Matthew Nowicki

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Maciej "Matthew" Nowicki (born  June 26, 1910 in Tschita , Russian Empire , † August 31, 1950 near Cairo in Egypt ) was a Polish architect , urban planner , architecture professor and graphic artist . With his most famous building, the Dorton Arena , the first large building in architectural history with a freely hanging roof, he ushered in the era of lightweight construction . In 1954, the architecture magazine L'Architecture d'aujourd'hui described Nowicki as the pioneer of architecture in the second half of the 20th century, and Frei Otto called him the “architect for architects”.

Nowicki was initially a representative of a strict formalism according to Le Corbusier . He soon left the monotony of the cubes , the primacy of the right angle and the straight line behind, and oriented himself more and more towards organic structures that served people and not the other way around. This is most evident in the planning of the new capital Chandigarh in the northern Indian state of Punjab . There Nowicki aligned the course of the street and the residential districts with the grain of a leaf ( Leaf Plan ). After Nowicki's untimely death, Le Corbusier replaced the natural route planning, adapted to the terrain, with a rectangular grid, but adopted many details from Nowicki's designs for his brutalist architecture and is considered the only urban planner in Chandigarh. Nowicki is counted among the few architects today who would have been able to overcome the monotony of modern architecture and give cities a more human appearance.

Life

Maciej Nowicki was the only child of Zygmunt Nowicki, a lawyer, nobleman and prominent activist of the peasant movement, after two siblings who died in an accident. Nowicki Jr. spent his childhood in Słomniki near Cracow and in Chicago , where his father was consul general from 1918. In Chicago he attended drawing lessons at the Art Institute of Chicago school . After his father's return to Poland, he continued his art education at Wojciech Gerson's School of Fine Arts in Warsaw and later at Józef Mehoffer's School of Painting and Drawing in Krakow.

Education

He studied architecture at the Technical University of Warsaw from 1928 to 1936 . His fellow students and the teaching staff were mostly returnees from France, Russia, Germany and Austria, who represented different currents and views on architecture from there. He did a short internship in Le Corbusier's office, but leaned more towards the architectural style of Auguste Perret , a master of reinforced concrete construction . He then became an assistant to Professor Rudolf Świerczyński, with whom he designed, among other things, the Warsaw State Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego 'Bank for Economics' ( BGK ). According to Barucki, Świerczyński preferred “logical composition” and “transparent building”, which he combined with a “certain boldness” of ideas that “extended far into the future”. His architectural style was shaped by the premise of leaving out everything that is not necessary (“ design by subtraction ”).

During his studies he met fellow student Stanisława Sandecka, whom he married in 1938. With her he designed several buildings and many posters and magazine covers in the Art Deco style . In 1938, he and Jan Boguslawski designed the Polish pavilion for the 1939 World's Fair in New York .

Second World War

In 1939 he was drafted as an officer in an anti-aircraft battery. The couple was then able to carry out smaller construction projects such as cafes. During the German occupation in Poland he taught in the Warsaw Underground. He taught in illegal classes at a school for building trades in order to circumvent the Nazis' prohibition of education beyond basic skills and elementary knowledge. He also taught for students at the Faculty of Architecture at the Warsaw University of Technology , which was closed by the Germans, and at a private women's technical drawing school for the construction industry.

During the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 he was a liaison officer of the Polish Home Army and was wanted by the Gestapo . After the suppression of the uprising, the Nowickis fled to the border in the High Tatras .

Rebuilding Warsaw

After the war, Nowicki worked for a few months on the planning for the redesign of the Warsaw center, which was 90% destroyed according to plan . Nowicki received an official order for himself and his employees from the Biuro Odbudowy Stolicy 'Office for the Reconstruction of the Capital' ( BOS ), which comprised around 2000 architects and civil engineers. Contrary to the later reconstruction of Warsaw, Nowicki decided to start over. He wanted to separate road and pedestrian traffic on two levels without crossing. He dissolved the historical, closed ensemble development with avenues, squares and stand-alone buildings, which he in turn assigned to various functional areas, graduated according to heights. Preserved historical buildings should be integrated into it. The new buildings themselves should be able to be combined with one another in a diverse and modular manner thanks to prefabricated construction parts in large and small standard rows . The future parliament building had a structural novelty: it was a cylinder structure with a spoke-shaped, concentric suspended roof.

United States of America

In December 1945 he traveled with his family to the USA , first as a cultural attaché for the Polish embassy and shortly afterwards as a member of Le Corbusier's group of architects for the New York UN headquarters (1947–1953). During the planning phase, Nowicki was able to successfully mediate in the discussions thanks to his tactful mediation and with an eye for the essentials.

