ABSTRACT
The chapter discusses examples of Jerzy Sołtan’s design work outside Poland, at the global scale. These examples show how his ideas and theory were able to persist in different design groups, even without the stimulating atmosphere of the Workshops at the Fine Arts Academy in Poland. As since the 1960s, Sołtan was mostly involved in teaching at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, these case studies of buildings are scattered both in Europe and America as products of different design teams. The discussion is illustrated through four case studies of built and unbuilt work – private houses in Greece and in New Hampshire working on the idea of the vernacular, competition design for a Museum of Modern Art in Berlin, a series of educational designs and schools in Massachusetts, and some late conceptual designs for competitions, where he crystallised his poetics of modernism. Through these designs, it is possible to illustrate Sołtan’s theory – the importance of history of architecture and the “grassroots architecture” as Le Corbusier’s heritage, landscape design, programme, and the relationship between a building a city inherited from Team 10.
