Image courtesy of Igor Hansen (from the archive of Oskar Hansen) Project for extension of Zacheta Gallery in Warsaw by Oskar Hansen, Lech Tomaszewski and Stanisław Zamecznik, 1958
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but focuses on anticipation and potentials that are yet to come. Surprisingly many contemporary architects seem to be rather fixated on different ideals of architectural harmony that focus on definite beauty and the perfect form. 5 For Hansen they lay in the opposite – in the unfinished, imperfect, open or, one may say, weak. The ideas of spaces he created expressed the transitory. They were in dialogue with their context and left lots of room for interpretation for the user. Open form, bottom-up architecture and adaptivity today are often considered clichés and fail to become popular among architects widely. They are often associated with niche designers that focus on politically unstable regions, regions of disaster or areas of urban poverty. For some reason openness does not appeal to investors, developers or politicians who for various reasons may prefer strong and finished forms. But in the changing and ever more open world the time for ‘strong’ eventually will fade into the past. One may only wonder how many years it will take. ~
Another example of Hansen’s work, this time unrealised, is his project for the extension of the Zacheta Gallery in Warsaw, designed in 1958 in collaboration with Lech Tomaszewski and Stanisław Zamecznik. Because Hansen considered the original neo-Baroque Zacheta Gallery an example of ‘closed form’, the most obvious way for him to subvert it was to pair it with something based on opposite values. The extension used a light structural system that not only formally contrasted with the original building but also proposed a new way of thinking about exhibiting art and curating. The structure was based on a steel modular cubic frame finished with glass panels forming the outer skin of the box. Internal walls made of adjustable panels created secondary and tertiary layers that could alter both outer appearance and inner organisation. By rotating the panels one could make different spatial arrangements depriving the building of fixed form and letting it adapt to the needs of each exhibition and the changing vision of artists and curators. Of course Hansen wasn’t the only one who was interested in openness at that time. Umberto Eco wrote in 1962 that the work of art becomes inexhaustible insofar as it is ‘open’. 4 An open work of art does not lead to fulfilment in a finite sense,
5 These ideals were expressed by many Renaissance thinkers. A fragment by Alberti quoted by Heinrich Wölffin in ‘Renaissance and Baroque’ sounds incredibly accurate to explain that thought: “I shall define beauty to be a harmony of all the parts, in whatsoever subject it appears, fitted together with such proportion and connection, that nothing could be added, diminished or altered, but for the worse. A quality… noble and divine…”
4 Umberto Eco, The Open Work . Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1989. p9
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