Piotr Kowalski

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Piotr Kowalski
Piotr Kowalski (1995)

Piotr Kowalski (born March 2, 1927 in Lwów , Poland , † January 7, 2004 in Paris ) was a Polish sculptor and architect , urban planner and author who lived and worked in France for a long time . He created sculptures and objects in which a technological aspect was in the foreground and light kinetic environments and installations .

life and work

Piotr Kowalski left his native Poland in 1946. In 1946 he worked with the landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx . He lived for some time in Sweden , Germany , France , the USA and Brazil . Kowalski studied architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge , USA, and physics and mathematics with Norbert Wiener and in Göttingen . He obtained his architecture diploma in 1952.

From 1952 to 1953 he worked in the architecture office of Ieoh Ming Pei in New York City . Kowalski returned to Europe in 1953 - to Paris, where he worked as an architect. At the invitation of Marcel Breuer, he was involved in the construction of the UNESCO building in Paris from 1953 to 1956. In 1955 he opened his own architectural office in Paris. Kowalski was a member of the teaching staff in the CIAM seminars in Venice in 1954. He studied the prefabricated structures for desert settlements with Jean Prouvé . In 1958 he founded a studio for experimental architecture.

His interest in sculpture had existed since 1950. He always saw sculpture in connection with town planning and the planning of urban environments, experimental architecture and art in public spaces . He created his first sculptural works out of transparent polyester . His first public art project was realized in the late 1950s. In the same year he won first prize in an international competition for a design for the Tunis train station . In 1950 he also had his first own exhibition at the Maison des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

In the following years he participated in he had numerous solo exhibitions and took part in group exhibitions in the most prestigious galleries or museums around the world. He has won several prizes in architecture and urban planning and has been awarded a number of academic or artistic grants.

In 1968, Kowalski represented France at the 34th Venice Biennale . In 1972 he took part in Documenta 5 in Kassel with some of his sculptures in the Individual Mythologies department . From 1978 to 1985 he was a Rockefeller Foundation fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In the 1980s he toured South Korea and Japan and made a number of urban planning designs for Tokyo and Kyoto .

Since 1970 he has created numerous objects in public spaces, he worked as a city planner and created, in some cases monumental, sculptures in urban spaces in France, Austria, Switzerland , the USA, Denmark , Germany and Japan. In his sculpting he tried to find new forms, he worked with flexible surfaces, moving elements and kinetic techniques.

The work of art "Thermocouple" in Linz

His most famous projects include the Porte Sud and the Place Pascal in the La Défense district of Paris , the Ax de la Terre ("The axis of the earth") - an "astronomical sculpture" in a roundabout in Marne-la-Vallée , and the " Thermocouple "in the Donaulände Park in Linz (A) - two massive, 6 m high bimetallic strips towering next to each other , one with the rusting steel side facing the bank and the shiny chrome-nickel steel side inland - and the other opposite. At 0 ° C, the leaves lie in one plane, when it is warm, the leaves bend lengthways with the grate side out of the common plane and stand apart at the top accordingly. When it is very cold, the leaves spread in reverse.

Literature and Sources

  • Exhibition catalog: documenta 5. Survey of Reality - Imagery Today ; Catalog (as a file folder) Volume 1: (Material); Volume 2: (list of exhibits); Kassel 1972
  • documenta archive (ed.); Resubmission d5 - A survey of the archive on documenta 1972 ; Kassel / Ostfildern 2001, ISBN 3-7757-1121-X

Web links

Commons : Piotr Kowalski  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Forum Metall - Thermocouple , In: Linz.at - Denkmäler -, description with picture, accessed on November 22, 2013
  2. Image of the artwork on Flickr , Arenamontanus, September 2, 2009, accessed November 22, 2013