Anna: What role does usability play in empathetic architecture?
Iwona: There should be no contradiction between architecture and usability. They are absolutely the same thing, because we are building a space in which to live, in which we want to live well, to be happy. Right now, the pandemic has made everyone emphatically aware of the importance of our surroundings. There is a huge difference between an interior where we have one window and the same perspective from an apartment that you can't leave, and an interior that has multiple facades with different directions, where light passes through different points. If this landscape that one sees - whether it is urban or nature - changes, if the light changes, our mood in the apartment changes, it is difficult to get monotony or boredom.
Offices and laboratories for the INRA Institute near Orleans, competition project, 2000-2006
proj.: I. Buczkowska
Anna: What is your relationship with nature?
Iwona: I belong to those for whom nature is very important. Looking at the history of the 20th century, nevertheless, the opposition is evident: Europe and modernism and Frank Lloyd Wright's organic movement. If I were to sum up the history of 20th century architecture and name one architect, it would be Wright. First of all, because space was something absolutely free for him. Modernism left us with orthogonality. It was as if there was only one direction or two in space. As if the parallelism of ceilings or roofs was necessary. And there are an infinite number of directions in space. No literary person writes a book with one letter, unless he wants to. Why should an architect limit his language only to this compression of the abecadal of space, which in total is unlimited?
Anna: Many architects limit themselves?
Iwona: Yes, because that's how they were formed in school. It seems to me that education is key. In my experience, I know that in a group of eighteen to twenty students, on average, two or three people should change direction. Two or three are born architects. Teachers in schools are for the rest, who can be properly developed, directed, to whom you can pass on your experience, to whom, above all, you need to pass on enthusiasm. Unfortunately, now in French schools, regulations are incomparably more important. When I was in my third year of architecture, our professor took us to the center of Ivry, where the construction of a project by Jean Renaudie, an extremely interesting architect, was coming to an end. I suppose that if I had not known his work, the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and still Claude Parent, my architecture would have been different. Standing in front of this building, I remembered my professors from Gdansk, who said, "Ms. Buczkowska, you can do this to yourself in the West." And when I was in the West and saw Jean Renaudie's proposal, his apartments, terraces, and those forty-five foot angles, where each apartment is different, I thought to myself that if something like this can be built, then anything can be built. I'm not going to get into a discussion of whether it's pretty or ugly, but it was this freedom of expression of the architect, which at the same time then transforms into the freedom of the user. The problem is that the user may not want this freedom. This is a completely different matter. In France, a synonym for the word "apartment" is cellule, which is also a cell. Only it can be a cancer cell, also a prison cell.
Offices and laboratories for the INRA Institute near Orléans, competition design, 2000-2006
proj.: I. Buczkowska
Anna: In Polish, you can say "cell".
Iwona: The statement that a cell is synonymous with an apartment indicates the inadequacy of spatial solutions for commercial construction.
Anna: What's fascinating is this layer of language. Many people repeat words they have heard, they don't understand their meaning; they think they want something, and in fact they don't even know what they might want.
Iwona: Sometimes I hear: "people don't want it." And how are they supposed to know what they might want? People will know what they want if you show them all the possibilities.
A complex of 99 public housing units (in which each unit is different), services, studios,
municipal meeting hall and underground parking lots in Ivry-sur-Seine, competition design, 1980-1986
proj.: I. Buczkowska; cooperation: J. Kaminska, M. Thomsen, M. Van der Maelle
Anna: How do you understand the words today: "This you can make for yourself in the West"?
Iwona: There were great architects in Poland at that time, and there still are, but that architecture of interest was churches, theaters. Not housing. The studies had to prepare the student for a specific Polish reality. Architecture in Gdansk, however, was completely different from that of Warsaw or Cracow. I left after the second year, so I didn't have construction, but statistics or drafting geometry were at an insanely high level, plus drawing, sculpture and painting. And it's not drawing for an architect - I learned to draw the way students at the Academy of Fine Arts draw. I still have a very close relationship with these professors to this day. I believe that without them I would have a different view of architecture. This technical formation was very important, and at the same time it was also artistic. In France, there was no such thing. In France there was a debate on architecture, space, which in turn was not present at the Gdansk University of Technology. The events of 1968 were very important for the French, they changed their view of the world, everyone wanted to live differently, architecture could facilitate this.
A complex of 99 communal apartments (in which each is different), services, studios,
municipal meeting hall and underground parking lots in Ivry-sur-Seine, competition design, 1980-1986
proj.: I. Buczkowska; cooperation: J. Kaminska, M. Thomsen, M. Van der Maelle
Anna: Did the fact that you are a woman ever matter?
Iwona: No.I didn't even realize that the fact of being a woman could hinder my existence as an architect. I don't know what my professional life would have been like if I hadn't left Poland. I suppose I would have worked as an architect, at a university, but what type of architecture it would have been, I don't know and will never know. I have never experienced gender discrimination on a construction site.
Anna: What do you think is the determining element for a person to stay in the profession?
Iwona: It depends on how strong the passion is. Some are not interested in their profession, they work because they need to make money. Others work very diligently. Still others work with passion. And there are those for whom the profession is a passion. One can also fail to deal with this passion.
