prof. Wojciech Hora

"The purpose of art is not to cause a momentary release of adrenaline, but to gradually build, over the course of a lifetime, a state of enchantment and inner peace."

In 1987 he graduated from the Faculty of Interior and Industrial Design at the Poznan State Academy of Fine Arts and since then he has been an employee of the Academy. Since 1991 he has been directing the Bionics Studio at the Faculty of Architecture and Design. In 2007 he started his own Faculty of Design at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of University of Technology and Life Sciences in Bydgoszcz.

He had his first encounter with furniture design in 1984, during his first year at the then State Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań, when he joined Prof. Aleksander Kuczma's modelling workshop. This is how he recalls his teacher: "He was a sculptor and furniture designer, a master of the synthesis of function, form and material, lovingly stroking a piece of wood until he saw in it what others could not." He owes his fascination with bionics - the method of design thinking, the logic of design - to Professor Włodzimierz Dreszer.

His diploma work consisted of a set of 22 pieces of realized furniture, most of which are still in use today. At the exhibition of the best diplomas of art academies at Zachęta in 1987, he received the First Prize of the Minister of Culture.

Winning the Maria Dokowicz competition at his alma mater enabled him to spend a year in London with an internship at the RCA and work at Workshop 119 - a company designing and making unit and small batch furniture for various companies and individual clients. It was there that he created furniture for Tina Turner and Roger Davies.

Since 2016 rector of the University of Arts in Poznan.