An extraordinary architect and a unique personality. Last Thursday, Jerzy Gurawski - the creator of many academic, cultural and housing projects - died at the age of 86. Winner of numerous competitions, a respected didactician and an accurate and witty commentator on reality. As a designer, he did not blindly succumb to fads and trends. "The greatest satisfaction is finding the language of the place where I operate," he said in an interview with A&B.
Jerzy Gurawski was born on September 4, 1935 in Lviv. After the war, he and his family moved to Bielsko-Biała, where he graduated from high school. He often repeated that the form, logic and design documentation of the school building, found by chance, were to inspire him to devote himself to architecture. He studied it at the Cracow Polytechnic during the cultural and social ferment of the Gomulka thaw, which allowed him to rub shoulders with the most important figures and cultural events in Cracow of that period. Hence his close ties with the theater, which - even before graduation - resulted in winning a national competition for a touring theater of the Mazovian land, and later in a thesis dedicated to experimental theater.
theater and Opole
Gurawski made use of his student experience when invited to work with Jerzy Grotowski, who ran the famous Theatre of 13 Rows in Opole (later known as the Laboratory) from 1959. There, the young Gurawski successfully created arrangements of theatrical space that were far from traditional stage design, often blurring the boundary between the audience and the actors. At the same time, he worked as an architect at the Opole Provincial Design Office, creating designs for, among other things, schools and sports and cultural facilities, including - the Opole Village Museum. Gurawski recalled this period with ease in an interview with A&B in 2008:
There was a lot of it. Little cool things. Modernizations and expansions of schools, offices, various halls. They welcomed me in this Opole region with puddings, the village women's circle did a party, there was beer. And everyone knew exactly what they wanted and how they wanted it. They just needed someone to draw these projects for them.
After Grotowski left for Wroclaw in 1965, Gurawski stayed in Opole and from 1968 worked with Marian Fikus, whom he met there, and with whom they formed an author team for the next 17 years. They became famous for winning many national competitions. They "specialized" in projects for downtowns of medium-sized cities.
It was both sport and ambition. And ambition was about pleasure. Of course, where we were winning. In turn, we lost where we really wanted to win. This was the case with the competition for the Pompidou Center. (...) Those were great times!
Campus and Poznań
Winning the 1974 competition for the campus of Poznan's Adam Mickiewicz University in what was then the village of Morasko (now part of Poznan) turned out to be crucial. Gurawski, Fikus and the third author of the project, Jan Godlewski, moved in the mid-1970s to Poznan and the Miastoprojekt there. From then on, Gurawski's career was mainly associated with that city,. In Miastoprojekt, in addition to the campus, he focused on housing. He also designed churches.
However, the campus began to materialize much later, in the 1990s. - Far from the original intentions. Instead of interconnected faculties around a vast academic forum, a series of independent buildings emerged . Four of them were designed by Gurawski. These are the faculties: Physics (implementation of the first stage: 1994), Geography (2006), the top-rated one - Mathematics and Computer Science (2002), and the sports hall (2010). The rest were created by other authors. Gurawski lamented that the ambitions of the university's various departments made the complex inconsistent and far from its original intentions.
Gurawski's work cannot be easily pigeonholed - he took what was inspiring from current trends, but never let himself be swept away by fashion.
I don't build spaces like famous architects who make their visible mark. The greatest satisfaction is finding the language of the place where I work.
Gurawski's projects, first set in modernism, later escaped from the rigid framework of this trend. In many conversations, however, the architect shied away from being called a postmodernist, although the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Glogow, for example, according to a 1981 project still started jointly with Marian Fikus, can be considered postmodern. In 1985 the architects parted ways, later leaving Poznan Miastoprojekt and - at the threshold of the 1990s - establishing their own studios.
Echoes of postmodernism can also be seen in a perfunctory way in the building of the Faculty of Physics, now designed by Gurawski, or - somewhat more clearly - the Academy of Music in the center of Poznań. This 1989 competition project lived to see implementation in two stages. The teaching building was built in 1997, and the concert hall nine years later.
colleges and an apartment building
At the beginning of this century, however, the architect returned to modernist patterns, creatively interpreting them, such as in the Department of Mathematics and Poznan 's first and very successful apartment building Wstęga Warty (together with Przemyslaw Cieślak, 2000) located, still unusual at the time, close to the river. The soft line of wavy façade used in this building returned in two more projects from Gurawski's studio - the Academy of Physical Education building (2012) travestying the form of the university's first building designed by Marek Leykam, and in another apartment building - Casa Verona - on the edge of the Old Town on Garbary Street (2015).
