Agnieszka: Since you are now designing a school, I expect you to introduce wildlife and empathetic thinking there as well.
Alexandra: We started designing the school a year ago, in the first lockdown, and after just a few months I was richer in knowledge about how to design such buildings in the future, so that they wouldn't have to be closed in case of pandemic returns, so that they would create a healthier microclimate. I have one child in high school and another in kindergarten, so I was getting sanitary data from two different systems. First we had to provide one and a half square meters per child, then two. No school meets such standards, the classrooms are too small, so in a pandemic they have to be closed. If each classroom had separate, non-intersecting entrances, then children could stay in so-called bubbles with educators and there would be no need to switch to remote education. Of course, there should be at least one washbasin in each classroom.
Agnieszka: That's how it was planned in the Thousand Year Schools.
Alexandra: Because schools were supposed to be able to become a hospital in case of war or pandemic. This multifunctionality of school buildings, in general of all buildings, is a very interesting topic, which especially now seems crucial in thinking about the future of architecture. We cannot predict extremely rare events. Therefore, any public building should be versatile and easily adaptable to changes in terms of required room heights or evacuation. Post-epidemic modernism has healed buildings and ventilated cities, and now the reflection on air is also returning. The results of many studies of air quality in school buildings are alarming, as almost eighty percent of schools in Poland have bad air. It turns out that after fifteen minutes in a closed room with bad ventilation, children simply start inhaling their own carbon dioxide. They feel bad, get headaches and lose concentration. According to building law, mechanical ventilation cannot be mixed with natural ventilation, due to the need to recover warm air, which proves very problematic when mechanical ventilation is poorly serviced, and it turns out that this is often the case.
Elementary school project in Niemcz, design: Pracownia Architektoniczna Aleksandra Wasilkowska
Agnieszka: So by protecting the environment, we are harming humanity.
Aleksandra: Yes, there was an interesting discussion recently in our circles about building 2226 of the Baumschlager Eberle project. This building is a manifesto of a certain turn to the roots - architecture without central heating, air conditioning, mechanical ventilation and a million smart, green installations.
Agnieszka: The so-called greenwashing.
Alexandra: In favor of de facto medieval architecture, very simple, that is, with walls seventy centimeters thick, without Styrofoam, excellent insulation, with natural ventilation in the form of windows opened byCO2 detectors. However, this is a private office building, and under Polish legal conditions the design of public buildings has many restrictions and very many restrictions on the installations themselves. An architect, to come up with a healthy and well-breathing building, must enter into a dialogue with the designers of sanitary installations, this requires specialized knowledge. The same applies to toilets - it's difficult to design non-discriminatory toilets when every project has to be approved by a sanitary expert, and he counts everything according to technical conditions and has no way to question it. And yet it is known that a woman pees for an average of three minutes and a man for one minute, so theoretically there should be three times more toilets for women than for men. This is pure physiology, not ideology.
Agnieszka: After all, everyone has been aware of this for a long time, just look at the queues in front of women's toilets in the cinema or theater.
Alexandra: We talk about it in the press, and in fact, having this knowledge, we should change the construction law. Sometimes it is possible to outsmart this law, there was, for example, a very clever design for a stadium with a sliding wall in the toilets. When a game is played, where most of the fans are men, the wall moves and there are more men's toilets, and when a nurses' conference is held, and it's mostly women, the wall is moved in the opposite direction and there are more women's toilets.
design of the elementary school in Niemcz, proj.: Pracownia Architektoniczna Aleksandra Wasilkowska
Agnieszka: And in the school will you be able to overcome this flexible approach?
Aleksandra: I don't know yet what final solution we will come to, but for sure this building will not discriminate on the basis of gender.
Agnieszka: You're an architect, but you're also an artist, a curator, you write books, you design theater sets. I happened to hear opinions in the architectural community that what is an architect who does not build, but chafes at other activities. Have you encountered the opinion that architects who do other things are not real architects?
Alexandra: Yes, they are. A gallerist friend once met me and after reading some interview with me said: "Ola, you don't read that Yona Friedman, just build!". That was about ten years ago. Of course I want to build, because after all, it's worth verifying theory in practice, but I would never want to give up all the excitement that awaits me in my work in theater or art, because it's a super-inspiring air, it gives me a healthy distance and a critical view of architecture itself. I don't feel that I have to build very much or at any cost. I'm comfortable with small scale and a certain disconnect between art and architecture. My studio is very authorial and functioning in art or theater gives me the opportunity to introduce interesting elements into architecture.
