The end of December - because that's when we finished preparing the January issue - is the best time for all kinds of summaries. And like every year, we ask practitioners and architecture critics to write what they consider a success and what they consider a failure in a given year. We do it in the convention of Kits and Hits. We give our Authors and Authors total freedom of expression and exceptionally we do not moderate this discussion. We are just very curious about it. For us, the biggest setback of this year was a marked decline in interest in the competition procedure. The large number of tenders for important spaces in Polish cities testifies to the fact that it is not quality that is most important, but cheapness. This is a very disturbing trend. We consider the pandemic-enforced interest in ecology, the climate crisis and the social relations resulting from the use of architecture to be a success. Much remains to be done, but the accuracy of the diagnosed problems makes us optimistic. 2020 has already made history, so we look to the future with hope!
- A&B editors
Robert Konieczny on the putts and hits in 2020 architecture
This year was difficult for all of us because of the pandemic. I would most readily award kits to our poor preparation for this crisis, then to poor countermeasures, but also to all the people who disregarded sanitary restrictions. We could have extinguished the pandemic faster, but it happened differently. However, I try to look for some positives in 2020. One of them was certainly to stop the pace of life. I spent the last few years, or maybe decades, on the road constantly, like a band musician, with constant visits to construction sites, trips to lectures. The peak period was the construction of the Breakthroughs Dialogue Center in Szczecin, when I had to chase across Poland. At one point, my daughter asked me if I was sleeping at home tonight, making me realize that I had become a rarely seen guest for her. Those lost moments together with her I will not get back. It was the pandemic that made me stop rushing around so much that gave me more time for my family and myself. And the biggest discovery of this year - online lectures. Previously, I had to spend all day commuting to a meeting and returning. Today I fire up the computer in the Ark and in my slippers I can do a lecture, and not for three hundred people, but three thousand, and even larger audiences, because recorded lectures have their second life on the Internet and are then eagerly watched. Apparently, before, the technology of distance lectures already worked, but I only discovered it now and I think many people do too. For me, this is the biggest hit of the year.
Thanks to the grounding, I also had time to finish, together with Tomasz Malkowski, our book "Archip Guide to Europe", which was published in early December by the Pascal publishing house. We started discussions for this guide in 2019, but I constantly had something else on my mind and it was difficult for us to get caught up. Lockdown was a time when we could quietly finish work on the book. Something negative - the bad time of the pandemic - I tried to turn the work into something more positive.
Thekitty for me has been the air quality in Poland for years , still scandalous. I have a house in the mountains, but in the evenings I have to lock myself and my family in it tightly, because the smog would suffocate us. People burn anything in their homes, in poor-quality kopciuchach stoves. And in many beautiful mountain towns, instead of enjoying the alpine air, one can smell burning plastic, coal and garbage all winter long. What is left are walks to high mountain areas, above the smog level. As I sat down to write this text, in Katowice, in the center of the city, on Raciborska Street, not far from our studio, another thoughtless developer had cut down the mature trees. Despite our earlier protests, comments made by residents, and the city's lack of permission for the cutting, over a hundred-year-old chestnut trees went under the axe. All this in a city where air quality standards are exceeded for most of the year, on a street where a cancer hospital is located - surely many of its patients found themselves there because of the carcinogenic, deadly air.
Throughout Poland, similar situations have become the norm. For me, the cuttings are a systemic problem that can only be solved systemically. There is a development plan in the Raciborska area, which envisioned building frontage. Planners devoid of any imagination drew the line of the current development right next to centuries-old trees, in a place where nothing had stood for years. It was well known that the planned frontage would come into collision with the mature tree crowns and their extensive root system. And this is how the developer is now explaining that by digging the hole, he damaged the roots of the trees and compromised their stability, which "forced" him to cut down the trees. This shows that our trees are being left unprotected. In the plans we focus on spatial order, but understood narrowly as volumes. And spatial order is also greenery, including existing greenery. The protection of greenery should be more strongly enshrined in the plans, especially of mature trees, which can convert the mostCO2 into oxygen, and contribute to reducing dust in the city. However, whole rows of large trees are constantly going under the axe, and in their places are planted rachitic trees, not even a hundred of which correspond to one cut down. Kit 2020 for the systemic lack of tree protection in Poland.
And another issue that appalls me in Katowice, having in part to do with air quality. Two interchange centers were recently put into operation to encourage Katowice residents and visitors to leave their cars and use public transportation. These are much-needed facilities in the city that can contribute to reducing exhaust fumes and just improving air quality. Unfortunately, facilities with such tragically bad architecture have been built that I'm afraid that instead of encouraging public transportation, they will scare people away. And that an interchange center can be outstanding architecture is shown by the example of Strasbourg. At the beginning of this century, Zaha Hadid built a parking lot and a sculptural concrete shelter there; the structure won the 2003 Mies van der Rohe Prize for the best building in Europe. Not looking far - in the small town of Zory, a cool, minimalist interchange center has been built. Its architecture is a scaled-down bus shelter and a glass box inside. That's all and that's all. In Katowice, on the other hand, two centers opened in December - bombastic, overdone, as if someone without talent wanted to build a substitute for Dubai. In Zawodzie we have a massive roof made of pipes; in Brynów some kind of unshaped mushroom. Katowice's earlier transfer centers are equally disastrously designed, with strange, irrational structures. A chance to build interesting public spaces in the city was wasted. A huge pity, all the more so because these investments cost hundreds of millions of zlotys. It came out provincially. And all this in a city that is famous for its excellent architecture!
Robert KONIECZNY
architect, head of KWK Promes office
