{"id":21963,"date":"2026-09-17T18:57:36","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T16:57:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/?p=21963"},"modified":"2026-09-18T23:15:04","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T21:15:04","slug":"exhibition-on-humanist-modernity-at-the-center-for-architecture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/2026\/09\/17\/exhibition-on-humanist-modernity-at-the-center-for-architecture\/","title":{"rendered":"Exhibition on Humanist modernity at the Center for Architecture"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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October 1, 2026 – March 27, 2027<\/strong>
Center for Architecture<\/a><\/strong>
536 LaGuardia Place, New York, NY 10012<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Thursday, October 1, 2026 at 6:00 \u2014 8:00 PM<\/strong>
Opening reception (Members of the press are invited to a VIP tour with the curators from 5:00 \u2014 6:00 PM (RSVP to lkim@aiany.org)
Center for Architecture<\/strong>
536 LaGuardia Place, New York, NY<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Tuesday, October 6, 2026, 6:00\u20138:00 PM<\/strong>
Panel Discussion
Center for Architecture<\/strong>
536 LaGuardia Place, New York, NY 10012<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Curator:<\/strong> Kacper K\u0119pi\u0144ski, Deputy Director of the National Institute of Architecture and Urban Planning, Warsaw, Poland<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Humanist modernity<\/em>, presented in collaboration with the National Institute of Architecture and Urban Planning in Poland, showcases the work of Stanis\u0142awa 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 Stanis\u0142awa Sandecka-Nowicka, Humanist modernity<\/em> explores their vision of modernism as a human-centered approach to design\u2014one 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Photo \u00a9 courtesy of Andrew Fremont-Smith<\/sub><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cThey signed their early work together, drawings and buildings alike, as a single shared practice,\u201d said K\u0119pi\u0144ski. \u201cThe record kept Maciej\u2019s name, and this exhibition gives the work back to both.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Writing in the Warsaw journal Skarpa in 1945, Maciej proposed that \u201clinking architecture to the human being for whom it is designed may be understood as the humanism of our art.\u201d He argued that this humanism has two faces that seem to contradict one another\u2014we 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\u2019s responsibility toward people and toward the world being built.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cWith this exhibition, we are asking how to build responsibly for a place, a climate, a community,\u201d said K\u0119pi\u0144ski. \u201cSeventy 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.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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 Orze\u0142 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\u2019s cable-net roof, slung between two intersecting parabolic arches, was a structural breakthrough that influenced a generation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The exhibition combines original and facsimile archival material with newly produced work, from architectural drawings and sketches\u2014 facsimiles of plans, perspectives, and concept sketches (including Dorton Arena and the UN Headquarters studies)\u2014to 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 Wroc\u0142aw.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 Wroc\u0142aw (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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Photo \u00a9 Jakub Rodziewicz, Warsaw, Poland<\/sub><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At a time when architecture is reexamining how to build responsibly\u2014for people, place, and climate\u2014the 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cFor the Nowickis, wind, water, sun, and planting were active materials, organizing space as concretely as any beam or column,\u201d said K\u0119pi\u0144ski. \u201cThey 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.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The exhibition layout was designed by Only If, a New York City\u2013based practice for architecture and urbanism, with Polish-American architect Karolina Cz\u0119czek 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\u2019 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\u2019s work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The exhibition’s visual identity is by Katarzyna Nestorowicz; the graphic design is a collaboration by Weronika Nowak, Karolina Cz\u0119czek, 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 Stanis\u0142awa Nowicki against geometric forms derived from the shapes of their buildings\u2014structures 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 Wroc\u0142aw to New York.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Photo \u00a9 photo Jakub Certowicz, Wroclaw, Poland<\/sub><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Featured Artists<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The exhibition includes newly commissioned works and contemporary interpretations of the Nowickis\u2019 legacy by:<\/p>\n\n\n\n