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SUMMARY:Exhibition on Humanist modernity at the Center for Architecture
UID:https://instytutpolski.pl/newyork/2026/09/17/exhibition-on-humanist-modernity-at-the-center-for-architecture/
LOCATION:
DTSTAMP:20261001
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Warsaw:20261001
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Warsaw:20261001
DESCRIPTION:October 1, 2026 - March 27, 2027Center for Architecture536 LaGuardia Place,
New York, NY 10012
Thursday, October 1, 2026 at 6:00 — 8:00 PMOpening reception (Members of
the press are invited to a VIP tour with the curators from 5:00 — 6:00 PM
(RSVP to lkim@aiany.org)Center for Architecture536 LaGuardia Place, New
York, NY
Tuesday, October 6, 2026, 6:00–8:00 PMPanel DiscussionCenter for
Architecture536 LaGuardia Place, New York, NY 10012
Curator: Kacper Kępiński, Deputy Director of the National Institute of
Architecture and Urban Planning, Warsaw, Poland
Humanist modernity, presented in collaboration with the National Institute
of Architecture and Urban Planning in Poland, showcases the work of
Stanisława Sandecka-Nowicka and Maciej (Matthew) Nowicki, two significant
figures in the history of American and Polish architecture. Named for a
concept developed in the 1940s by architects Maciej (Matthew) Nowicki and
Stanisława Sandecka-Nowicka, Humanist modernity explores their vision of
modernism as a human-centered approach to design—one concerned with
understanding who a building is really for, and how it binds a human being
to the space around them. The exhibition follows this idea across their
work and asks what their architecture offers us today.
The first exhibition to present the Nowickis as equal partners in a shared
body of work, it explores a practice that bridges drawing, building,
graphics, and structure, across Europe, America, and India. While Nowicki
died tragically at age 40 when his plane crashed as he returned from a job
site in India, several years later Sandecka-Nowicka went on to become the
first woman in the United States to be appointed as a full professor of
architecture when she was appointed as such at the University of
Pennsylvania in 1963. She taught fundamental design principles until her
retirement as Professor Emeritus in 1977 and received the American
Institute of Architects medal in 1978 for her lifelong influence on the
profession.
Photo © courtesy of Andrew Fremont-Smith
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The first exhibition to present the Nowickis as equal partners in a shared
body of work, it explores a practice that bridges drawing, building,
graphics, and structure, across Europe, America, and India. While Nowicki
died tragically at age 40 when his plane crashed as he returned from a job
site in India, several years later Sandecka-Nowicka went on to become the
first woman in the United States to be appointed as a full professor of
architecture when she was appointed as such at the University of
Pennsylvania in 1963. She taught fundamental design principles until her
retirement as Professor Emeritus in 1977 and received the American
Institute of Architects medal in 1978 for her lifelong influence on the
profession.
“They signed their early work together, drawings and buildings alike, as
a single shared practice,” said Kępiński. “The record kept Maciej’s
name, and this exhibition gives the work back to both.”
Writing in the Warsaw journal Skarpa in 1945, Maciej proposed that
“linking architecture to the human being for whom it is designed may be
understood as the humanism of our art.” He argued that this humanism has
two faces that seem to contradict one another—we build for the changeable
human, whose habits, work, and institutions are remade every few decades,
and at the same time for the unchangeable human, whose bodily proportions,
perceptions, and deepest needs have remained constant since the first days
of history. Humanist modernism, in their hands, worked as a way of
understanding the architect’s responsibility toward people and toward the
world being built.
“With this exhibition, we are asking how to build responsibly for a
place, a climate, a community,” said Kępiński. “Seventy years ago,
the Nowickis treated structure, landscape, and the human body as a single
problem. That work reaches us now as a living method, one we can still put
to use.”
This attitude is legible across an unusually wide range of work: it moves
from interwar Polish competitions, among them a mosque, sports and spa
buildings, the Orzeł sports club, and the Laski complex for the blind,
through the visionary postwar reconstruction of Warsaw, to the American
projects: the Carolina Country Club, schools and campus studies, the master
plan for the North Carolina State Fairgrounds, and its centerpiece, the
Dorton Arena in Raleigh. Completed in 1953, the Arena’s cable-net roof,
slung between two intersecting parabolic arches, was a structural
breakthrough that influenced a generation.
