“Mr Antoni, tell me honestly, what are they saying about me in Warsaw? – Am I to answer honestly? Nothing. – And indeed. After all, we really don’t talk about Korngold at all in Warsaw”*, wrote Antoni Słonimski in *Essential Articles: Notes and Observations 1951‒1958*. It’s a pity, because Lucjan Korngold designed dozens of buildings that have become a permanent feature of the cityscapes of Warsaw and São Paulo. They also appeared in Polish architectural journals, in the French *L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui* and the Italian *Architettura*. The diversity of his formal solutions and the quality of his architectural designs deserve recognition. On the New World, he found himself working with new materials, designing skyscrapers as an affirmation of the style of the future, and developing new forms suited to the needs of a tropical climate.

A brief biography of Lucjan Korngold

The Warsaw-born architect was born on 1 July 1897. He lived, studied and worked there. He interrupted his studies at the Faculty of Architecture of the Warsaw University of Technology in 1918 to join the Polish Military Organisation, and subsequently the Polish Army. He obtained his degree in architecture in 1923 under the supervision of Rudolf Świerczyński. At that time, the artistic search for a national style was drawing to a close in Poland, whilst interest was growing in avant-garde solutions and ideas inspired by Le Corbusier, the German Bauhaus and the Russian Constructivists. Korngold’s Warsaw designs straddle the boundary between the academic classicism he had learnt at university and the modernist idea of functionalism. From the early 1930s, Lucjan Korngold ran his own practice. He was keen to work in teams. His body of work from the interwar period comprises over 50 projects.

Korngold’s first architectural projects

Many of them can still be seen in Warsaw today. In a rapidly developing city, there was a growing demand for office buildings, investment properties, company headquarters and modern urban villas. Lucjan Korngold also designed interiors and furniture for his architectural creations. The projects created at that time are regarded as prime examples of Polish architecture from that period, such as the villa on Chocimska Street in Warsaw, designed in collaboration with Henryk Blum. It is a house composed of simple forms, plastered white, with a raised ground floor supported by columns and a terrace on the roof of the side wing. Like Le Corbusier, the architect gave significant elements clean, geometric forms.

Lucjan Korngold’s life in exile

The outbreak of war brought his flourishing career to an abrupt halt. He took part in the September Campaign. In December 1939, the architect and his family fled from occupied Poland, first to Rome and then to Brazil. In 1940, he settled in the rapidly developing city of São Paulo.

Modernist trends had been present in Brazilian architecture since the 1920s, thanks to artists emigrating from Europe and local architects educated at European universities. The Ministry of Education and Health building in Rio de Janeiro, completed in 1943 and designed by Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer with consultation from Le Corbusier himself, became a symbol of modern architecture in Brazil. “I had no idea that modern architecture of such a high standard could exist in the world, about which we in Poland knew next to nothing,”* wrote Korngold from Brazil in a letter to the architect Jeremi Strachocki.

The post-war economic boom contributed to Brazil’s rapid development. In São Paulo, a major economic and industrial centre, the population more than doubled within two decades. The newly constructed buildings were intended to meet the needs of the expanding metropolis and to serve as a manifestation of the future and modernity. Simple, functional, and rising skywards.

Lucjan Korngold’s architectural work in Brazil

Lucjan Korngold, an experienced designer, undertook his first projects on the new continent whilst working at the architectural practice of Francisco Matarazzo Neto. He was only able to practise independently after obtaining Brazilian citizenship.

In 1944, the Polish architect opened his own practice and began collaborating with architect Francisco Beck; the most famous result of this collaboration is the Edifício Thomas Edison office block on Bráulio Gomes Street. Korngold himself noted that “Brazil’s mild climate made it easier to realise Le Corbusier’s most daring theories”*, which would have been impossible in Europe due to climatic conditions.

