26 September 2005
Emeritus Professor Jerzy Soltan 1913–2005
With great sorrow I announce the passing of Nelson Robinson, Jr. Professor of Architecture and Urban Design Emeritus, Jerzy Soltan, who died at his Cambridge home on September 16, 2005.
Born in Prezma, Latvia, in 1913, Soltan studied architecture at the Warsaw Technical Institute. Drafted into the Polish Army, he was, following Poland’s defeat, interned for the duration of the war in a German prison camp. During that period he intensified his study of Le Corbusier through reading, translation and correspondence. Immediately upon his release, Soltan traveled to Paris and joined the Le Corbusier atelier; he worked on several projects including the Unité d’Habitation.
In 1949 he returned to Poland and joined the Faculty of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. For the following decade he was active as an architect, designer and educator.
Jerzy Soltan first came to the GSD in 1959 as a visiting critic, at the invitation of Dean Josep Lluís Sert. Like Sert (and then GSD faculty members Sigfried Giedion, Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, and Eduard Sekler) Soltan had been active as a member of CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne). He was shortly thereafter named Professor of Architecture and served as Chairman of the Department of Architecture from 1967-1974. Throughout his tenure at the GSD, Soltan was an enthusiastic advocate for the design philosophy of Le Corbusier, which he summarized as “an architecture of imagination, metaphor, poetics.”
Soltan was a guest critic and lecturer at numerous universities. He also maintained an architectural practice and pursued his own work as a visual artist and painter. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, he was most recently awarded the Topaz Medallion of Excellence in Architectural Education, presented jointly by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA).
Alan A. Altshuler
Dean, Faculty of Design