Date: 6th February 2019

Event: Proportion. Unity of Opposites

Format: Lecture and Workshop

More information on http://www.rafalmazur.pl/

Poster © Rafał Mazur

A graduate of the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning at the Krakow University of Technology, Rafał Mazur currently lectures at the Rzeszów University of Technology and the Warsaw University of Technology, where he defended his PhD thesis on the proportions in architecture. In addition to academic and scientific work, he is a practicing architect, in 2006 founding the Studio Pracownia Architektury in Urbanistyki Rafał Mazur in Warsaw, which has won a major commission to design the cultural center in Katowice, also designed so called “house on the water” in Czemiakow Port in Warsaw, the marina in Pisz, and built several residential buildings.

Dr. Mazur visited Georgian Technical University for teaching activities within Erasmus+ mobility project coordinated by RUT. The lecture at IDS focused on comparative review of architecture of Hans van der Laan and Mies van der Rohe. Between 1920 and 1991, the Dutch Benedictine monk and architect Dom Hans van der Laan (1904–91) developed his own proportional system based on the ratio 3:4, or the irrational number 1.3247…, which he called “the plastic number”. According to him, this ratio directly grew from discernment, the human ability to differentiate sizes, and as such would be an improvement over the golden ratio. To put his theories to the test, he developed an architectural language, which can best be described as elementary architecture. Similar spatial-dynamic effects, derived from the superposition of spaces, can be found in the architecture of F. L. Wright and Mies van der Rohe, though Van der Laan never referred to them.