Nowicki and his wife had a residence and work permit in the USA, but they were denied membership in the Chamber of Architects . Therefore, they had to work with several established architects for the first few years. From 1947 to 1948 he taught at the School of Architecture at New York's Pratt Institute . In 1948 the Nowickis decided to stay in America. On the recommendation of her friend Lewis Mumford , he became a co-founder and vice- dean of the School of Design at North Carolina State College in Raleigh, North Carolina that same year . In 1949 he designed several buildings with Eero Saarinen for the campus of Brandeis University in Massachusetts .

Dorton Arena

Dorton Arena in Raleigh

A local contract for an exhibition hall was to be Nowicki's most famous building. With the State Fair Arena in Raleigh , later Dorton Arena, he wrote architectural history and exerted a great influence on the development of architecture. The fair manager JS Dorton no longer wanted the autumn cattle auctions to take place outdoors. But so that this hall was not empty for most of the year, it should be a multi-purpose building and also usable for other events. Dorton turned to the dean of architecture at the local university, Henry Kamphoefner , a proponent and promoter of modern architecture, and he recommended Nowicki as an architect.

Nowicki used this opportunity to realize his earlier idea of ​​a free-hanging roof made of steel cables as before for the unbuilt Warsaw Parliament building. This time he went a few steps further and thus created a completely new building concept, which was admired worldwide for its transparent and elegant construction. It inspired several successor buildings and many further developments. A steel net forms the roof surface between two long steel arches that cross each other at a height of eight meters. To stabilize the construction, the two ends of the steel arches in the ground are connected to one another by steel cables. An additional support is therefore no longer necessary and thus offers the possibility of a fully glazed facade design.

This construction, described as “simple and at the same time elegant”, set in motion the development of lightweight construction . The hall was built a year after Nowicki's accidental death, and his widow was able to help with many details. On April 11, 1973, the Dorton Arena was added to the National Register of Historic Places as a National Historic Monument . This monument status saved the Dorton Arena from serious interventions during the later renovations.

India

In February 1950, through the mediation of Lewis Mumford and city planner Clarence Stein, it was proposed to real estate developers Albert Mayer and Henley Whittlessey for another city planning project. After India gained independence, a new capital was to be constructed from the drawing board in the northern Indian state of Punjab ( planned city ).

Nowicki took the initiative as well as the management and developed an organic floor plan of the city based on a leaf, the so-called Leaf Plan . The green main axis led to the Capitol , the parliament with its administrative buildings, which was primarily to be reached via a river ramp and was supposed to be on a hill - with the panorama of the Himalayas as a background. The secondary axes, which arched towards the main street, divided the residential districts, here called superblocks , although the quarters were not right-angled, but extended along curves. From the end of June 1950 he stayed in India for eight weeks and was inspired by the surroundings. There he made many sketches, including a model of a city district for simple parliamentary officials. He wanted to use red brick as a building material for the houses and loosened up their facades with inwardly offset entrances and verandas with sun roofs. In each district, sidewalks and streets were spatially separated and each was equipped with schools, kindergartens, playgrounds, shopping centers, etc.

With his work and his personality, Nowicki was able to convince the Indian authorities so much that he was asked to work as Minister for Housing of the State of Punjab. He accepted the offer, but wanted to settle his affairs in the USA beforehand. On the return flight from Chandigarh, Nowicki died after a stopover in Cairo when TWA Flight 903 crashed near Wadi Natrun . Despite the almost complete destruction of the aircraft, the experts were able to carry out an exact damage analysis and also recommend preventive measures.

After that, Le Corbusier of all people was commissioned to continue the urban planning, from whose functionalist architectural style Nowicki had repeatedly turned away in writing. Le Corbusier made tabula rasa with the Leaf Plan and arranged everything in a grid. (Le Corbusier: "The straight line and the right angle cut through the thicket of difficulty and ignorance and are a clear manifestation of power and will.") He discarded the local building material brick in favor of brutalistic exposed concrete with many consequential problems, since the material turns out to be proved not stable enough against the extreme weather conditions. Finally, it is also accused of heroic architecture.

family

Maciej Nowicki and his wife Stanisława (Siasia) Sandecka had two sons, Paul and Peter. Stanisława Nowicki taught architecture at the University of Pennsylvania from 1951 to 1977 .

Fonts

  • Bruce H. Schafer (Ed.): The writings and sketches of Matthew Nowicki. University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville 1973.
  • Maciej Nowicki: On Exactitude and Flexibility. In: Student Publications of the School of Design North Carolina State College, Raleigh, NC , Vol. 6, 1951, pp. 11-18 ( online pp. 58-67; PDF; 55.4 MB).