Flamboyant projects from under starchitects Gurawski was critical of:
There's a demand for bizarre architecture: twisted fussy. Meanwhile, my point is not that it should be bent, but that average architecture should be good. And mostly it isn't. Itdoesn't catch the scale, it doesn't fit into the context," he said in the same interview 15 years ago and repeated it many times later.
no retirement
He worked until the end, running the studio with his son Bartosz, among others. And he continued to succeed: as part of a consortium, with other architects, his office won the 2018 competition for the Berdychowska Footbridge, which is to connect Poznan's Old Town, Ostrów Tumski and the polytechnic area. A year later, the studio won third place in the competition for the Musical The ater in Poznań. And last year it was honored with the Architectural Award of the Wielkopolska Region for the headquarters of the Polish Dance Theater in Poznań in the "public interior" category.
The latter project tied Gurawski's professional life together with a striking buckle. For many years he was not given the opportunity to return to work for the theater. Only at the beginning of the second decade of this century did he design the modernization of the so-called paint shop of the Polish Theater serving as a chamber stage (2012). The Polish Dance Theater (2021) turned out to be one of his last projects and, to some extent - hidden behind the facade of an adapted tenement - allowed Gurawski to realize one of his design dreams:
I would make a theater (...) that as a building would almost not exist. It would have to be done a bit in reverse: so that a person would imperceptibly enter the space where magical theatrical things happen, so that people would be drawn into it. (...) But he wouldn't please anyone in Poland (...) Society and various decision-makers are not prepared for a theater building that is not seen," he said in 2008.
wit, distance, insight
Gurawski was able to talk about architecture, his own and others', about theater, broadly understood culture and many other phenomena of the modern world in an exceptionally light, interesting and witty manner. Never ex cathedra, always with a distance to himself and reality. He was a great storyteller and an insightful observer and commentator. Casual and intelligently mocking. Aptly and with just the right amount of mischief, he was able to point out inept decision-makers, stiff academics or the misguided works of his professional colleagues.
He was the recipient of awards for his lifetime achievement and individual realizations. In 2007, he received the SARP Honorary Award. He is a two-time winner of the Jan Baptista Quadro Award for the best Poznań realization of the year (Department of Mathematics - 2002, Aula Nova of the Academy of Music - 2006). Gurawski was also awarded the Knight's Cross of the Order of Rebirth of Poland in 2000 on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the founding of Jerzy Grotowski's theater. He was president of the Poznań branch of SARP for two terms (1990-96).
Many people, in recognition of his achievements and teaching work, titled Gurawski "professor," although he had no such formal title. As an experienced practitioner, he taught at Poznań Polytechnic University in the 1970s and 1980s, but he generally had a lenient attitude toward his academic career. "Rehabilitated docents," he used to say with a laugh about the overly serious academics he encountered while designing the Moraski campus.
To the end with a lively outlook, breaking conventions, different from most of the Poznan environment, almost always seen with an inseparable cigarette. A year ago he was the protagonist of a conversation in A&B's series "Architects for the 21st Century" available on our Youtube channel. There he talks about his life, professional path and outlook on contemporary architecture.
Last Tuesday, he was scheduled to present the winning project for the Polish Dance Theater at the SARP headquarters in Poznań. Unfortunately, his health has already prevented him from doing so. He died on Thursday, March 10.
The place and date of the funeral ceremony will be announced in the coming days by the Poznań SARP on its website and Facebook profile.
Jakub Głaz
For A&B, Jerzy Gurawski is remembered by Karol Fiedor (CDFArchitects), chairman of the council of the Wielkopolska District Chamber of Architects, and member of the SARP General Board:
I was a graduate student of Jerzy Gurawski, and I owe it to him that I am an active professional architect. After graduation, I didn't quite know what to do in life. I had many different plans. Gurawski, always gifted with intuition and intuition, noticed these hesitations and decided that it was worth pushing me towards architecture. Without this encouragement, I would probably be somewhere else. I greatly respected Jerzy both as an architect and as a personality, a man who was always worth listening to. Every conversation with him was valuable, enjoyable, often surprising. He had a wonderful mocking sense of humor infused with ambiguity. "I wouldn't know how to do it that way," he once told me about my studio project, which could have been both praise and rebuke. Only after a while did he add that the wonderful thing about the architectural profession is that you can be delighted by a colleague's design at the same time as knowing that you can't do it yourself. He was able to call or write a letter, as he is probably the last person I know who wrote me traditional letters to appreciate a project he liked. We were in close contact. Every year I visited him on Christmas Eve to meet and wish him well. He will be greatly missed.
