(b St Petersburg, 17 April 1906; d Warsaw, 29 March 1983). Polish architect and teacher. He studied architecture at Warsaw Technical University (1925–37) and was one of the young Modernist architects active in Poland in the 1930s. He participated in many competitions, one of his most notable designs being that for the Polish Savings Bank (1934; with Tadeusz Sieczkowski and Roman Soltynski; unexecuted), Poznan. His major work of the 1930s was the Law Courts (1934–8), Gdynia, also designed with Sieczkowski and Soltynski. After World War II, avoiding the ostentatious eclecticism prevailing at the time, he designed some simple, high-quality office buildings in Warsaw, including the Ministry of Construction (1949–51) and the Metalexport Building (1950–52; with Tadeusz Zielinski). He also built some blocks of flats (1954) in Warsaw and the Polish Embassy (1958–60) in Beijing. In 1955 he began to teach architectural and landscape design at Warsaw Technical University, where he became Professor and Head of Design of Public Buildings in 1966. From 1958 to 1968 Karpinski was Chief Architect of the East Wall shopping centre in Warsaw’s principal street, Marszalkowska Street, producing the master-plan for the scheme and coordinating the other architects working on individual buildings. His competition-winning plan attempted to maintain the 19th-century street pattern in the area and to create a human-scale pedestrian precinct in spite of the high-rise flats, hotels and huge department stores that were planned. The development was comparable to large-scale shopping centres in such other European cities as Stockholm.