interview from issue 10|2021 of A&B
The New Polish Deal is "cracking down" on spatial order. An implementation competition is underway for the conceptual design of a single-family house with a building area of up to 70 square meters. A bank of designs will be created, which for a zloty will be able to download from the website, print and build a house according to them yourself. This will be made possible by an amendment to the Construction Law simplifying the whole process - a building permit and a construction manager will be unnecessary. Can this be successful? Katarzyna Jagodzinska talks about it with Małgorzata Pilinkiewicz, President of the National Council of the Polish Chamber of Architects.
For years, the Chamber of Architects of the Republic of Poland has been calling for changes in the Construction Law liberalizing the procedures for obtaining a building permit. The government's idea initially sounded like a joke, but no one is laughing anymore. Anyone who wants to build a small house (up to 70 square meters of building area) will be able to become a construction manager themselves. The idea of "do-it-yourself" is entering a new dimension - the government is convincing that to build a house for a family of four (because that's what they see in this house with their eyes), no special skills are needed, and anyone on their own can face such a challenge. And since the construction of a small house can not be complicated, noting the progress of the work in the construction log is not required. In place of the procedure for obtaining a building permit comes an application with a construction project. It sounds like a construction eldorado. So there's no need to wait, just open the pattern book, choose a nice design, pay a zloty and drive to the DIY market to get a DIY kit.
DIY and pattern book
The government's idea, announced before the vacations, is based on two pillars: simplifying the construction process (which, without professional supervision, may come at the expense of safety) and creating a bank of ready-made projects. It is supposed to be fast, simple and affordable.
The idea of the draft amendment to the Construction Law and the Law on Planning and Spatial Development on August 2, 2021, the explanatory statement reads, "stems from the need to provide simple legal tools to enable the construction of single-family houses to meet one's own housing needs." In order to counter developer development with this instrument, a permissible density of development was specified - one such building on a plot of at least 1,000 square meters.
The second facilitation is the design of such houses in open access. Fifty designs are to be created on the basis of an architectural competition announced on September 7, which will be made available for download to all those willing to build a catalog house. The competition will evaluate the attractiveness of the proposed architectural and development solutions; the building's functional and utility solutions; the economics of the solutions; and environmentally friendly solutions. The ordering party (Ministry of Development and Technology) assumes that the maximum total cost of constructing a house according to such a design will be 150 thousand zlotys gross.
Thanks to the competition," reads the website of the General Office of Construction Supervision, "the best available and universal architectural solutions will get a chance to become widely known. In the long run, the selected projects have a chance to raise the aesthetic quality of the Polish landscape, increase the harmony and order of space with individual buildings.
environmental turmoil
There was an uproar in the architectural community. IARP took the floor. Thunderstorms rained down on the Chamber's Facebook profile, and not only against the government, but also against the Chamber's authorities for making a conservative statement or ignoring the substance of the issue. The Chamber organized public consultations to gather opinions and arguments, and then formulated an official position, pointing out that the draft amendments to the law "unseal the system of construction law, provoke abuses, do not guarantee the safety of buildings implemented under it, and may contribute to the overflow of chaotic development." The more than three-page letter to the ministry lacked space to argue the last point.
A week after the architectural competition was announced, the chamber issued a "warning" on its website against participating in the competition, whether as a competition judge or participant. At the top of the arguments was the statement:
A typical design may not only fail to provide for individual needs, but above all fail to meet the requirements of spatial order, which is a social good, not an individual one. In addition, the distribution by the state of free construction projects for single-family houses with a building area of up to 70 m² will deepen the crisis in the design market, leading to the marginalization of the architectural profession as a partner of the investor in the investment process, and consequently to the degradation of spatial order.
In Facebook comments, architects called for the removal of those who enter the competition from the Chamber, but the warning is simply a lack of recommendation. When asked about the possibility of such a solution, Malgorzata Pilinkiewicz referred to professional ethics:
The Chamber carries out the statutory tasks of supervising the proper practice of the profession on the basis and within the limits of common law and self-government, including the Code of Ethics. Disciplinary ombudsmen and the disciplinary court are independent and autonomous in making decisions on matters of professional or disciplinary responsibility of Chamber members. Therefore, the punishment of an architect can only be decided by the disciplinary court at the request of the ombudsman. In contrast, architects will make the decision to participate in the competition for government-recommended single-family houses of up to 70 square meters or adaptations of typical and repetitive designs, including those donated for a buck, on their own and at their own risk. In light of the discussion taking place in the media space, I believe that the professional architectural community, however, puts ethics ahead of political order or short-term gain. I believe that the ethos and message of the architectural profession as a profession of public trust will weather this storm.
non-order
One would like to say that the Polish Order is introducing disorder, but the disorder is already there. Maybe it will be a little bigger, although you probably won't notice the difference. What will these new arrangements change on a macro level?
