Gerard Ciołek (24 September 1909 – 15 February 1966) was a Polish architect, as well as a leading historian of parks and gardens. Biography Gerard Antoni Ciołek was born in Wyżnica, a small town in the Austro-Hungarian Duchy of Bukovina (in present-day Ukraine). His parents, Adolf and Ludwika (née Melz) Ciołek were from Galicia and Bukovina . His father was a high-ranking official at the Austrian Tax Office, first in Kuty, then in nearby Wyżnica in Carpathia. Following the end of World War I, and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Wyżnica was incorporated into Romania. In 1921, the Ciołeks and their two children left Bukovina for the newly established Republic of Poland, and settled in the southern city of Lublin. In 1929, on graduating from the Stanisław Staszic Lycee in Lublin , Gerard Ciołek embarked on tertiary studies in the country's capital, Warsaw. Initially he intended to take up drawing and painting (especially "en plein air" watercolours) at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts (Akademia Sztuk Pięknych). Eventually, however, he chose to study architecture at the Warsaw University of Technology (Politechnika Warszawska). In the mid-1930s, Ciołek was a research assistant to professor Oskar Sosnowski at the Politechnika Warszawska, a man under whom he deepened his studies on Polish folk architecture, and the conservation of architectural heritage. Around 1937 he developed an interest in the history and design of parks and gardens. He was also interested in town-planning, regional planning, and in the harmony between human settlements and their fragile ecologies. In June 1939, he married Regina Najder (1917–2005) from an extensive family of aristocrats, landowners, railway and sugar refinery engineers, doctors, and businessmen from Kiev and south-western Ukraine, which was then part of the Russian empire. At the beginning of World War II, in September 1939, Ciołek served in the Polish Army as a Second Lieutenant (2Lt) in an air-defense unit in Wilno. Between 1940–1944, during the Nazi and Soviet occupation, he lived in German-held Warszawa where he joined the Armia Krajowa ("Polish Home Army"). For his pseudonym, while in the Resistance, he chose "Biała" (his clan's battle-cry) . He was a lecturer in architecture and town planning at the now-banned, underground Politechnika Warszawska. In early 1944, he earned his Ph.D. for his research on the effect of the physical environment on the forms of villages and folk architecture in Poland, Belarus and Ukraine. In August–September 1944 he took