Ewa Kuryłowicz has been awarded the SARP 2021 Honorary Award. Considered one of the most prestigious Polish architectural awards, it has so far only twice gone to an architect. Professor Kurylowicz was recognized for being guided by empathy in design and social activism.
The decision to award the prize to Prof. Ewa Kuryłowicz was made by a jury consisting of previous years' winners Romuald Loegler, Ryszard Jurkowski, Andrzej Bulanda, Zbigniew Maćkow and SARP President Bohdan (Bisia) Lisowski. The exclusively male group is only an aftermath of the fact that the award was last presented to a woman 43 years ago. At that time Halina Skibniewskaya was honored, and Jadwiga Grabowska-Hawrylak also received the award. Hanna Adamczewska-Wejchert, Malgorzata Handzelewicz-Waclawek and Malgorzata Pizio-Domicz were awarded jointly with their husbands.
multidimensional activities
The building of the Faculty of Applied Linguistics and the Faculty of Neophilology at UW
Photo: Panek / Wikimedia Commons
The jury appreciated the laureate 's multifaceted social activity, her teaching work supporting successive generations of architects , and her presence in the community discussion of today's architecture. They noted what Ewa Kurylowicz herself emphasizes, namely the attempt to be guided by empathy in design.
Thank you very much for this extremely prestigious award, which I take as a tribute to women architects. We play many roles on the architectural scene, and all of them emanate from our female point of view, which, together with the male one, gives us the potential to co-create a harmonious world. In architecture, this is evident in a way that is particularly important and relevant to all. This distinction shows that there is no way to undo the process of women's full participation in public life, as independent and free in every aspect members of modern society.
Prof. Ewa Kurylowicz
beyond architecture
Młociny Gallery
photo: Cybularny / Wikimedia Commons
Ewa Kuryłowicz is not only an active designer, but also a professorin the Department of Design and Theory of Architecture at the Faculty of Architecture at the Warsaw University of Technology. Her teaching achievements include reviews of many doctoral and postdoctoral dissertations, and she was the supervisor of more than 150 master's degrees. Her social activities at the interface with architecture included expert work for ACE on universal design and the establishment of the Stefan Kurylowicz Foundation. She is also active on urban grounds, including fighting the noise coming from clubs along the Vistula River, of which she is privately a neighbor. She also talks about her approach to work as part of the series "10 questions to...", available at architekturaibiznes.pl
environmental reflection
The publication "Bird Collisions with Transparent Surfaces. A Compendium of Knowledge" by the Glass Traps Foundation. As Ewa Kurylowicz pointed out in the introduction to the guidebook, if we do not understand that losing birds is the same manifestation of mindless violence over nature as destroying forests, draining swamps, etc., nature will repay us and for that, as it is already repaying us by threatening disaster.
Q22
Photo: Wikimedia Commons / Panek, Adrian Grycuk
lazy change
Members of the Architects' Ball collective - Dominika Janicka, Barbara Nawrocka and Dominika Wilczynska - were reminded that the changes taking place at SARP are happening too slowly. Fighting for equal rights for female designers, the activists point out not only the imbalance between men and women among the awardees, but also in successive SARP boards or the composition of competition juries.
We are very pleased and congratulate Ms. Ewa Kurylowicz. Major awards going into the hands of women is an important and good sign for the younger generation of female designers. On our profile on Instagram, Anna Syska created a gender breakdown of important industry awards some time ago, which shows that to date, women alone have received this award twice out of 55 editions. Most recently, in 1978, it was given to Halina Skibniewska, incidentally a promoter of Kurylowicz. We are glad to see this example of female mentoring, which is worth noting, but change is happening too slowly. Quickly counting, it comes out to us that, for fairness, we now need another fifty editions in a row in which the SARP honorary award is given to women.
Women Architects Ball
award presentation
The SARP 2021 Honorary Award Ceremony, combined with the opening of an exhibition of the work of this year's winners, will be held on December 10, 2021. , at the exhibition pavilion of the Association of Polish Architects in Warsaw, 2 Foksal Street.
