MACBA: Oskar Hansen

The exhibition, in Barcelona, is dedicated to the practice of Oskar Hansen (1922–2005), architect, urban planner, theorist and pedagogue.

Oskar Hansen during AICA Congress in Wroclaw, 1975, © OskarHansen Archive, Museum of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw

Hansen was a member of Team 10, the architectural group that formed the first critical voice against the modernist orthodoxy of the Athens Charter and the followers of Le Corbusier.

Oskar Hansen, Study of Linear Continuous System. Courtesy Igor Hansen

Hansen presented his Open Form theory at Team 10’s founding meeting – the CIAM congress in Otterlo in 1959 – and continued to develop it through projects on various scales: from the design of exhibitions to his Linear Continuous System, a project for decentralised cities – akin to Constant’s New Babylon and Yona Friedman’s Megastructures – running throughout Poland and the European continent. Regardless of the scale to which the idea of Open Form was applied, its main interest was in developing strategies of indeterminacy, flexibility and collective participation.

Oskar Hansen, Photo Erazm Cioek, 1986, © Fotonova East-News

For Hansen the role of architect in shaping the space was limited to the creation of a ‘perceptive background’. The architecture was supposed to expose the diversity of events and individuals present in the space. Focusing on the process, subjectivity and creation of contexts for individual expression, architecture was supposed to become an instrument that could be used and transformed by its users, and adapted easily to their changing needs. During Hansen's tenure at Warsaw's Academy of Fine Arts, he passed Open Form on to generations of students, encouraging them to pursue art practices beyond traditional disciplines.

Oskar Hansen, Lech Tomaszewski, Polish Pavilion in Ismir, 1955, courtesy MASP

The exhibition at MACBA develops the idea of Open Form through the main areas to which Oskar Hansen applied it, aiming to show its multiple layers organised in a series of sections to be freely connected without imposing one ‘closed’ way of experiencing it. Furthermore, the architecture of the exhibition, addressing various exhibition concepts by Hansen, becomes an integral part of the display.

KwieKulik Game on Morel's Hill 1971. © KwieKulik Archive

until 15 January 2015
Oskar Hansen – Open Form
Curators: Soledad Gutiérrez and Łukasz Ronduda in collaboration with Aleksandra Kędziorek
MACBA, Barcelona

MACBA: Oskar Hansen

The exhibition, in Barcelona, is dedicated to the practice of Oskar Hansen (1922–2005), architect, urban planner, theorist and pedagogue.

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