"Building is not to build, but to make money." - heard recently from the stage at a conference on rebuilding Ukraine. For builders, war is an opportunity. And since it stubbornly refuses to come to us, we need to trigger its effects ourselves. We are therefore demolishing more and more.
"There is no crisis in Warsaw. People are throwing away equipment that is two-three years old," - told a scrap metal worker known to the media to the gazeta.pl portal in mid-April. He even ended up with a free four-month-old refrigerator for five thousand. It was thrown out by the owner, who didn't want to defrost the equipment (I wonder if she abandons the untidy house and buys a new one). But to only refrigerators, to only Warsaw. Across the country, more and more buildings of, for architecture, youthful age are flying to the dump. Twenty, thirty years old and into the trash. Instead of redevelopment - replacement. The concrete of new developments pours, truckloads of rubble and new materials produce a carbon footprint and GDP. Demolitionists and builders make money. It's also dripping something perhaps to architects as well.
Under the pickaxe go no longer only the tin-roofs of markets and halls, which, fact, deserve euthanasia. The rubber stamping of the more durable, seemingly shameful architecture of the 1990s is also underway. Wroclaw's Solpol has already become an icon of this trend, more specimens from the era are going under the knife, led by the historically significant Curtis office building in Warsaw's Mordor. Testimonies of strange times are being erased, which - after apt adaptation or alteration - could serve future generations both as a reminder of past aspirations and as a warning: against architecture in the role of a toy, an experiment on an urban organism, a careless lack of planning. Finally, even among Polish postmodernism there are works of high quality, which, if anyone still doubts it, is easily checked in the just-released "The Long 90s." Anna Cymer. If we are already cleansing the country of manifestations of this trend, it is worth doing it with a head: preserving the most interesting mainstays, formally perhaps bizarre, but well-proportioned, thoughtful and functional.
So far , however, we have not done our homework after the demolition of communist modernism. Randomness rules. What disappears is not what is worst, but what stands on valuable ground. In the queue, moreover, are the next architectural trends and decades. In the capital's Mordor, the 1997 Mars office building by JEMS Architects is about to go under the pick. In Poznań, they are dismantling the fifteen-year-old Malta shopping mall, which, on the face of it, would have survived in good condition for another half century. Even a thirteen-year-old (!) chapel from Tarnów, near Warsaw, has gone into oblivion, despite being nominated for the Mies van der Rohe award and rubbing up against the register of historical monuments.
Mars and Malta is quite a neo-modernism. Chapel - a shtick in every respect. So why not to remake them, not to tinker creatively in the not yet perished matter, and in the case of the chapel - not to move to a new place? One: it supposedly doesn't pay off. Two: it' s not profitable. Three: it's probably not profitable. And besides, in the case of an office building and a shopping center, it's not very feasible, which is not surprising. When a quarter of a century ago I was trying to figure out in college how to position a building here in relation to the sides of the world, an active didactic-designer wheezed that I shouldn't bother with nonsense. Now there are intelligent buildings, he said, they will cool here, heat there, poszura automatic blinds, you can do anything, make it cool.
Now I'm watching this building intelligence go under the pickaxe, because it can't be meaningfully transformed. Neither decent offices nor apartments will be made out of a windowless shopping center with deep tracts, and somehow there is no demand for storied mushroom houses in a good location. Another thing is that many of today's apartments can't be converted into decent housing either. However, no one will dismantle them - fragmented ownership will perpetuate them for decades.
I'm about to hear, moreover, that in principle everything is fine, things have always been torn down, Haussmann, New York and all - soon there will be no more architecture "forever". Here goes, after all, in circular design, programmed for so many years that it wears out, but does not degrade. So contrived to build something new from the dismantled elements. The kind of design in which you have to determine the expiration date and already plan methods of distant demolition.
Yes, circular is coming, and it makes a great deal of sense, except that it is nowhere near our demolitions. Postmodern will probably be replaced by a dull residential development, whose main purpose will be capital investment. I can't imagine a developer today willingly programming it for decades to come and thinking how - with the least harm to the environment - to dismantle his creation and reuse it. That is, I may imagine it, but I don't believe in its existence.
Circular architecture in our country is probably in danger of doing the same thing as revitalization. It will become its own caricature, in which only the magic term resounds: useful life. Instead of projects providing for careful demolition and reuse of the building material, joyful tenders in the "build and demolish" mode will be launched. On top of that, there will be a merry-go-round of construction novelties: at the fair they will show prefabricated beams and poles with dynamite inside, to be fired when the buildings are past their best before. Boom! - And off again. Landfills will make money, cement plants will make money, transporters will make money.
Anyway, especially in housing, architects today, at the behest of investors, are doing their best to get their creations demolished as soon as possible. Who knows if representatives of the demolition industry have not infiltrated design offices. And they act in such a way that it makes one want to demolish. The fresh idea of building a hotel on the beach in Miedzyzdroje could only have come from those hoping that in a few years some conscious building inspector will order it to be demolished. The same with the Golebiewski in Pobierowo and other seaside wonders, for which the Baltic will probably soon stretch its paws.
And if, by some miracle, the mechanism of joyful demolition is jammed, there will always be the threat of war, the one that the builders talked about so dreamily at the conference. After all, the more we demolish ourselves, the less we will be bombed by evil aliens.
Jakub Głaz
Read more: A&B 05/2024 - DWORKS,
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