(b Helsinki, 12 April 1922). Polish architect, urban planner, teacher and theorist of Finnish birth. He graduated from the Technical College in Vilna (now Vilnius, Lithuania) (1942), then studied in the Department of Architecture at the Technical University, Warsaw (1945–50), under Romuald Gutt. In the 1940s and the first half of the 1950s he also took up painting and sculpture, which he later dismissed as examples of ‘Closed Form’. In 1948–50 he visited France, Italy and England and studied under Fernand Léger and Pierre Jeanneret; he also became acquainted with Le Corbusier, Henry Moore and Jerzy Soltan. From 1950 to 1983 he lectured at the Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw. He was also a member of the Groupe d’Etude d’Architecture Moderne and Team Ten. In 1959 he published his theory on ‘Open Form’, which allowed the user active participation in the creation of a work; it was a development of ‘unlimited growth’, an earlier concept of Le Corbusier and Soltan. Hansen’s theory had a fundamental influence on the Polish concepts of ‘environment’, ‘dziela-procesu’ (works of process) and ‘performance’ in the 1960s. It was fully expressed in his competition plan (1957; with Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz and Julian Palka among others, unexecuted) for the international monument to the victims of Fascism at Auschwitz-Birkenau (now Oswiecim-Brzezinka); his proposal consisted of a path through the extermination camp, leaving most of its elements completely untouched. In the 1960s he developed the ‘Open Form’ theory into the ‘linear continuous system’ theory, which envisaged the extension of his principles to the arrangement of buildings and communications on a larger scale; projects included the housing estate (1963) at Przyczulek Grochowski, Warsaw, the district plan (1966–8) for Warsaw-Ursynów and proposals for town, regional and national plans. He also designed several international exhibition buildings during his career, as well as the Museum of Contemporary Art (1966), Skopje, and the Polish Embassy (1973), Washington, DC (both with others).

• Hansen, Oskar
  • Hasior, Wladyslaw
  • Jarnuszkiewicz, Jerzy