The exhibition combines original and facsimile archival material with newly
produced work, from architectural drawings and sketches— facsimiles of
plans, perspectives, and concept sketches (including Dorton Arena and the
UN Headquarters studies)—to photographs (vintage and reproduction prints
documenting built and unbuilt projects, as well as portraits of the
Nowickis), architectural models produced for the exhibition by Onimo and
Marta Dachowska, posters and graphic work signed by both Nowickis,
contemporary artworks (newly commissioned and loaned works responding to
the Nowickis' legacy: a textile collage and aquatic-plant models by
Centrala, Nowicki's Garden, a 2025 textile work by Alicja Bielawska, a 2026
installation by Diana Lelonek, and Wiktor Dyndo's painting Flaga), and text
and printed matter. Archival loans and reproductions are drawn from, among
others, Centre Pompidou, the NCSU University Libraries, the UPenn
Architectural Archives, the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, the Art
Institute of Chicago, Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research, Walker
Art Center, Brandeis University, the Museum of Warsaw, the National Museum
in Warsaw, and the Museum of Architecture in Wrocław.
Humanist modernity opened at the United Nations Headquarters in New York in
January 2024, then traveled to Raleigh, North Carolina, the city of the
Dorton Arena (2024); to the ZODIAK Warsaw Architecture Pavilion (April to
July 2025); to the Museum of Architecture in Wrocław (from March 2026);
and to the Government Museum and Art Gallery in Chandigarh (May to July
2026). Its presentation at the Center for Architecture returns the Nowickis
to the city where so much of their American story took place.
Photo © Jakub Rodziewicz, Warsaw, Poland
In the late 1940s, Maciej Nowicki worked alongside Wallace Harrison, Le
Corbusier, and Oscar Niemeyer to shape the United Nations Headquarters.
With the planner Clarence Stein, he proposed a raised circular pedestrian
platform for Columbus Circle that separated people from cars and reframed
the intersection as a stage for city life. With Eero Saarinen, he developed
the campus plan for the newly founded Brandeis University in Waltham, MA.
At a time when architecture is reexamining how to build responsibly—for
people, place, and climate—the Nowickis offer a compelling precedent.
Their work treated structure, landscape, and human experience as an
interconnected whole, making Humanist modernity a timely conversation with
architects and urbanists today.
“For the Nowickis, wind, water, sun, and planting were active materials,
organizing space as concretely as any beam or column,” said Kępiński.
“They carried this idea as much through their teaching as their
buildings, into cities they never saw finished. They anticipated ecological
thinking long before the term existed.”
The exhibition layout was designed by Only If, a New York City–based
practice for architecture and urbanism, with Polish-American architect
Karolina Częczek serving as principal in charge. The design employs
curtains and sculptural tables as the primary organizational elements of
the exhibition. Textiles provide a backdrop for drawings, photographs, and
texts while guiding visitors through the space. The tables, through their
sculptural form, encourage a more intimate engagement with the exhibited
material. The curtains draw inspiration from the Nowickis’ own graphic
and textile work, as well as from a lineage of architects and designers who
used fabric to define and articulate space, including Petra Blaisse and
Lilly Reich. The result is a light-filled, atmospheric environment that
reflects the ephemeral qualities and humanist sensibility at the core of
Nowicki’s work.
The exhibition's visual identity is by Katarzyna Nestorowicz; the graphic
design is a collaboration by Weronika Nowak, Karolina Częczek, and
Katarzyna Nestorowicz. The identity grew out of a question: how does one
translate humanistic modernism into the language of visual design? Working
within a palette drawn from the Nowickis' drawings, Nestorowicz set
original sketches by Maciej and Stanisława Nowicki against geometric forms
derived from the shapes of their buildings—structures that, in most
cases, were never built. These forms are traces of unbuilt architecture
that remain present as a visual layer running across the exhibition
graphics, guide, and communications, giving the traveling show a consistent
character carrying through from the United Nations and Wrocław to New
York.