Literature (selection)

  • Tadeusz Barucki: Matthew Nowicki. Poland / USA / India. salix alba, Warsaw 2010, ISBN 978-83-930937-1-7 .
  • Lewis Mumford : The Life, the Teaching and the Architecture of Matthew Nowicki, part 1 . In: Architectural Record. No. 6, 1954, pp. 139-148.
  • Lewis Mumford: The Life, the Teaching and the Architecture of Matthew Nowicki, part 2: Matthew Nowicki as an Educator . In: Architectural Record. No. 7, 1954, pp. 128-135.
  • Lewis Mumford: The Life, the Teaching and the Architecture of Matthew Nowicki, part 3: His Architectural Achievement . In: Architectural Record. No. 8, 1954, pp. 169-178.
  • Lewis Mumford: The Life, the Teaching and the Architecture of Matthew Nowicki, part 4: Nowicki's Work in India . In: Architectural Record. No. 9, 1954, pp. 153-159.
  • Tyler Sprague: Eero Saarinen, Eduardo Catalano and the Influence of Matthew Nowicki: A Challenge to Form and Function. In: Nexus Network Journal. Vol. 12, No. 2, May 2010.
  • Tyler S. Sprague: "Floating Roofs": The Dorton Arena and the development of modern tension roofs. In: Paulo J. da Sousa Cruz (ed.): Structures and Architecture: Concepts, Applications and Challenges. Taylor & Francis, London 2013, ISBN 978-0-415-66195-9 , pp. 1096–1102 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
  • Adolph Stiller (ed.): Maciej Nowicki, architect. 1910-1950. Poland, USA, India . German English. Müry Salzmann, Salzburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-99014-072-7 , book accompanying the exhibition from November 27 to February 15, 2013 in the exhibition center of the Vienna Insurance Group .
  • Marta A. Urbańska: Maciej Nowicki - humanista i wizjoner architektury. Osobowosc twórcza na tle epoki. [ Maciej Nowicki - Humanist and Visionary: An Architect and His Times. ] Dissertation from Politechnika Krakowska , Kraków 2000.
  • Marta A. Urbańska: Maciej Nowicki: architect, urbanista, wizjoner i jego Chandigarh. / Maciej Nowicki: An Architect, Urbanist, Visionary, and his Chandigarh. In: Architektura , 2014, pp. 132–155, (Polish / English), (PDF; 810 KB), with many illustrations.

Movie

  • Dorton Arena. Documentary, USA, 2014, 10 min., Script and director: Our State Magazine (North Carolina), production: UNC-TV, Internet publication : July 15, 2014, online video with archive and flight robot recordings, table of contents with photos from ArchDaily.

