Bronek Katz was born on 2 October 1912 in Warsaw, Congress Kingdom of Poland, Russian Empire, (now Poland). He studied architecture in Vienna. In 1936, Katz immigrated to London, England where he had a successful career in design and architecture.
Architect Bronek Katz was born on 2 October 1912 in Warsaw, Congress Kingdom of Poland, Russian Empire, (now Poland). He pursued architectural studies at Vienna’s National University (1930-35). A year after graduation, in May 1936, he immigrated to London and started a professional career within Walter Gropius and Maxwell Fry’s London offices and worked there until September 1939.
Katz’s practice included design and architecture. Throughout the Second World War, Katz worked for the Ministry of Education focusing on exhibitions. When the war ended, he maintained his involvement in exhibition design in the capacity of associate member of the Design Research Unit (DRU). Katz partnered with Fry’s former assistant, Reginald Vaughan (1906-1971) in 1945. Their collaboration yielded a successful entry in a competition to design a Richard Shop located on London’s Regent Street. The duo soon started collaborating on other projects. Katz and Vaughan later garnered commissions to design shops for Freeman Hardy & Willis, Bata, and Truform as well as an array of hotels, houses, office blocks and redevelopment projects. Additionally, they collaborate with DUR’s Jewish-Russian-Azerbaijani émigré designer, Misha Black on the design of a Tea Shop on Regent Street, a Parisian restaurant on the Rue de Tivoli, and the Ontario Services Club on Regent Street in London. Katz also soon become a Fellow of the Society of Industrial Artists (FSIA). Moreover, he served as an architect for Bata Development during the 1950s, a role that necessitated extensive global travel throughout Africa, Canada, and the Middle East. He designed residential buildings and worker housing in West Africa. In 1959, working with builders, Katz and Vaughan achieved the rapid reconstruction of Moulton's Ltd., a 45,000 square foot, six-story store in Ilford that had burned down earlier that year. The reconstruction was completed in 185 days, a record speed.
Katz and Vaughan also continued to work in exhibition design. Some of their collaborative work includes the exhibition Britain Can Make It which opened at Victoria & Albert Museum in 1946, Darkness into Daylight which opened at the Science Museum in 1948, and the 1951 Homes and Gardens Pavilion of the Festival of Britain South Bank exhibition. For this exhibition the British architect and town planner, Herbert Jackson stated: ‘I had scanned the names of the architects for the various pavilions and seen a number of (to me) unknown, un-English sounding names, such as Moya, Reifenburg and Brontek Katz. This, I thought, is some way to show off the British Way of Life,’ (1951, p. 2).
While being a resident in London, Bronek Katz died in Switzerland on 27 February 1960 while on holiday. In 1969, Vaughan still operating under the name Katz&Vaughan designed the Grand Metropolitan Hotel in Brussels which featured a typical Scottish bar. The National Archives hold drawings by Katz and Vaughan and photographs documenting their work can be found in University for the Creative Arts’s library, VADS.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Bronek Katz]
Publications related to [Bronek Katz] in the Ben Uri Library