You can spruce up and design for hard money, and still authentic life will nestle in some incredibly ordinary place. One that hasn't even been swept by the eye of an architect or interior designer. This is just plain scandalous!
Once upon a time I used to collect points for PTTK tourist badges. You used to roam or sail to get a bolt-on badge, and it made holes in your clothes. It was time for a rematch. I am screwing the Polish Tourist and Sightseeing Society with the Vulture of Enterprise badge I established. After all, thanks to PTTK, I no longer have to set off for the Karkonosze and get tired of roaming the mountains to rot in Samotnia in the evenings - a hostel that for years maintained a hopelessly mountainous atmosphere and decor, fed too well and too cheaply (outrageously good bigos!) and attracted not typical tourists ready to tuck into frites for three dimes, but weirdos who didn't want to live in a mountain hotel or guesthouse for the hell of it. When everything was optimized, Samotnia was stubbornly unoptimized. It still maliciously looked like a typical hostel, although it had, after all, undergone several renovations, experienced improvements and innovations including photovoltaics. One was a bit out of time and space there, and for dog's money, yet it is well known,
that to experience such deprivation, you need to go to a spa or at least take a course in active laziness.
Solitude in this form is no more. There were protests, there were some moves by hostel fanatics, but happily in vain. PTTK got what it wanted: it moved out the Siemaszko family, devoted to the place and associated with the facility for more than half a century, and brought in business from Podhale. Now it's a gite: white furniture from Provence, bar counters from the corporate canteen and designs with a spirit of Zakopane, though supposedly contaminated by the influence of some Karkonosze embroidery. No one has reached for motifs from pre-war Karkonosze chalets, and rightly so, because they are, after all, "Kraut."
So I don't have to climb under the modernized Samotnia anymore, strain my sinews and muscles, risk injury, and get my clothes sweaty. If I get the urge for whitewashed furniture, I have several such restaurants near my house. For now, however, I go to other places, as unoptimized and under-designed as Samotnia. And I wonder if and when the next Enterprise Vulture will reach them. In Poznań, for example, a noncommittal but besieged square separated from Wielkopolski Square in the Old Town has remained scandalously long. It is besieged largely by students and staff of the nearby University of Arts, although the benches and lanterns here are like those from Castorama, the cobblestones are of a similar standard, and there are such small pavilions all around. Most of them are lined with florists, and in one - a modest pizzeria run for years by a native Italian. Here one eats pizza only outdoors: on benches or tables set up as if and what if. On the rack you drink a racial espresso for three (!) zlotys (doppio for five). The atmosphere is that of a picnic. So: lots of flowers, cheap and good pizza and coffee, and almost zero design. Even the price list is some kind of cardboard. That's all it takes to make them sit, eat, drink and smoke, not only shot painters, sculptors or multimedia specialists, but also architecture students and their lecturers. The same ones who would design from A to Ziet instagram pubs and stores. Zero shame, they don't even hide that they are manning such a very undesigned place. Well, and a bit suicidal, though, because how to explain to a client now that they need a polished design.
Equally obscene is the Kleparski Market in Krakow. The pavilions are densely packed, the fence is blue, the lettering is from the 1990s, but it's alive, it works, and it attracts a clientele for whose wallets the owners of various gastroconcepts would fight. It mixes locals and newcomers, those on a budget and those with a fortune. Or such a market hall in Wroclaw! It stands a marvelous monument in the very center of the city and for nothing wants to turn into Warsaw's Koszyki. Under the parabolas of concrete arches one could sip, taste, "relive the experience of tasting" or "experience the atmosphere of excitement" at the gleaming countertops, but here one just hangs out, buys and eats. Stalls, bars, stores, order as such, residual design, and lives this commercial basilica in an unashamedly ordinary way.
For the word "ordinary" is the key to these and other places that live, operate and attract a variety of people. Ordinary, that is, just right or just right, without bending toward the gumption of a crumbling bazaar on the one hand, or without deviating toward the excised pubs, stores and squares on the other. Ordinary , that is, one that creates a framework for life in its various manifestations without disciplining it with an over-determined form. In ordinary there is no need to hustle in front of others and flex your muscles.
Finally, "ordinary", which means - precisely - not optimized: profitable enough to earn enough, not maximum. Affordable to almost everyone, and yet not downlandishly outlandish, which becomes important in light of recent reports. Lo and behold, in 2023, two and a half million Polish citizens live in extreme poverty, and seventeen (!) million - below the subsistence level. Instead of decreasing, these numbers are increasing, and the trend seems likely to continue. Inflation is doing its job, and the post-war baby boom is adding more and more abundantly to the ranks of pensioners. Many of them, battered by years of transition, can count on starving monthly payments. So you won't see them at the equally cheerful but expensive Christmas markets, the polished restaurants and bars, or the shopping malls. For more and more people, places designed in a show-off manner will begin to be associated with oppression and powerlessness.
In order not to condemn almost half of Poles to substandard places that are cheap but chaotic and sad, we need more decent ordinariness. The trend needs to be bucked. So I'm waiting for headlines like "This extremely ordinary design will win your heart." Architecture and design faculties will find the subject "Under-design" useful. And potential optimizers, including PTTK, should be tempted by the "Non-Modernization of the Year" award.
Jakub Głaz
Read more: A&B 12/2024 - THIRD SITES,
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