Oskar Sosnowski - Biography

Biography

Sosnowski received his education at a Russian polytechnic in Warsaw, in the Engineering and Construction Faculty Department.

In the fall of 1918, the recently renovated building of the Faculty of Architecture at the Warsaw University of Technology (Warsaw Polytechnic) was occupied by the Bolshevik army causing many Polish students enlisted to drive them out, and following this brief interruption, new professors arrived at the Faculty; including Sosnowski, who took the post of the Chair of Polish Architecture Division. In 1919, he became a professor at the Warsaw Polytechnic. In 1922, he initiated the establishment of the Association of Polish City Planners. In 1929, he founded the Department of Architecture of Poland at Warsaw Polytechnic.

Sosnowski's projects were based on traditional historical forms, but he used new materials as reinforced concrete. He also developed proposals for communities that for the first time applied a new urban form of building around a lake or other feature.

Sosnowski was one of the greatest Polish architects of the period that developed the Professors' Quarter in Warsaw. A unique complex of 21 houses built in the Powiśle district of Warsaw (within the triangular area delineated by the Górnośląska, Myśliwiecka, and Hoene-Wrońskiego streets). They were built between 1923 and 1926 by professors at Warsaw Polytechnic's Faculty of Architecture, with the idea for each architect designs a house for himself. The houses have been preserved in an almost perfect condition and are now a treasured monument of architecture and urban planning.

Sosnowski was quite interested in Jewish culture, and he began a project to inventory synagogues in Poland during the 1920s. Of especial importance is the documentation, measured drawings and photographs made in the period between the First and Second World Wars by the Department of Polish Architecture of the Polytechnic of Warsaw, and in particular, the efforts of Professor Sosnowski and other architects, art historians and students which he led, has provided a unique collection of documentation Sosnowski, photographer and art historian Szymon Zajczyk, and Warsaw Polytechnic students documented these wooden structures through architectural drawings, replica paintings, and photographs. Recognizing the historical importance and artistic value of this architecture and fearing its impending destruction with the rise of anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, this team compiled extensive data and produced architectural drawings, color and detail studies and photographs of many synagogues. Much of this project was destroyed during World War II but a substantial amount survived. Today the documentation is all that remain of the wooden synagogues of Poland.

He also prepared an extensive database documenting of other buildings and design elements that has now become part of the work in preserving the European Wooden Churches Heritage. The collection includes drawings and photographs concerning monumental as well as vernacular architecture. It was rescued during the burning of Warsaw by the Nazis and the collection was continued after war, so that it consists now more than 35 thousand drawings – plans, sections, facades, and details along with thousands of photographs, and is probably the biggest archive of this kind in Poland.

Work by Sosnowski within the Polish Architecture Division in the Department of Architecture was conducted in the following areas: folk art and rural construction, the history of art, inventory measurements, town planning, painting, and history of fortifications, as well as in studios dealing with interiors and equipment, liturgical (sacral) art, Jewish art, and garden architecture. The amassed collections of measurements, photographs, and slides totaled thousands, and the number of publications exceeded twenty.