Jarosław Kozakiewicz

In 2006 Kozakiewicz represented Poland at the Venice Biennale of Architecture. Some of his projects have received prices in architectural competitions. He received an honourable mention, for instance, in a competition for the design of the Centre of Contemporary Art in Toruń (2004) and in 2005, his entry won in international competition for the Park of Reconciliation near the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum. In 2005 Kozakiewicz’s Project Mars, a massive redesign of the landscape of a former lignite-mining area near Lake Baerwalde in Germany, won an open competition and was completed in 2007.

In 2005, Kozakiewicz’s design of the Park of Reconciliation of Nations won the first award in an open competition to revitalise an area on the right bank of the river Soła, near the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. The design proposed by the artist (with irregular paths inspired by the veins of poplar leaves, a popular tree in this area) meant a radical move away from the geometry of straight lines; it was a symbolic gesture aiming to negate the horribly clear geometric layout of the former death camp. According to the plan’s requirements Kozakiewicz’s design sought to create a park that would be available not only to the visitors of the Auschwitz museum but also to the local population. The result was a public park, located in the direct vicinity of a place charged with historical memory, which would not only integrate itself with the existing ecosystem but also address the needs of the residents of the town Oświęcim. The artist faced a particularly daunting task, that of reviving the space of a park located near a former death camp.

Kozakiewicz searches for geometrical equivalents of the ways the human bodily presence manifests itself in the world, that is the sphere of physical contact and communication between bodies. Using the language of architecture, he strives to express proximity, distance, bodily experience of the other, and contact with non-human bodies. This search is best evident in his design for Tower of Love (2004) – a challenge to civilizational processes that eliminate the body from social life. Kozakiewicz's organic buildings catch the eye. Behind his utopian architecture, for which nature carves out the structural parameters, is more than a desire to improve quality of life in the city; it also takes into account a possible urbanistic context. Examples might be Tower of Love (2004), the Oxygen Towers (2005) shaped like human lungs or Transfer (2006), presented at the 11. Architecture Biennale in Venice. Some of the artist's designs are practically ecological manifestos.

In 2003 an international competition was held to seek proposals for the Baerwalder Lake Landscape Park, a section of an immense cultural and recreation area situated on the largest in a chain of 27 artificial lakes created from the abandoned coal pits. The open-ended challenge was to fashion an artistic project physically powerful enough to stand up to the power plant still operating just behind it.

Jarosław Kozakiewicz (born 1961) is a Polish artist who works at the intersection of art, science and architecture. The inspirations for his artistic-architectural projects include contemporary ecology, genetics, physics, astronomy and ancient cosmological concepts which relate microcosm with macrocosm. Identifying an analogy between the human body and the natural world, Kozakiewicz questions the anthropometrical character of Vitruvian man as the traditional paradigm of architecture. Instead, he proposes an organic paradigm, a `geometry of the inside´.

Kozakiewicz was born in Bialystok (Eastern Poland) in 1961. He studied at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts (Sculpture Department) and the Cooper Union for Advancement of Science and Art in New York, in the class of Nicky Logis and Hans Haacke. Originally trained as a sculptor he turned his attention to architecture, urbanism and science in the mid-nineties.