Photo © photo Jakub Certowicz, Wroclaw, Poland
Featured Artists
The exhibition includes newly commissioned works and contemporary
interpretations of the Nowickis’ legacy by:
About Curator Kacper Kępiński
Kacper Kępiński is an architecture critic, curator, and Deputy Director
of the National Institute of Architecture and Urban Planning (NIAiU) in
Warsaw. He writes on and curates around 20th-century and contemporary
architecture, with a particular interest in how modernist ideas travel and
what they offer the present. He is the curator of Humanist modernity and an
author of its accompanying book, having contributed the central critical
essay that develops the exhibition’s argument.
About Exhibition Designer and Curatorial Collaborator Karolina Częczek
Karolina Częczek is a Polish-American architect, Critic at the Yale School
of Architecture, and Principal of Only If, a New York City–based practice
for architecture and urbanism. As Principal in charge, she led the design
of the Humanist modernity exhibition, including its inaugural installation
at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. Częczek also contributed
to archival research and exhibition material about Nowicki’s academic
work.
Only If’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), M+ in Hong Kong, the Venice
Architecture Biennale, and the UABB Bi-City Biennale of
Urbanism/Architecture in Shenzhen. The practice’s projects have been
featured in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Architectural Digest,
Architectural Record, Architect Magazine, Interior Design, Wallpaper,
Frame, Azure, and The Architect’s Newspaper. In 2022, Only If was named
to Architectural Record’s Design Vanguard and its work was nominated for
the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize. In 2020, Domus recognized Only If as
one of the world’s 50 best emerging architecture firms.
About Curatorial Collaborator Grzegorz Piątek
Grzegorz Piątek is an architecture critic, historian, and writer based in
Warsaw, known for books and essays on the history of Polish architecture
and the rebuilding of Warsaw. He collaborated on the curatorial concept and
contributes biographical and contextual texts to the project. Author of the
books: The Temple and the Dumpster: Architecture for Life (2025);
Starzynski. President from the monument (2024); Promised Gdynia (2022);
Indestructible, Bohdan Pniewski – architect of the salon and power
(2021); The best city in the world. Warsaw in reconstruction 1944-1949
(2020); Sanator. The career of Stefan Starzyński (2016). Recipient of
literary and cultural awards, including the Literary Award of the Capital
City of Warsaw, Polityka’s Passport Award, the Nike Readers’ Choice
Award, the Kazimierz Moczarski Award, and the Jerzy Giedroyc Award.
About the National Institute of Architecture and Urban Planning
The National Institute of Architecture and Urban Planning (NIAiU) is
Poland’s national institution for architecture and the public realm.
Based in Warsaw, it brings the buildings, ideas, and people who shape how
we live to the widest possible audience, from the icons of Polish modernism
to the questions facing cities now. Through exhibitions, books, talks, and
research, NIAiU takes architecture out of the archive and into public life,
and carries Polish design to the world. Founded in 2017, it is a Polish
state cultural institution.
About the Center for Architecture
The Center for Architecture, founded in 2003 by its partner AIA New York,
engages local and international audiences with the value, impact, and
wonder of architecture. Located in the heart of Greenwich Village, the
Center for Architecture is also the home of the American Institute of
Architects New York (AIANY), which cultivates an open, adept, and
future-forward architectural community. Together, we advance the value and
practice of architecture to promote just and sustainable communities.
Through exhibitions, public programs, educational initiatives, and our
Archtober festival and platform, the Center for Architecture brings
together architects, designers, students, and the public to foster
collaboration within the design community while creating accessible
opportunities for the public to experience and learn about architecture.
Whether you're an industry professional, a curious visitor, or a student
exploring the field, the Center for Architecture offers a space for
connection, creativity, and critical conversation—empowering everyone to
engage with the transformative power of architecture.
Exhibitions at the Center for Architecture are made possible by the New
York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the
Governor and the New York State Legislature, and are supported, in part, by
public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in
partnership with the City Council. The exhibition is organized by the
National Institute of Architecture and Urban Planning, Warsaw, Poland, and
co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. Program is
supported by Polish Cultural Institute New York
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