Oskar Hansen - An Architect Looking into the Future
Authors: Maria Wierzbicka Anna 
Published: September 2019

In 2015, the Architecture Department of Warsaw University of Technology was celebrating a century of existence. Although the Warsaw College was created during the occupation, it was characterised by the autonomy of its creators. Even in the hostile post-war years, when the leading professors were under the influence of socrealism, the teachers kept elaborating independent ideas about the design. Many started creating according to the new ideology, but some were still developing concepts that were not influenced by the oppressive communist system. Many creators and theoreticians of the Architecture Department influenced the academic, didactic and creative activity of the following generations of architects. Oskar Hansen was one of the many outstanding alumni of the Faculty of Architecture Warsaw University of Technology. He was a teacher at the Visual Structures Studio at the Fine Arts Academy, from 1954 to 1983. His unconventional creativity influenced heavily the research led in the experimental laboratory of the Department of Sculpture at the Fine Arts Academy. Hansen’s character has been widely described, both in academic and popularised literature, in Polish and in English. The most notable are About Zofia and Oskar Hansen by Springer and Zaczyn, Zobaczyć świat (Looking at the world) written by Hansen himself, where he describes his open form theory and his publications in the weekly Przegląd Kulturalny (The Cultural Review) and the magazine Architektura (Architecture). In this research paper, we will question the available literature about the subject - the artist’s own publications, articles and monographies describing his work, and more specifically, the architectural practice using the theory of design called “open form”. The “open form” theory will be analysed under the perspective of the applicability of the semantic narrative of the architecture of meaning. The research will be led through a case study method. We have chosen to analyse ten major semantic subjects: the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, the Franciscan monastery in Tychy, the Ronchamp Chapel in France, the ecumenical chapel in Switzerland, Bruder Klaus chapel in Germany, St. Jacob’s chapel in Germany, the Chapel of Reconciliation in UNESCO, the Cymbalista synagogue in Tel Aviv, and the Bełżec memorial for the murdered in Poland. The chosen subjects have been carefully selected, in order to show the multi-layered quality of the open form theory. The influence of the open form theory when designing modern object related to a symbolic narrative, remembrance sites, and sacral spaces, will be a significant element of our study. An innovative element of this work will be the attempt to fully analyse the “open form” theory exposed in Hansen’s writings called Zobaczyć świat. The study of these specific elements and characteristics of the contemporary commemorative monuments and sacral objects belonging to the open architecture school raises the question of the place of semantics in the globalisation era. In the open form theory, the author builds the opportunity for contextualisation, and challenges the user. Does it stand in opposition or does it balance the Kantian theory of sacral spaces? The open form issue can also be connected to the didactics of the Faculty of Architecture Warsaw University of Technology, Workshop of Sacral and Monumental Architecture. The long-standing didactic practice of the university shows the importance of the “hansenian open form”.