Zofia Garlińska-Hansen

Zofia Garlińska-Hansen was born 13 May 1924 in Kałuszyn, Poland. Little is known of her family, other than that her father, Tadeusz Garliński, was a schoolteacher. She studied at the Faculty of Architecture of the Warsaw University of Technology under the proponent of modernism Romauld Gutt. She met her future husband and co-designer Oskar Hansen while at university, who was also studying architecture at the time. They married in 1950 and she graduated in 1952.

Anticipating a population surge in Poland, the Hansen's expanded upon their theory of Open Form to the scale of urban planning, which was integrated with notions of adaptability and flexibility. Disregarding existing infrastructural methods as outdated, they proposed the Linear Continuous System (LCS), which organized the designs of cities linearly. They imagined a system of large cities which stretched across Poland from North to South in four parallel bands, in an effort to dissolve the idea of a city centre and surrounding periphery. The ideas behind LCS were applied in two of their projects, the Juliusz Słowacki housing estate in Lublin and the Przyczółek Grochowski 'The Grochów Bridgehead' in Warsaw. This proved to be her most controversial completed project, which consisted of a series of buildings that housing 6,600 inhabitants. Interviewed in 1990 while at the housing project, Garińska-Hansen critiqued her own work, expressing disappointment by confessing that "I think that in a practical sense, Przyczółek Grochowski is not a success, because people are not happy there."

Zofia and Oskar's built work focused on the rebuilding of Poland following World War II through several social housing projects, primarily in Warsaw. These include: • The Juliusz Słowacki housing estate in Lublin (1961) • Rakowiec (1961-1963) • Bracławska (1964-1974) • Przyczółek Grochowski 'The Grochów Bridgehead' (1968-1974) Zofia was also a co-head exhibition designer at the National Exhibition of Interior Design at Zachęta Gallery in 1957, which interrogated the shaping of interior spaces.

A small, gabled summer house near an oxbow lake in the Mazovia region of Poland, the House in Szumin is the spatial manifesto of Open Form. It was initially constructed in 1968-70 but perpetually changed based on the habits and needs of those residing within it. This project was freed from the constraints of the Polish social housing industry and therefore allowed this site to more holistically reflect Zofia and Oskar's ideas about Open Form. The interior of the House in Szumin was transformable, used to serve domestic functions but also as a teaching space, containing didactic tools which the Hansen's used while teaching composition classes. It had also housed a steel structure which was exhibited at the 1977 Venice Biennale.

Several projects of theirs which were never realised include the following: • Warsaw Town Tall (1952) • Extension to the Zachęta Gallery in Warsaw (with Lech Tomaszewski and Stanisław Zamecznik; 1958) • "The Road" monument to the victims of the concentration camp in Auschwitz (1958) • the museum of contemporary art in Skopje (1966)

Zofia Garlińska-Hansen is recorded as architect.