Wladimiro Acosta — architect with roots in the Russian Empire
Wladimiro Acosta was born Vladimir Konstantinovsky in Odessa, in the Russian Empire, on 23 June 1900, into a Jewish family of Sephardi origin, according to one study. He grew up in the city's Jewish community, which also produced his contemporary and friend Gregori Warchavchik, the pioneer of modern architecture in Brazil, and in 1911 entered the Odessa school of fine arts. He began to study architecture in 1919 and, like Warchavchik, continued his training in Rome, in the circle of Marcello Piacentini.
In 1922 he moved to Germany, where he worked with several architects and absorbed the ideas of German modernism and expressionism, among them those of Erich Mendelsohn. After deciding to emigrate, he left Europe in 1928 and, after a brief stay in São Paulo, settled in Buenos Aires, where he adopted the name Wladimiro Acosta.
In Buenos Aires he became one of the pioneers of modern architecture. In 1932 he devised what he called the Helios system, a set of design principles that used orientation, overhangs, ventilation and the seasonal path of the sun to keep buildings cool in summer and warm in winter; historians of architecture now describe it as an early form of bioclimatic design. He applied it to private houses, among them the Casa Miramontes, one of the few of his designs that were built, and to larger projects. At the end of the 1930s the government of the province of Santa Fe engaged him as an adviser on urban planning, and he designed a series of health buildings there, among them the psychiatric hospital now called Hospital Mira y López, the former leprosarium of Recreo and the colony for psychiatric patients at Oliveros.
He also designed furniture and urban schemes, including his City Block proposal for dense housing, and set out his ideas in the books Vivienda y ciudad (1947) and Vivienda y clima. He taught architectural design at the University of Buenos Aires and lectured at other universities.
Acosta died suddenly in Buenos Aires in 1967, on 11 July according to one source and 11 June according to another, while still active. A tribute organised by the University of Buenos Aires in 1986 and a monograph published in Spain in 2008 have brought renewed attention to his work.
"Studied in Odessa and Rome, worked in Germany from 1922, and settled in Buenos Aires in 1928, after a brief stay in São Paulo."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Odessa, Kherson Governorate (now Ukraine)
Born Vladimir Konstantinovsky in Odessa, in the Russian Empire, in 1900, into a Jewish family, he studied at the city's school of fine arts before continuing his architectural training in Rome.
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Odessa, Kherson Governorate (now Ukraine). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.