Work submitted for the competition
"Best Diploma Architecture".
The events of recent years clearly indicate that the idea of the city is changing under the influence of physical and social factors. The consequences of the recent pandemic, war, increasing migration, changing family structures, lifestyles, economic and climate crises, and the increasing digitization of daily life are introducing issues into urban structures that have been shaped for hundreds of years and have not previously been considered.
visuals
© Bartłomiej Roguski
Observing the dynamics of changes taking place in the modern world, the question of the role and language of architecture in this changing landscape arises. By creating successive buildings, we are shaping them for an unknown future, so the consideration of the designed object should not end at the moment of its construction and commissioning. The life cycle of a building is in constant motion and subject to constant change.
projection
© Bartłomiej Roguski
Assuming the long-term presence of the designed building in the environment, we should be aware that the assumed program may turn out to be only a short episode. Most likely, new factors affecting the use of the building will emerge, which we are not able to predict today. When designing, therefore, we should leave a margin - an excess capacity of the building, which allows for different interpretations of its space for future users. In this context, we can think of architecture as a very flexible shell that offers a variety of uses within the basic structural form. This will give the building a better chance to adapt to new conditions.
cross sections
© Bartłomiej Roguski
Identifying and understanding the basic, fixed values of the elements that make up a building can help achieve this. The focus of the design process is shifted from categorizing human activities and defining the space in which they should be carried out, to categorizing the elements that make up the building and juxtaposing them in a way that shapes spaces that allow for individual interpretation. This way of defragmenting a building into individual components and juxtaposing them was referred to in the project as typology, understood as the division of something according to certain rules.
axonometry and projection of the apartment
© Bartłomiej Roguski
The study section analyzed design methods that distinguish building components characterized by different lifespans, and indicated ways to shape the relationships between them in order to minimize the environmental and economic follow-up costs of adapting the building to changing environmental factors by extending the lifespan of each component. The search was for a way to categorize and juxtapose elements in such a way as to give greater flexibility to the designed structure. Based on an analysis of the work of architectural theoreticians and practitioners, the author's typology of the layers of an architectural work was proposed, taking into account the issue of its durability.
projection and visualization of the office space
© Bartłomiej Roguski
As a result, a design for a townhouse complementing the layout of large-scale tenement buildings developed in Warsaw's Praga district in different periods of the 20th century was developed. The project implements the principle of building an architectural form as a composition of a regular building structure, subordinated to its geometry of internal separations, systems of technical infrastructure, facade modules, aimed at shaping the excessive capacity of the building allowing individual interpretation of the space it shapes.
details
© Bartłomiej Roguski
As Maciej Nowicki wrote:
Almost all good architecture was functional, and almost all architecture ceased to be so after the passage of years. For what we call functionality is linked to a form of life that is strictly fixed in time, and forms change constantly, both in life and in the corresponding architecture.
Bartłomiej ROGUSKI
Illustrations: © Author
