JAROSŁAW KOZAKIEWICZ – Geometry of the Inside

Geometry of the Inside, Oxygen Towers

Jarosław Kozakiewicz has been one of the most interesting artists of the recent years. His architectural projects constitute an attempt at solving the problem of reintegrating the human being within his surroundings – the natural environment. They often use symbolic forms, quite frequently referring to the human body. This approach brings to mind, above all, the eighteenth -century tradition of architecture parlante as well as the utopian projects of Boullée or C.-N. Ledoux, but at the same time, they constitute an aspect of contemporary ecological thought.

At the exhibition will be presented two projects “Oxygen Towers” and “Geometry of the Inside”.

The Oxygen Towers are meant for a large city. The building comprises two irregular ovals, narrowing towards the bottom and truncated at the top. Placed next to each other, they resemble the shape of the human lungs. The objects are a kind of roofed gardens. Oxygen-producing plants will be grown inside. The identification of architecture with a human bodily organ (the lungs) isn’t based solely on morphological similarity here but also on a similar “physiological” function–breathing. Each of the towers houses a spiral surface that forms a promenade, a walking path for the visitors. The building is a space of rest, relaxation, and contact with nature. It plays the role of an oasis in an industrial space, but, thanks to its fully glassed-in walls, remains open to the urban environment. The Towers address the, crucial for the contemporary city, problem of breathing, which has been emphasised in their form and function. They constitute the city’s “lungs”not only because they produce oxygen, but also because they provide a doze of spatial “breath,”becoming a place where one can take a break from the unified, overwhelming architecture of the city.

Geometry of the Inside is the project of a metropolitan cinema. The shape of the building has been derived from an over 8 hour-long recording of the involuntary movements of a sleeping young woman. Her bodily movements were recorded by a computer and transformed into interweaving lines – the image of the attractor. In physics, the attractor is a ‘set of physical properties towards which a system tends to evolve regardless of the starting conditions of the system.’ The term, originally used in the theory of dynamic systems, has also proved useful in sociology and ecology. In Kozakiewicz’s project, the attractor describes the movements of the sleeping figure, plotted with lines drawn from the woman’s bodily orifices. The grid so obtained has been transformed into an irregular, sculptural figure that, properly enlarged, becomes an architectural form. Geometry of the Inside explores the, seemingly untranslatable to the language of architecture, phenomena of movement and change. The building’s walls will be semi-transparent to make it possible to project images directly on them, both inside and outside, erasing the division between the private (inside) and public (outside). The continuity of the private (dream) and public (reality) spheres is already present at the project’s preparatory stage. By employing outer-wall screens, the object engages accidental passers-by who at any moment can become viewers of a projection. The use of walls as screens also means that the building’s shape has not been determined once and for all; the projected images will co-determine the building’s appearance and make it unique. Geometry of the Inside isn’t a static figure but a changeable form shaped by visual information.

www.kozakiewicz.art.pl