Idon't really know what the scandal is about," Wojciech Gawinowski of Vostok Design 's Krakow office wrote on IARP's Facebook page. - Will it really make that much of a difference if there are designs for $1 instead of $1,500? After all, catalogs have been around for years, and for years that's the vast majority of the market. For years, designs that don't fit the environment have been chosen by investors who don't have a clue. After all, these catalogs were produced by members of our Chamber and nothing bad happens to them for it. Will there be takers? After all, catalog companies already have ready-made projects full of cabinets, and the ethics of the profession have not interested them for a very long time. So what difference does it make?
Architects' fear that citizens will throw themselves en masse into building small houses according to the designs offered by the government is probably over the top. I'm betting that government designs will not compete with custom-designed architects.
Without discounting the validity of the arguments made by the IARP authorities, it seems to me that a much bigger issue is urban, suburban and rural space, landscape and infrastructure. I like to reach for Filip Springer 's "The Colonnaded Bathtub" and quote the passage in which the author dissects the definition of spatial order. Eight years after the book was published, the timeliness of the text doesn't seem to be in danger - "Spatial order is something everyone in Poland has heard about, but no one has seen it for a long time." Tomasz Maksymiuk of MXL4 Design Bureau in Szczecin points out that:
The real danger is the bill's intention to trigger a mass movement of single-family construction as a supposed antidote to the housing problems of the less well-situated part (that is, the majority!) of society. The message from the bill is: go ahead and build up! This will lead in a straight line to an even greater spillover of Polish cities, towns and villages in the fashion of the now-criticized American suburbanization of the previous century. On top of this, the planned planning facilitations and restrictions on supervision will further exacerbate the existing spatial chaos. Chaos, which, it is worth reminding, is not an aesthetic notion, but a quantifiable impediment to economic development.
Agnieszka Kalinowska-Sołtys, SARP vice president for environment and climate protection, points out that urban sprawl forces the construction of expensive infrastructure, which interferes with nature and often degrades the environment. Thus, promoting the construction of single-family, small-volume homes is not environmentally friendly. Small houses are energy inefficient and thus expensive per square meter.
Houses with an area of up to 70 square meters," explains Kalinowska-Soltys, " are a small volume with a proportionally huge number of external partitions - walls and roof, which are building elements that cause significant heat loss during cold periods, and are also a large area that heatsup small interiors during hot weather. Because of their geometry, small houses have enormous energy requirements compared, for example, with an apartment of the same area in a multi-family building, but with only one exterior wall. Small buildings require special adaptation to the location, so that they are well protected from the negative effects of moisture, frost, but also to take advantage of the potential of passive design solutions that give a healthy, comfortable interior through the proper shaping of the building mass and location on the plot.
Time will tell whether citizens will hijack the organization of construction sites en masse. I am skeptical. It seems that the convenience of a fifteen-minute city, which is emphasized not only by planners, but also by some developers, suits many people. Michal Wisniewski of the Institute of Architecture has no doubt that the concept of building houses without permits is:
...an attempt to create a media smokescreen for the total helplessness of the state in the face of the current situation in the housing market and absurdly inflated housing prices. At a time when housing construction is handled by the "invisible hand of the market" and property taxes are low, housing has become a savings investment that still guarantees a relatively high return on invested capital. The result is that prices are steadily rising, apartments are out of reach for those who realistically need them, and toxic, oversized and lacking adequate infrastructure is increasing in cities. The 70-square-meter houses are not the answer to this crisis, it is not known where they are to be built, and the urban context of such developments is even more of a mystery. Added to this is the scale of these houses, which are slightly larger allotment gazebos with an attic. Can this work? I will leave this question unanswered.
I raise the question. And we wait. And maybe someone will enter the competition for a new Polish house and maybe create a design that will change the face of the Polish landscape. Finally, I will mention that out of eight competition judges, only two are active architects. An urban planner is missing from this group.
