Interview with Piotr Pasierbinski
Piotr Pasierbiński - architect, winner of international and national architectural competitions, awards and scholarships ( including Scholarships in Tennessee and Singapore) .
He graduated with honors from the Cracow University of Technology, and received numerous awards for his diploma project, including the SARP Cracow Diploma of the Year award. He gained his professional experience at award-winning studios around the world, in Vancouver and Shanghai - Chris Doray Studio, in Knoxville and Sharjah - SHO Architecture, and in Tokyo working for NOIZ Architects and Sou Fujimoto.
Piotr Pasierbinski received an equal honorable mention for his work titled. "Traces of Water" in the A competition at the International Architecture Biennale Krakow 2019 MBA Krakow 2019.
Anna Popiel-Moszyńska: Piotr, I wanted to congratulate you on your professional resume. You are very young, and you already have work and experience in many countries. While you were still a student, you did a fellowship at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville in the United States, then another, in Singapore. These trips were, in your own words, groundbreaking for you. In the States you studied and later worked with Gregory Spaw (founder of SHO Architecture), while in Asia your second professional mentor was Chris Doray, whom you met at a Polytechnic workshop, and with whom you also worked immediately after the scholarship in his Vancouver office. After your time in Canada, you returned to your alma mater, the Faculty of Architecture at the Cracow University of Technology, where you defended your master's degree with honors in 2016 - and from Cracow you left for Tokyo.
Piotr Pasierbinski: Yes.
Iidabashi train station, Chuo-Sobu line
Photo: © Potr Pasierbinski
Anna: Was going to Tokyo - you got a job there at NOIZ Architects - was that your goal after graduation? Did you already have some contacts there? What was it like?
Piotr: I didn't have any contacts. It was a dream - to go to Japan not only as a tourist, but to be able to stay here longer, discover the local culture and get to know the country not only from the perspective of a tourist, but by living and working here. At first I was exploring and absorbing the city, only later did I start sending applications to various offices.
Anna: Have you been to Japan before or was this your first time in the Land of the Cherry Blossom?
Peter: This was my first time.
Anna: What made you decide to go there?
Piotr: I think, first of all, the contemporary architecture. A combination of respect for nature, but also a very bold, avant-garde view of spatial play in architecture.
Anna: In the studios you dealt with before - in the States and Canada, in a different culture - wasn't that present? Did you just find that you wanted to see something completely different from the approach to doing the profession there?
Peter: That's not an easy question to answer. I think I'm looking for some new challenges all the time. At the time, Japan just seemed to me to be one of the biggest challenges - both in terms of the work environment and the completely different culture, the language barrier, I was very attracted to it. And Japanese architecture is completely different from ours, their outlook - very different. I was curious about that.
Anna: Did it take you a long time to find your first job?
Piotr: I managed to find a job surprisingly quickly, after a month.
Anna: Did you submit many applications?
Piotr: Yes, but not at the beginning. I had several interviews with selected offices and I was very selective, I only contacted studios that I dreamed of. The qualification process itself surprised me, I thought everything would move faster. It turned out that you have to wait about a month for responses - both positive and negative. In the States, this process is much faster. Only later did I start applying to more offices, a dozen in total.
Oi Racecourse flea market in the Shinagawa district
Photo: © Potr Pasierbinski
NOIZ Architects
Anna: What were your first days like, what surprised you the most? You don't seem to speak Japanese?
Piotr: I work in English. I remember the very beginnings as extremely intense work, from morning to midnight. The first project I worked on was an urban plan with an architectural concept commissioned by a company that is a robot manufacturer. Apartments, a hospital, offices and the headquarters of this company. The fact that the work would be extremely intensive was no special surprise to me - I was prepared for the fact that there was a lot of work here. The surprise, however, was the communication with my co-workers. In Japan, very few things are said directly, you have to read between the lines, everything is understated, and you just have to learn that in order to communicate well here.
Anna: Have you experienced any rookie slip-ups in this connection?
Peter: There were a few misunderstandings, because Japanese people don't say "no" directly. For a long time I couldn't understand why we couldn't do something, go in the direction I proposed. Only a colleague from the studio - a Frenchman - at some point on the site explained to me that the Japanese to whom I was proposing certain design solutions had already been telling me for three weeks that it could not be done this way. I didn't accept this, because he didn't tell me directly. "Difficult," "it might be complicated," "the client wouldn't necessarily like it." - that's the opposite of American openness and directness.
Anna: What was your contribution to the teamwork on the masterplan in Japanese?
Peter: Everyone on my team spoke good English, the client - the company's founder, a university professor - also. At meetings, seeing me, he switched immediately to this language, which is a sign of great respect; this was an extremely pleasant surprise, given the extreme hierarchical nature of this society. On the other hand, the final phase of the project, the Japanese descriptions - in this I was no longer involved, I contributed to the conceptual and design phase. On this project, incidentally, most people spoke English. At NOIZ Architects, two bosses once worked for Tadao Ando, then one of them went to the States, studied and worked in New York. They employ five people in Taipei, fifteen in the Tokyo studio, almost half are foreigners.
Shinjuku district, Koshu-Kaido Ave.
Photo: © Potr Pasierbinski
Anna: What is the work organization like in a Japanese office? I happened to work in a rather large Parisian office, where employees would come to work around nine-thirty, walk around the entire premises for the first forty-five minutes, greeting - with the traditional kisses on the cheek - everyone, then take half an hour to wake up at the coffee machine. They reached their desks around eleven o'clock. Between noon and fourteen, they would break for lunch. Real work began around fifteen or sixteen. Most employees consequently stayed after hours!
Peter: It's different here! (Laughter) Work starts relatively late, at nine-thirty. What surprised me at the very beginning is that no one even says "good morning" and "goodbye" to each other! When someone starts work, they just sit down at their desks without saying a word, and the same is true when they finish, at least in this office. This came as a bit of a shock to me. Later I only came across the phrase otsukaresama deshita at the end of work, which has no Polish equivalent, it means something like "thank you for your hard work", "I'm tired of working hard". There is a one-hour break for lunch. Unfortunately, in many places, hierarchicalism is still in effect, manifested in the custom that one should not leave the office before someone who is a rung higher comes out. So I have observed many times Japanese people waiting for the boss to leave.
Anna: While waiting, were they still working effectively?
Piotr: Not quite, it is impossible to work effectively for twelve or fourteen hours a day.
Anna: Do you have fixed working hours written in your contract? Is there also weekend work, overtime before projects are turned in?
Piotr: There are specific working hours in the contract - but sometimes this has little to do with the time actually spent in the office. Overtime here is, by definition, unpaid. Working on weekends - if there are deadlines for handovers - is non-stop: both Saturdays and Sundays are by definition for work. My longest marathon was a month in the office full-time.
Shinjuku train station, underground corridors
Photo: © Potr Pasierbinski
