16 Facts About Karlis Johansons

The Karlis Johansons family lived in Melava, on what is Piebalga Street in Cesis, Latvia, their house now long gone.

Karlis Johansons started pre-school in 1901, then at the Cesis School of the City.

Karlis Johansons was not a successful pupil and it is unknown if he was artistic at school, however his sisters were crafty as Mary embroidered and Rosalie used pencil and colors.

At art school, Karlis Johansons developed a life-long friendship with Konrads Ubans, Voldemars Tone, and Aleksandr Drevin, a Cesmen.

Karlis Johansons participated in a group of artists seeking new tasks for artists in post-revolution Russia.

Karlis Johansons exhibited his designs from 22 May through June 1921, at the 2nd exhibition of The Society of Young Artists.

Karlis Johansons did not operate there as a technician, rather as an "inventor" of design methods he wanted to develop into practical industrial products.

Kenneth Snelson had acknowledged the Constructivists as an influence for his work and French engineer David Georges Emmerich noted how Karlis Johansons's work seemed to foresee tensegrity concepts.

Karlis Johansons never knew of the profound influence of his ideas.

That same year a photo of Karlis Johansons's work was published in a Bauhaus book in Germany, one of the 20th century's most influential design schools.

Karlis Johansons's "self-stabilizing constructions" are considered prototypes of the tensegrity construction systems further developed by Richard Buckminster Fuller and Kenneth Snelson in the 1950s.

In photos of the 1921 INKhUK exhibition, Maria Elizabeth Gough identified a total of nine sculptures made by Karlis Johansons, now numbered I-IX.

Not a single one of Karlis Johansons' sculptures has been preserved there are four prints in the former Costakis collection in the State Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki.

In 2015, at the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, and in Cesis, eight of Karlis Johansons' works were exhibited, reconstructed by well-known Moscow artist-designer Vyacheslav Koleichuk based on measurements accurately interpolated from 1921 photographs due to the loss of the original sculptures.

The fundamental concept in all of Karlis Johansons' work relates to one issue: How structural tensile-stress stability occurs when objects are bound with simple contact without fusing, adhesives, or chemical reactions.

Karlis Johansons called these simple connections "cold" as alternatives to "hot" rivets or welds.