Anna: Do you have a distance from your projects, or do you always remain in a relationship anymore?
Iwona: One always remains in a relationship. Projects require tremendous commitment, time and energy. I have never completed a building where I had to bring about some compromise that would undermine my architectural solutions. Maybe sometimes there was no money for better materials... I am one of the few architects who have lived for thirty-five years in a communal apartment designed by myself. It would be difficult for me to live in an orthogonal space (although some solutions are interesting), with linearity that limits the possibility of establishing relationships.
A complex of 225 public housing units (in which each unit is different), 7 art studios,
retail, services and underground parking in Le Blanc-Mesnil, 1977-1993, construction 1986-1992,
proj.: I. Buczkowska; collaboration: I. Jeangeorge, T. Krupa, M. Van der Maelle
Anna: What should be the relationship of buildings to the city? How should architecture create the city?
Iwona: I'm a big believer in those spaces that are for pedestrians, where the role of cars is reduced. In my neighborhoods there are no cars, only pedestrians, trees and flowers. Buildings become part of nature, after twenty years they become almost invisible. The idea is to create spaces that facilitate contact, where you can stop, talk, contemplate the space, where ecology is important. If one were to forget for a moment about epidemics, dirt, non-existent hygiene, it turns out that it was medieval cities that offered the best solutions, contact with other people was easiest in them. I have a weakness for those placed on hilltops, especially Italian ones, because they were city-states, they were rich. That wealth still exists today. A marvel of urban planning for me is Apricale, a town in Liguria. There are three terraces in the center: the first, the highest terrace with earth, palm trees, there is the palace of a former duke. Below the terrace-plaza and church, this part already belongs to the city. And the third terrace, about a level lower, and on it there is a second square and a second church. This is the city's theater stage, in August, by the way, a theater from Genoa uses it, staging its performances there. The square was a place where people could find their place, make contact.
The basic element of the city, however, is housing. Already Alberti wrote that a city is a huge house and, conversely, a house is a very small city. The first urban theorist, Ildefonso Cerdà, took up this concept, formulated slightly differently by Aldo van Eyck (Team X) in the "leaf tree diagram": "A tree is a leaf and a leaf is a tree - a house is a city and a city is a house [...] - a city is not a city if it is not also a big house, a house is a house only when it is also a tiny town." What follows is the importance of the architectural concept of the place where one lives. In my work on the apartment house, I tried to develop the concept of "apartment-home" by combining the advantages of individual and collective housing.
cross-section - a complex of 225 public housing units (in which each unit is different), 7 art studios,
retail, services and underground parking in Le Blanc-Mesnil, 1977-1993, construction 1986-1992,
proj.: I. Buczkowska; cooperation: I. Jeangeorge, T. Krupa, M. Van der Maelle
Anna: How do you relate this to the concept of a modern city? Is living in such a big city good for us?
Iwona: Of course it can be good, but I think increasing the density of large agglomerations is a mistake. The density of Paris is not felt despite the fact that it is one of the largest among European cities. It is not felt because there is Haussmann architecture, 19th century architecture, which is insanely compact. The problem is cars. How to reduce this traffic? How to solve it? Density and the problems posed by the pandemic should be taken very seriously by architects today. Ecology is now being discussed in every part of the world.
Earlier pandemics (plague, cholera, malaria, tuberculosis) influenced the later development of cities: they were followed by parks (Central Park in New York), aqueducts (Philadelphia), modifications to transportation, boulevards and sidewalks (Paris), new urban planning laws for housing in New York, neighborhoods and cities with regular grids, and so on. Will we be able to learn from our year-long pandemic experience, change and improve the urban planning, architecture and landscape of our cities, while living in such a commercial society? The answer is not obvious.
Anna: Thank you for the interview.
interviewed: Anna WALEWSKA
Illustrations provided courtesy of Iwona Buczkowska.
Iwona BUCZKOWSKA - architect and urban planner, graduate of École Spéciale d'Architecture in Paris. Since 1978 she has run her own studio in Ivry-sur-Seine. She creates residential buildings in the spirit of the garden-terrace (gradins-jardin) concept expanded on a neighborhood scale by Jean Renaudie as a development of the late modernist concepts of the Team X group. In 1989, she received a gold medal and a special prize at the Fifth World Architecture Biennale in Sofia for her design of the Le Blanc-Mesnil housing development; in 1994, the Silver Medal of the French Academy of Architecture for lifetime achievement; and in 2003, the People's Choice Award for the Le Blanc-Mesnil neighborhood (voting via the Internet). Awarded the Label d'architecture du XX siècle for the design of a residential building in Saint-Dizier. Since 2017, documents on the projects of the Collège in Bobigny and the district in Le Blanc-Mesnil are part of the collection of the Museum of Architecture at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris. Her work has been covered in many articles, books, television reports and films. She did design work at the École nationale supérieure d'architecture et de paysage de Lille and the École nationale supérieure d'architecture de Versailles. Since the 1980s, her projects have been shown in group and solo exhibitions at various institutions around the world.
