Jaroslav Josef Polívka

Who was Jaroslav Josef Polívka?

Jaroslav Joseph Polivka, Czech structural engineer who collaborated with Frank Lloyd Wright between 1946 and 1959.

Jaroslav Joseph Polivka aka J. J. Polivka Civil Engineer was born in Prague in 1886. He received his undergraduate degree in structural engineering at the College of Technology in Prague in 1909. He was educated at the elite Mao school for four years and then studied at the Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich, Switzerland and at the Prague Institute of Technology, where he earned a doctoral degree in 1917. After serving in First World War, he opened his own architectural and engineering office in Prague and developed his skills in stress analysis of reinforced concrete, pre-stressed reinforced concrete and steel structures. Polivka became an expert in photo-elastic stress analysis, a technique that examines small-scale transparent models in polarized light.

In Prague Polivka worked together with avant-garde Czech architect Josef Havlíček on the Habich Building and Chicago Building.

Polivka designed the structural frame of the Czech Pavilion at the Paris International Exhibition of 1937 collaborating with renown Czech architect, Jaromír Krejcar. Two years later, he worked with Czech architect Kamil Roškot to design another Czech Pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair. In 1939 Polivka immigrated to the United States and took a position as research associate and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1941, he and Victor di Suvero co-invented a structural design technique that received a patent for improvements in structures. Polivka with his son Milos translated into English Eduardo Torroja’s ‘Philosophy of Structures’ book published in 1958.