1961
Oskar and Zofia Hansen
The Open Form
The Open Form in architecture as defined by Oskar and Zofia Hansen in 1961 imagined an architecture of variable composition, activated and altered by fluid uses and users. Guided by a postwar Modernism and humanism, the concept of the Open Form emphasized both the perceptual and concrete agency of inhabitants to shape space. On an urban scale, the Open Form was coined the Linear Continuous System: a proposal for Poland’s rapidly changing demographics in the mid 1960’s that found its solution in longitudinal belts of settlements, a reaction against centralized cities that left little possibility for density- and quality-controlled growth.
On an architectural scale, as outlined in their manifesto “The Open Form in Architecture — The Art of Great Numbers,” the prevalent closed-form systems failed to resolve problems of quantity. Housing was a pertinent example in which architects had designed for a finite quantity — and minimally and efficiently, at that — and as demand increased, the closed form became responsible for its decline in quality.
“The term ‘quality’ in the language of the Open Form should be understood as the recognition of the individual in a collective. The base elements of the Open Form … are the meshed vectors which will form the new architecture. The new number will produce new quality and conversely the concept of the new quality help us resolve the number.”
— Oskar Hansen, Zofia Hansen (Kedziorek, Ronduda, 7)
They believed that an attention to the discernibility of the individual as well as their number, rather than the typical analysis of people as an averaged whole would give rise to appropriate form.
Perhaps these concepts were most specifically described and formalized through Oskar Hansen’s prior works in exhibitions and temporary structures. The Polish pavilion at the Izmir International Fair in Turkey (1955), a collaboration with Lech Tomaszewski, was a modular 8 x 8 meter hyperbolic paraboloid tensile structure. The tensile canvas, just as much as the displayed objects, was a surface of performance which he called “the experience of the background” (Hansen, 132) which situated people in the foreground of the event.
In the unbuilt pavilion My Place, My Music for the Warsaw Autumn Festival of Contemporary Music, Oskar and Zofia Hansen strove to visualize the spatiality of music, creating conditions for wandering devoid of boundaries that evoked synesthetic audio-visual experiences. The Polish pavilion in Sao Paolo (1959) again used a steel structure with tensile canvas, but was revised as non-modular and more transformable, this time responding more to external forces of the environment, to wind, than its occupants or displayed items.
The pavilions, along with his practices as an educator, were the laboratories in which Open Form took shape. His pedagogical methods included film, performance, and improvisational activities. His KwieKulik games that he performed with his students emphasized and required articulations of the individual to the collective through social interactions and activities, giving rise to a group form.
References:
Hansen, Oskar. Towards an Open Form/Ku Formie Otwarej. Fundacja Galerii
Foksal, Revolver. 2005.
Hansen, Oskar and Hansen, Zofia. “The Open Form in Architecture — the Art of the Great Number.” Oskar Hansen: Opening Modernism, On Open Form, Architecture, Art and Didactics edited by Kedziorek, Aleksandra and Ronduda, Lukasz. Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. 2014.
