In the student COMPETITION for a press REPORT on architecture, the jury awarded two equal second-degree honorable mentions: Maja Czarnecka for her reportage entitled "Known material - unknown space"[info] and Alina Celichowska for her work entitled. "The world of selfies." Below we publish Alina Celichowska's reportage. We encourage you to read it!
Alina Celichowska, although she studies at the Poznan University of Technology on a daily basis, she also studied architecture in Mantua, at Politecnico di Milano. She is currently gaining experience at Burckhardt & Partner in Zurich, having already completed an internship at ULTRA Architects.
A world of selfies
Thursday, 9 p.m. A rainy day, autumn standard. Friends have just texted that they are going out on the town, asking if I feel like going with them. I don't actually have much to do, I'm watching a TV series. However, I don't go, I refuse. I scoop up statistics that speak of the antisocial society in which we live separately. The evening passes, and my head is still buzzing: I would so much like to be there - there, in the city, with people. However, I live in a residential area far from the center. A couple of infrequent and unreliable bus lines reach us. A momentary outing for me is a moment plus about a two-hour commute.
I have friends on the estate. Why not spend an evening together? For such a meeting you need time (let's assume disposable), people and... a place. Our small neighborhood offers us all three options: our own house (good, although the meeting could interfere with the evening pajama strolls of other household members), the estate streets (perfect for a walk, but the aura is not conducive) and the bus stop (at least there is a canopy there).
Guests in the hallway, guests in the bedroom
The described estate, called by many a "bedroom", is a rather peculiar entity. Its plan is the result of an SARP urban planning competition to develop a concept for a new neighborhood designed to accommodate more than twenty thousand people. Developed successively from 1986 to the present day, the area located near Poznan's western wedge of greenery still seems to be a housing dream come true for many. The plan is very orderly, with most streets laid out perpendicular or parallel to the main ones: Literacka and Wergiliusza, which ensures easy orientation in the space. The cottages, row houses and multi-family buildings present here are inhabited by people who are open-minded and clearly want to engage in community life. Numerous initiatives are fostered by Facebook, but urban planning does not help them. The neighborhoods being developed as part of the much-discussed 1980s neighborhood lack, following Christopher Alexander, an urban necessity: plazas. They are supposed to be the largest and most public "rooms" in the city. After all, guests are not received in a hallway or bedroom, but in a living room.
A real city living room, that is, a square in Rzeszow
photo: Alina Celichowska
computer sunshine
On Sundays around 4 pm, a lot of kids buzz around the playground under the block. Their moms sit on the benches around, gossiping at their best. Dog owners and happy couples stroll between the big slab creations, searching with their eyes for the generously designed greenery on the concreted area. Beautiful weather - the estate is alive. But how many days are there when, through thick clouds, cold wind and drizzling rain, the main source of light and dopamine becomes for the Pole-blockdweller a computer screen.
With typical settlements of Corbusier's thought, the urban planner obviously planned communal spaces. The reality of the communistbudget, however, made it mostly an aluminum shed with not very inviting appeal, housing a Biedronka, a hairdresser and a lumpx. It's hard to talk about a real cultural center here, unless culture is rated extremely low.
Public culture for Polish weather, or the J. von Eichendorff Central Polish-German Library in Opole
Photo: Alina Celichowska
beware of PUM
However, all these unpleasant gray estates appeared to the world a very long time ago. Nowadays, a lot of new multi-family buildings are being designed, around which in visualizations there are laughing children running around, old people walking around with an expression of bliss written on their faces, and in general, people are plentiful and everyone is very happy. However, looking at such a development after it has been adopted for living, it turns out that the meeting place becomes a neighborhood parking lot. Services in these blocks are in short supply, and those located on the first floor are not particularly suitable for a great meeting place - except when buying a parrot in a small pet store or exchanging gossip in a hair salon. The architects' affliction here becomes the lack of a simple provision in the development plan: allowing services and retail on the first floor. And just as during the communistera the assumptions were guided by politics and the architects' struggle with the authorities for comfortable living with poor cash resources, now the construction trend is mainly determined by the so-called PUMsqueeze. The usable floor area of apartments, for which investors now rake in huge sums (in Poznan alone, over the past year, the price per square meter has risen by seven percent¹), is becoming the new design principle, replacing those rules devised by prominent urban planners, which architecture students learn from their first day at university. But what can an architect do when gold becomes more important than people?
a place to avoid
I lived at Legion Square for a nice couple of years," says Ms. Maria, now a resident of Wroclaw. I never spent time there, nothing encouraged me there. A couple of benches were occupied by lamp posts, so basically I always used the path through the square, ran across it to the streetcar and that was it.
Legion Square in Wroclaw
photo: Alina Celichowska
Legion Square is a public space where you absolutely do not feel the square. Being there, you can talk about two patches of grass divided by a path. Although it is located on an important urban axis, between the modernist Lotos and Kosciuszko Square, by its neglected surroundings, a few haphazardly growing trees and the proximity of a streetcar that can take away from this ugly space at any moment, Legion Square has become a run-of-the-mill square. Unfortunately, instead of redesigning the entire square, the city decided to erect a large monument to a questionably friendly form perfectly on the axis that is now the great asset of the square. Once again, another public space has been given a spotty treatment, thus becoming even less friendly. Legion Square is, so to speak, a seed from which something beautiful could grow, but if it is watered but covered by the sun, it will go to waste. The square in front will remain a place to be avoided.
Or maybe it's the people?
Maybe it's the Instagram and Facebook society that doesn't need space to meet in person? After all, it has plenty of it virtually. Such thinking, unfortunately prevalent among many adults ("oh this youth of today, nothing but sitting on their phones"), can only be lost. There is no denying that phones reign supreme in our hands. However, assuming that, as the famous commercial said - "Nokia brings people together," social media can become an invaluable aid to bringing people together. A simple example would be the Chain of Light. Thanks to how often people reach for their phones, more than once it was possible to gather thousands of people in squares across the country overnight to express their views together, already in person. Public spaces, as long as they are and remain people-friendly, become a place for communal yoga, street concerts, "beer" meetings. Sometimes all it really takes is a good, clean bench to integrate.
Poznan, areas along the Warta River full of people
photo: Alina Celichowska
self-promotion?
Four years ago, the "Architecture and Urban Planning" major at Poznan Technical University ceased to exist. The name was shortened to just "Architecture." This quiet sign of the times symbolically exempted the future architect from thinking globally, on a city scale. The case is not lost, however. As long as the architect fights for the community and the idea of architecture created for man, a social being, so long will our communities not have to succumb only to virtual space. As long as man will not have to like his own company by force in order to spend his free time with pleasure.
Alina CELICHOWSKA
¹https://tvn24bis.pl/nieruchomosci,83/ceny-mieszkan-w-polsce-jak-wzrosly-ceny-nieruchomosci,971438.html
Alufire was a partner of the competition
