Piotr Kowalski
Piotr Kowalski ( born March 2, 1927 in Lwów, Poland, † 7 January 2004 in Paris) was a Polish sculptor and architect, urban planner and author, who lived long in France and worked. and. He created sculptures and objects for which a technological aspect was the main light and kinetic environments and installations.
Life and work
Piotr Kowalski left his native Poland in 1946. In 1946 he collaborated with landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx. He he lived for some time in Sweden, Germany, France, the U.S. and Brazil. Kowalski studied architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, USA and Physics and Mathematics at Norbert Wiener and in Göttingen. Its architecture diploma he earned in 1952.
He was from 1952 to 1953 employees in the architectural firm of IM Pei in New York City. Kowalski returned in 1953 to Europe - to Paris, where he worked as an architect. He was involved at the invitation of Marcel Breuer 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 seminars at the CIAM 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 was present since the year 1950. Sculpture he saw always in connection with town planning and the planning of urban environments, experimental architecture and public art. He created first sculptural works made of transparent polyester. His first project of art in public space was realized in the late 1950s. In the same year he won the first prize in an international competition for a design for the station of Tunis. In 1950 he had his first exhibition at the Maison des Beaux -Arts in Paris.
In the following years he took on, he had numerous solo exhibitions and participated in group shows in the most prestigious galleries and museums all over the world take part. He won several awards for architecture and urban planning, and was awarded a number of scientific or artistic scholarships.
In 1968, Kowalski represented France at the 34th Venice Biennale. In 1972, he was with some of his sculptures participant in Documenta 5 in Kassel in the Department of Individual mythologies. 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 traveled to South Korea and Japan, and made a series of town-planning designs for Tokyo and Kyoto.
Since 1970, he created numerous objects in public space, he worked as a city planner and created, in part, monumental sculptures in urban areas in France, Austria, Switzerland, the U.S., Denmark, Germany and Japan. In his sculpture, he tried to find new forms, he worked with flexible surfaces, moving elements and kinetic techniques.
Among his most famous projects include the Porte Sud and Place Pascal in Paris La Défense, the Axe de la Terre ( " The axis of the earth" ) - an " astronomical sculpture" in a roundabout in Marne- la -Vallee, and the " thermocouple "in the banks of the Danube Park in Linz ( a) - two adjacent towering massive, about 6 m high bimetallic strip, an oriented with the stainless steel side towards the shore and the shiny stainless steel side inland - and the other next to it vice versa. At 0 ° C the leaves lie in a plane with heat, the leaves bend along each addition, with the grate side of the common plane and stand up accordingly apart. In case of strong sub-zero temperatures, the leaves separated vice versa.
Literature and sources
- Exhibition catalog: documentation fifth survey of reality - imagery today; Catalog (as folders ) Volume 1: (material); Volume 2: ( list of exhibits ); Kassel in 1972
- Documenta Archive (ed. ); Resubmission d5 - A survey of the archive to the documenta, 1972; Kassel / Ostfildern 2001, ISBN 3-7757-1121- X