Jan Knothe (February 18, 1912 in Winnica – December 19, 1977 in

Warsaw Warsaw ( pl, Warszawa, ), officially the Capital City of Warsaw,, abbreviation: ''m.st. Warszawa'' is the capital and largest city of Poland. The metropolis stands on the River Vistula in east-central Poland, and its population is officia ...

) was a Polish architect, artist,

graphic designer A graphic designer is a professional within the graphic design and graphic arts industry who assembles together images, typography, or motion graphics to create a piece of design. A graphic designer creates the graphics primarily for published, ...

, writer, poet and diplomat (

Belgium Belgium, ; french: Belgique ; german: Belgien officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. The country is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to th ...

Syria Syria ( ar, سُورِيَا or سُورِيَة, translit=Sūriyā), officially the Syrian Arab Republic ( ar, الجمهورية العربية السورية, al-Jumhūrīyah al-ʻArabīyah as-Sūrīyah), is a Western Asian country loc ...

Biography

Jan Knothe was an alumnus of the Władysław IV Gymnasium in

. Studied at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Technology in Warsaw. During

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

, as a prisoner of

Oflag II-C Oflag II-C Woldenburg was a German World War II prisoner-of-war camp located about from the town of Woldenberg, Brandenburg (now Dobiegniew, western Poland). The camp housed Polish officers and orderlies and had an area of with 25 brick huts fo ...

prisoner-of-war camp A prisoner-of-war camp (often abbreviated as POW camp) is a site for the containment of enemy fighters captured by a belligerent power in time of war. There are significant differences among POW camps, internment camps, and military prisons. P ...

, Knothe participated in the prisoners' cultural life. Wrote a sequence of

Ramayana The ''Rāmāyana'' (; sa, रामायणम्, ) is a Sanskrit literature, Sanskrit Indian epic poetry, epic composed over a period of nearly a millennium, with scholars' estimates for the earliest stage of the text ranging from the 8th ...

-based poems about

(lost during the camp's evacuation). Having mastered the

Mahabharata The ''Mahābhārata'' ( ; sa, महाभारतम्, ', ) is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India in Hinduism, the other being the ''Rāmāyaṇa''. It narrates the struggle between two groups of cousins in the Kuruk ...

poetry form, Knothe wrote a narrative poem about ''The Brave Sailor

John Scolvus John Scolvus or John of Kolno may have been a navigator of the late 15th century. It has been claimed he was among a group of early Europeans to reach the shores of the Americas prior to Columbus, arriving in 1476 as steersman of Didrik Pining, a ...

'' (''Opowieść o dzielnym żeglarzu Janie z Kolna''), as well as, with Stanisław Michalski, worked on

woodcut Woodcut is a relief printing technique in printmaking. An artist carves an image into the surface of a block of wood—typically with gouges—leaving the printing parts level with the surface while removing the non-printing parts. Areas that ...

bookplate An ''Ex Libris'' (from ''ex-librīs'', ), also known as a bookplate (or book-plate, as it was commonly styled until the early 20th century), is a printed or decorative label pasted into a book, often on the front endpaper, to indicate ownership. ...

s and camp stamps. As an architect, Jan Knothe worked with a team of architects during the decade after

, carrying out the most important architectural investments for

: *East-West Thoroughfare (W-Z) (1946–49) with Henryk Stamatello, Józef Sigalin, Stanisław Jankowski, Zygmunt Stępiński *Marszałkowska Dzielnica Mieszkaniowa (MDM) (1949–52) with Stanisław Jankowski, Józef Sigalin, Zygmunt Stępiński *Ministry of Agriculture Edifice (1951–55) with Jan Grabowski, Stanisław Jankowski Knothe was the laureate of many construction competitions during the years following

: co-author of the Mausoleum-Monument of Victory, Piłsudski Square, Ministry of Industry, SPOŁEM and PZM Headquarters, Warsaw-Okęcie Airport (1947 building), reconstruction of St. Alexander's Church, Powszechny Dom Handlowy and the Ministry of Agriculture. Knothe inter alia illustrated the ''Six Year Plan to Rebuild Warsaw'' (''Sześcioletni Plan Odbudowy Warszawy'') (

Książka i Wiedza ''Książka i Wiedza'' ("Books and Knowledge") is a Polish publishing house founded in 1948, soon after World War II. As of the mid-2010s it has published over 13,000 titles. In communist Poland it was the leading state publisher of books about pol ...

1950). He was also an assistant at the Drawing Department of the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Technology in

, headed by Zygmunt Kamiński. Created his own artistic style, entwining thick hatches with clusters of dots. Jan Knothe is the author of a placard about

from 1952.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Knothe, Jan Architects from Warsaw 1912 births 1977 deaths