Janusz and Bożena Włodarczyk – a married couple of architects well-known in Tychy. At the end of the 1950s, at the invitation of Kazimierz and Hanna Wejchert, they came to Upper Silesia where they linked their professional and private lives during the construction of the new Tychy. Their joint projects and implementation of educational, residential, service, commercial and sacred buildings have become a permanent feature of the town’s landscape and that of many other towns in the Silesian voivodeship.
Janusz Włodarczyk (1932-2015) was born in Warsaw. In 1958 he graduated from the Faculty of Architecture at the Cracow University of Technology. In 1959 he began work on Miastoprojekt (urban project) ‘Nowe Tychy’ (New Tychy) and continued working on this initiative until 1989. After 1990 he ran his own architect studio. Whilst undertaking architectural design activities he was simultaneously a lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow (1977-1981), at the Faculty of Architecture at the Białystok University of Technology (1989-2009), and the head of the Department of Architectural Design at the University of Technology in Katowice (2004-2015). In 1987 he was awarded a doctorate in technical sciences, his habilitation in 1993 and in 2001 the title of Professor of Technical Sciences. Bożena Włodarczyk (1935-) was born in Pabianice. After defending her degree at the Faculty of Architecture at the Cracow University of Technology, she and her husband began working on Miastoprojekt ‘Nowe Tychy’. She is co-designer of many residential, educational, service and sacred buildings in Tychy and other towns within Upper Silesia.
The project ‘A collection of film portraits of architects of Upper Silesia from the second half of the 20th century’ presents profiles of the following architects: Stanisław Niemczyk, Marek and Ewa Dziekoński, Jerzy Witeczek, Janusz and Bożena Włodarczyk, all representatives of post-war architecture in Upper Silesia, and also architect Tadeusz Barucki – art historian and documentarian – who sets out the achievements of world architecture of that period. It is important in this project to not merely present post-1945 architectural heritage and associated surviving design documentation, but also, and perhaps first and foremost, to display profiles of their creators and their complex biographies and personalities. Our collection of film portraits constitutes a part of the documenting, archiving, research and popularisation activities of the Institute of Architecture Documentation at the Silesian Library.
The project is co-financed by the Polish History Museum in Warsaw as part of the ‘Patriotism of Tomorrow’ programme. Thumbnail photograph from the archives of the Włodarczyk family
This work is available under license Creative Commons Uznanie autorstwa 3.0 Polska.
(Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Poland licence).