Web links

Commons : Maciej Nowicki  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Tadeusz Barucki: The life and work of Maciej Nowicki (1910–1950). In: Architectus , 2014, 4 (40), pp. 21–31, (PDF; 2.8 MB), (Polish, English), ISSN  1429-7507 , doi: 10.5277 / arc140402 .
  2. ↑ a b c d e Nick Hodge: Maciej Nowicki: A Passage to India. In: Krakow Post , September 6, 2010, interview with Marta Urbańska.
  3. ^ Rainer Barthel: Laudation on the occasion of the award of an honorary doctorate to Frei Otto. ( Memento of the original from May 18, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.lt.ar.tum.de archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: TU Munich , Faculty of Architecture , May 25, 2005, (PDF; 10 p., 96 KB).
  4. ↑ Tadeusz Barucki: " In the design of Paraboleum M. Nowicki Introduced for the first time in the doubly-curved system of cables. This gave rise to the construction of objects with hanging roofs, and - thanks to the creative development of this idea by Frei Otto - has enabled the emergence of membrane structures made of soft fabrics. ”In: Tadeusz Barucki: The life and work of Maciej Nowicki (1910–1950). In: Architectus , 2014, p. 28.
  5. ^ Marta Urbańska: Maciej Nowicki: A Tribute to a Neglected Genius. In: local-life.com. (English).
  6. ^ Nihal Perera: Contesting visions: hybridity, liminality and the authorship of the Chandigarh plan. In: Planning Perspectives , 19, ISSN  0266-5433 print edition, ISSN  1466-4518 online, April 2004, pp. 175-199, doi: 10.1080 / 0266543042000192466 .
  7. ^ Tyler Sprague: Eero Saarinen, Eduardo Catalano and the Influence of Matthew Nowicki: A Challenge to Form and Function. In: Nexus Network Journal , Vol. 12, No. 2, May 2010.
  8. ↑ Marta Urbańska: “ And had those plans been realized [in Chandigarh], we could talk of a real breakthrough in urban planning, and I imagine that the history of world architecture would not be confined and petrified in the form of huge pre-fabricated slabs, as it was for many decades to come. Le Corbusier did utilize a few of Nowicki's ideas. However, the plan conceived by Nowicki and Mayer was much more human, much more intricate and much closer to life than the epic Cubist monuments of concrete as built by Le Corbusier. ”Interview with Marta Urbańska in: Maciej Nowicki: A Passage to India. In: Krakow Post. September 6, 2010.
  9. ^ Marta Urbańska: Maciej Nowicki: An Architect, Urbanist, Visionary, and his Chandigarh. In: Architektura , 2014, p. 149.
  10. ^ Magdalena Zdrenka: Historia Polskiego Projektowania. Kreatywne duety z Warszawskiej Politechniki. / History of Polish design. Creative duos from Warsaw University of Technology. In: STGU , February 13, 2013, (Polish), accessed June 6, 2016.
  11. ^ Drawing of the Polish pavilion in: Maciej Nowicki - An Architect's Career in Poland, America and India. ( Memento of the original from June 7, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.jewish-welcome.at archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Information sheet on the Vienna exhibition from November 27, 2012 to February 15, 2013, accessed on June 6, 2016.
  12. ↑ Maciej Nowicki. In: culture.pl , 2013, (English), accessed on June 6, 2016.
  13. ↑ Sketches of the parliament building in: Sprague, "Floating Roofs" , p. 1097 and in Marta Urbańska, Maciej Nowicki: An Architect, Urbanist, Visionary, and his Chandigarh. In: Architektura , 2014, p. 141.
  14. ^ David Louis Sterrett Brook: Henry Leveke Kamphoefner, the Modernist, Dean of the North Carolina State University School of Design, 1948–1972 . 2005, p. 36 (English, trianglemodernisthouses.com [PDF; 4.3 MB ; accessed on June 2, 2008]).
  15. ^ A b David R. Black: Nowicki, Matthew (1910–1950). In: NCSU Libraries , Series: North Carolina Architects & Builders, 2009, accessed June 6, 2016.
  16. ^ Tyler S. Sprague: "Floating Roofs". P. 1096.
  17. ^ Dorton Arena Construction / State Fairgrounds. In: NCSU Libraries , accessed June 6, 2016.
  18. ^ State Fairgrounds Facilities. JS Dorton Arena. In: ncstatefair.org. Retrieved June 6, 2016.
  19. ^ Marta Urbańska: Maciej Nowicki: An Architect, Urbanist, Visionary, and his Chandigarh. In: Architektura. 2014, p. 150.
  20. ↑ Photo of Lockheed L-749A Constellation N6004C. In: Aviation Safety Network . (ASN) Retrieved June 6, 2016.
  21. ^ Accident description: Lockheed L-749A Constellation. In: Aviation Safety Network . (ASN) Retrieved June 6, 2016: “ The failure of the rear row master rod bearing causing an uncontrolled fire which precipitated a crash landing. ”
  22. ^ David Gero: Aviation Disasters. 2nd edition, Patrick Stephens Ltd., Sparkford 1996, ISBN 1-85260-526-X .
  23. ↑ For example Maciej Nowicki: W poszukiwaniu nowego funkcjonalizmu , [ In search of a new functionalism ]. In: Skarpa Warszawska 3, [ The Warsaw Vistula Embankment ], November 4, 1945.
    Maciej Nowicki: On Exactitude and Flexibility. In: Student Publications of the School of Design North Carolina State College, Raleigh, NC , Vol. 6, 1951, pp. 11-18 ( online file, pp. 58-67 , PDF; 55.4 MB).
  24. ^ Le Corbusier: The City of To-morrow and Its Planning . 1987, ISBN 0-486-25332-5 , pp. 36 f . (English, limited preview in the Google book search - first edition: 1929): “the straight line and the right angle cutting through the undergrowth of difficulty and ignorance are a clear manifestation of power and will. Where the orthogonal is supreme, there we can read the height of a civilization. [...] Culture is an orthogonal state of mind. "
  25. ^ Marta Urbańska: Maciej Nowicki: An Architect, Urbanist, Visionary, and his Chandigarh. In: Architektura , 2014, p. 153.
  26. ^ Pioneering Women Architects in North Carolina: Stanislawa Sandecka (Siasia) Nowicki (1912–). In: North Carolina Modernist Houses , 2013.
personal data
SURNAME Nowicki, Matthew
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Nowicki, Maciej (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish architect
DATE OF BIRTH June 26, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Chita , Russian Empire
DATE OF DEATH August 31, 1950
Place of death near Cairo in a plane crash on the return flight from India to the USA