A skyscraper in São Paulo’s business centre

In 1946, plans were drawn up for the Edifício CBI Esplanada office block, which was to be built on one of the city’s main squares, Ramos de Azevado, near Formosa and Parque do Anhangabaú streets. The developer was the entrepreneur Henryk Spitzman Jordana (1906–1967), who, like Korngold, was a war refugee from occupied Poland.

Work began in early 1947 and continued until 1950. The project involved the construction of two separate buildings: the ground floor section was intended for retail and services, whilst the upper storeys were designed as office and club spaces. Korngold proposed a façade independent of the structure, unifying the whole into a coherent external form with a modern architectural language, constituting a new element in the landscape of Vale do Anhangabaú amidst buildings of a classical style.

The architecture of the Edifício CBI Esplanada skyscraper

Lucjan Korngold designed a building with a reinforced concrete structure, moving away from the steel frame typically used in such tall developments. To stiffen the 70-metre-tall building, which is based on a core structural system, he also incorporated two service and circulation cores. The lifts were manufactured in Brazil under an American licence. The site, with a level difference of over 9 metres, required specialised solutions for part of the foundations.

The open-plan layout of the successive storeys allowed for the flexible configuration of office spaces using partition walls. The simple, compact form of the building retained the classic division into a base, main body and crown. Thanks to its monumental porticoes, the uppermost section does not disrupt the uniformity of the cuboid form, whilst at the same time complying with the regulation that the three uppermost storeys must have a smaller outline than the others.

The building gained a sense of visual lightness thanks to its façades, which consist of reinforced concrete slotted walls with windows set back into the building. An innovation was the use of window frames made from steel profiles commissioned from Volta Retonda – Brazil’s first steelworks, which had opened two years earlier. The recessed windows provided excellent protection from the sun and tropical rain in summer, and from strong winds in winter, particularly as the building had neither air conditioning nor heating. The 50 cm deep window ‘shades’ form a brise-soleil grid, with the dynamic interplay of light and shadow adding vitality to the rhythmic structure of the façade. The austere, geometric, light-coloured structure still stands out amongst the skyscrapers of São Paulo. The design demonstrates an attention to proportion and order, ensuring harmony, as well as the sculptural quality of the whole that is characteristic of Korngold as an architect.

In 1948, the project was awarded a gold medal at the Pan-American Architecture Exhibition in Lima. In the year of its completion (1950), the CBI Esplanada was the tallest reinforced concrete building in the world. The building became an important point of reference for other developments in the centre of São Paulo in the years that followed.

Lucjan Korngold’s work in Brazil

This was Lucjan Korngold’s (who became a naturalised Brazilian citizen in 1949) first independent project, although he did not obtain his official architect’s licence until August 1953. Over more than 20 years of practice in Brazil, he designed or co-designed over 30 office and commercial buildings, single- and multi-family houses, industrial facilities, and buildings for institutions and private clients in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

These stylistically diverse projects range from the Palácio do Comércio, featuring a composite structure that was pioneering in Brazil, to Henryk Landsberg’s modernist villa in Rio de Janeiro. The architect himself, when explaining trends in contemporary architecture, used the term ‘technical beauty’, which he believed would, as a result of the development of new techniques, replace the classical understanding of beauty.

Officially, now as a Brazilian architect, he ran his own practice. He gathered a group of young designers around him, forming an informal ‘school’. He helped newcomers find their feet in their new environment and was actively involved in the Institute of Brazilian Architects. He played an active role in the city’s cultural life and collaborated with the specialist press. He remained professionally active until the end of his life. He died on 6 February 1963 at the age of 65 and was buried at the Cemitério do Araçá cemetery in São Paulo, the final resting place of those who have rendered outstanding service to Brazil.

In 1992, by decision of the São Paulo Municipal Council for the Protection of Historical, Cultural and Environmental Heritage (CONPRESP), the CBI Esplanada skyscraper was listed as a historic monument.

*Quotes taken from: Grzegorz Rytel, Lucjan Korngold. Warsaw–São Paulo 1897–1963, Warsaw, 2014, and *Architektura*.