-minded people, the now isolated and influential urban planner founded the office for fundamental issues of spatial planning (Polish: Pracownia Podstawowych Zagadnień Planowania Przestrzennego ). From 1958 to 1962 this group dealt with planning considerations that extended beyond the urban area of ​​Warsaw. From 1962 Chmielewski worked again at the Warsaw Technical University, he was in charge of the Institute for Fundamental Issues in Architecture, Urban Planning and Building (Polish: Zakład Podstawowych Problemów Architektury, Urbanistyki i Budownictwa ) and was again appointed full professor in 1965 - one year before his retirement .

literature

• Niels Gutschow, Barbara Klain, Destruction and Utopia. Urban planning Warsaw 1939-1945 , Junius-Verlag, ISBN 3-88506-223-2 , Hamburg 1994, p. 151 ff.

References and comments

1. ^ Oskar Sosnowski (1880-1939) was a Polish architect and monument protector.
2. ^ Rudolf Świerczyński (1883-1943) was a Polish architect and university professor.