Richard Filipowski

Untitled

1949
lithograph
Collection of Oliver A. I. Botár
Photograph by Leif Norman

In her 1952 book Experiment in Totality, the biography of her late husband László Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy quotes from a letter that Canadian School of Design student Filipowski wrote to her: “At the bottom of the infinite faith we had in Moholy was the fact that he never criticized the work of a student in terms of good or bad. Even the poorest work had a fragment of merit... each idea contained a spark of quality. This could have been termed simply as a teaching technique. But it really was much more. It was an expression of Moholy’s deep-rooted optimism, based on his faith in the validity of the human mind, and on his inexhaustible joy of constant discovery.” Filipowski had decided to attend the School of Design in Chicago after reading the 1938 MOMA Bauhaus exhibition catalogue. After graduating in 1946, he taught at the Institute of Design until 1950, when Gropius hired him to teach an introductory design course at Harvard. There he would have taught Canadians including Kiyoshi Izumi and Geoffrey Massey. In 1952 he moved to MIT and remained a colleague of György Kepes, teaching introductory visual concepts to architects (including Winnipegers Douglas Gillmor, Claude de Forest, Alan Hanna and Valdis Alers) until 1989.