practice of the architectural profession in Poland
This syndrome, unfortunately, does not affect only our profession, but is a broader problem on a national scale. Its ignoring by successive government teams over the past thirty years has led to a number of negative phenomena. The result is the still existing professional discrimination against women, both in terms of the positions they hold and financially, as well as degressive demographic indicators that are already a serious problem for Poland. In any case, this problem is not solved by the relatively anemic 500+ policy, especially for women with higher education. The lack of a comprehensive pro-family policy, such as in France, for example, results in a huge waste of women's energy and professional potential. In the case of female architects, this means not using five years of study and two or three years of professional practice, that is, seven or eight years of hard creative and professional work, as well as the experience gained during that time. Somehow we accept this phenomenon strangely easily as the prevailing norm, especially since Poland is a country with one of the lowest rates of active architects per thousand inhabitants in Europe. This phenomenon, not much seen from the position of agglomerations and larger cities, is particularly evident in smaller towns. In many municipalities there is no functioning architect, both in terms of design and staffing of architectural and construction administration, which is undoubtedly a significant contributor to the low quality of our country's spaces, very evident in areas remote from large cities.
However, the situation of women in the architectural profession is a fragment of a broader problem of the profession in Poland. Unfortunately, the role and position of the architect in the country has been changing unfavorably for the past thirty years. To make matters worse, this change has further weakened our professional position, already degraded during the communist period, reduced to the role of producer of repetitive documentation in state design offices. The professional start itself is already difficult.
© Piotr Średniawa
The competitions for the best diploma of the year, which have been organized for many years, give only a brief satisfaction to the graduates, and do not provide the majority of winners with a ticket to a further professional path. In the case of the diploma of the year competition held at Silesian architectural universities for nineteen years, only ten architects out of sixty prize and honorable mention winners have emerged in "adult" professional life. Somewhere we lost more than 80 percent of the most talented architectural youth. Often the most talented architectural youth seek to realize their ambitions outside Poland, taking advantage of the open European labor market.
Another negative phenomenon is the large number of requests for suspension from membership observed in our Chamber. One hundred and ninety-three people are currently suspended from membership, with a ratio of about 50 percent women and men. It is significant that these are largely suspensions at their own request, which mainly means that these people do not have jobs as designers, and involve very recent members. We call it laboriously the high numbers syndrome, but in reality it is a sad start to an independent life path and an unsuccessful start to the operation of a recently established studio or office. An independent professional start is often a very difficult professional threshold to cross, even for very capable young architects. This is fostered by the atomization of the community and the lack of ability to join forces in larger design organizations. Young architects do not take this skill out of college, nor do apprenticeships performed as design assistants serve to acquire it.
Also, it is difficult to evaluate positively the exercise of the profession already in adulthood. Looking through domestic architectural magazines or Internet portals, the situation is seemingly not bad at all. The projects and realizations presented there create (which is not an accusation) a false picture of the real situation of architecture and architects in Poland. The purpose and task of the professional press is to promote genuinely good architecture, and it would be absurd to make accusations out of this. Returning to my statistics on the publication of architects in A&B, if I counted three hundred and six names last year, with the number of members of the Chamber of Architects of Poland amounting to about fifteen thousand, this represents only 2 percent. It is likely, albeit a risky thesis, that a similar amount of valuable architecture is created annually in Poland as part of the total volume of volume built per year. The question arises, what about the rest? Unfortunately, the remaining daily bread of our architecture is below a decent level, which is no discovery. It is enough to take a shorter or longer trip around our country.