Agnieszka: You don't separate these fields?
Alexandra: No, everything intermingles. From the book on toilets came a realistically built series of public toilets in Warsaw. From the art projects and books also came my projects for modernizing bazaars, which are realistically being built. Certain things would have been impossible if I hadn't intellectually processed this on paper beforehand. This functioning in many fields is also a good economic model for me. It allowed me practically two years after graduation to open my own studio and make a living from it. Sometimes money earned in art or theater allows me to finance less profitable but socially important architectural projects, and sometimes vice versa, thanks to money from architecture I can do pro bono sculptures in a small park. This allows me to be independent, I design what I think is right, and I don't always have to fulfill only market whims. I'm not saying that this is the best or right strategy for an architect. I just function that way. I very much appreciate different attitudes and they seem to me to be full-fledged. Ewa Kurylowicz, who builds skyscrapers and deals with the accessibility of architecture, is great; Agata Twardoch, who has a real influence on housing policy, perhaps even more than many architects who build, and Gosia Kuciewicz, who designs great exhibitions and installations. Both Ewa, Agata and Gosia have a great influence on how architecture and the city looks. According to Gosia's idea, the urban Smile of Warsaw is being created, after all, this is the most real influence on reality. Architecture is, after all, not just buildings. I completely don't understand this race to prove who is more of an architect: the one who builds or the one who thinks conceptually. It doesn't matter at all in the bigger picture.
Agnieszka: You have an impact on reality, that's the most important thing.
Alexandra: What if we didn't? I don't think having an impact is some kind of overriding value. The most important thing is to do no harm. I would even risk the thesis that the best architect is one who does not build, but, for example, is an activist, or is involved in historic preservation. In any profession, the great art is to somehow manage one's ego in a sensible way, so that others also have some use for it.
Agnieszka: You have been designing theater sets for years. I see in them a connection with shadow architecture, there are some guts in these designs, scary eyes, grotesque, swollen figures. They are disturbing and look like they are pulled from the subconscious. Is this the case?
Alexandra: Scenography has the quality of being created in dialogue with some literary concept or story that the director wants to tell. I'm interested in the borderline between consciousness and dream, I draw out the corporeality, quite exhibitionist. My first set design, the installation "Black Island" for "The Sexual Life of the Wild" directed by Krzysztof Garbaczewski, was the fulfillment of the idea of open form or grassroots architecture. It became another actor, appropriating the space in some sense, entering into a choreographic arrangement with the actors, sometimes obscuring or enclosing them. This fluidity, evolvability and performativity also interests me in architecture. Scenography, installation design is also a pleasant break after time spent on construction. It gives me the fuel to function in architecture.
Agnes: What do you have in your plans? Are you going to learn something new again, as you have done so many times before?
Alexandra: I love to experiment. The next volume of "Shadow Architecture" will be about cemeteries and rituals associated with death and mourning. I've been very interested in this topic for years, and it also seems to me somehow marginalized, for example, how to solve the problem of the lack of cemeteries for religious minorities, or how to solve the issues of shrinking space in cemeteries, what connection this has to a particular culture, religion and ecology. I'm also preparing an exhibition at the market, where there is a wonderful "clawed" street with almost a hundred manicure booths side by side. I will be doing a nail art exhibition there - the first Polish na il art exhibition! [Laughs] Anyone who uses social media knows that today most of the art shown on the Internet is created on nails! I am fascinated by how art can penetrate everyday life. I like to introduce art where you least expect it. This exhibition will be a continuation of my architectural work, as I designed a large market hall in this bazaar and am leading a multi-year project to revitalize the place. I like it when such radically different activities are intertwined in one place.
Agnieszka: Thank you for the interview.
interviewed by Agnieszka RASMUS-ZGORZELSKA
Illustrations provided courtesy of Aleksandra Wasilkowska.
Aleksandra Wasilkowska - architect, artist and stage designer. Author of books, including "Aporia. The City Is The City", "Warsaw as an emergent structure", "Architecture of the Shadow". In 2010 she represented Poland at the 12th International Architecture Biennale in Venice (with Agnieszka Kurant), and in 2019 at the Quadriennale in Prague (with Krzysztof Garbaczewski). Her works have been shown at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Seoul Arts Center, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and are in the collection of the Zachęta National Gallery, among others. The studio, which she has run since 2007, specializes in marketplace revitalization projects.
