The text is from 07-8/22 A&B.
Would the Warsaw City Hall fit into the Palace of Culture and Science? If it turned out to be possible, would such a big move improve the functioning of the Warsaw magistrate's organizational units scattered around the city? And would the new symbol of local government be accepted by residents? I know that all these questions would probably be reduced to another. About the number of parking spaces in and around Parade Square. But fortunately, we don't have that problem.
The Palace of Culture is a prop here to make the scale of the problem clear. And at the same time its important implications for the city. Few people realize that the magistrate or city hall buildings are the tip of the iceberg of urban administration. They usually house the offices of the mayor and deputies, the council meeting room and a few of the most essential units for city government. The rest of the office is scattered throughout the city. The number of employees in the offices of the largest cities reaches two thousand, in Cracow it clearly exceeds these two thousand, and in the case of Warsaw - we are dealing with almost nine thousand, half working at the level of the whole city and half at the level of its districts. Of course, the entire public sector, which is subordinate to the city government, is much - sometimes even several times - larger, but it is worth realizing that we include employees of education, public transportation, municipal companies, and therefore hardly needing office space for their work.
Lodz - Juliusz Heinzl Palace
Photo: HuBar © Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 2.5
The magistrate, however, is not only a large employer, but also the administrator of quite a number of properties, the location, development and use of which are of great city-forming importance. How he arranges his own space tells us a lot about what we can expect from him in general. To what extent it is governed by a desire to organize reality, and to what extent by a desire to furnish itself at the lowest possible cost. In the way the administration is managed, we can see whether someone has an idea to which he or she subordinates tools, or whether he or she adopts the attitude of a transactional leader, focused on mediating between parties and interest groups.
Wroclaw - City Hall at Nowy Targ Square
Photo: Aidas U. © Wikimedia Commons CC BY 3.0
Observation of how the various parts of the offices of Poland's six largest cities are laid out confirms the hypothesis that these locations were shaped in a long process of removals, makeshift solutions and their rational improvements. No design or idea of how a magistrate's office should function was behind it, rather dozens of different ideas on how to fit into the still too small spaces adapted for administrative purposes. It all happened in a long process of expansion, budding the office, temporary locations, taking over - and sometimes even renting - buildings, looking for vacant corners.
Gdansk City Hall - the seat of the city's mayor
Photo: Arthur Andrew © Wikimedia Commons CC0
This way of governing one's own household is confusingly similar to the style of city politics: shaped from case to case, with a fair amount of opportunism, under the dictates of one fashion or another. Interestingly, the more efficient city presidents also not infrequently make efforts to give this own office fabric some more sensible shape as well, seeking salvation in new investments, acquiring historic buildings whose functions have deteriorated. They are trying to use these seemingly dead administrative resources as a factor in active politics.
Gdansk - New City Hall
Photo: Pumeks © Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0
Let's look at the details. The authorities of Krakow, Poznan and Lodz can enjoy sizable office spaces in the buildings where they themselves hold office. In Lodz, the complex of buildings on Piotrkowska Street around the Heinzl Palace and factory houses a significant number of departments, offices and divisions. So do the buildings of the former Jesuit college, the headquarters of Poznan City Hall. Poznan, by the way, has made a lot of effort to build modern A-class office buildings in the very center, next to the mayor's office (1 Za Bramką Street, designed by Ultra Architects) and on the outskirts of the city, but near the A2 highway - at 28 Czerwca 1956 Street (designed by ASPA & ZAPA), using the company Wielkopolskie Centrum Wspierania Inwestycji, created by the city. This shows the path of modernization of resources without trying to centralize them and concentrate them in one place at any cost.
Warsaw - Branicki Palace at Nowy Swiat, 2019
Photo: Adrian Grycuk © Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0 en
The facades of the Lodz and Cracow magistrates' offices do not tell everything about the size of the offices hidden behind them. Only from a bird's-eye view do we see their true size and the reason why they can house more than the offices of the mayor and his deputies. A large City Hall building from the 1950s is at the disposal of the Gdansk local government. In these three cities, as well as in the aforementioned Poznań, presidents are able to use sizable office resources without leaving their place of office.
The situation is different for the mayor of Wroclaw, whose offices are located in historic spaces on Market Square, as are the meeting room and the City Council office. However, the largest number of offices have been placed in buildings away from the seat of government, primarily in four locations in the downtown area: in the building of the former headquarters of the Silesian province on Nowy Targ Square, in the pre-war building of the Allianz company on Świdnicka 53, buildings on Bogusławskiego 8 and 10, and the former department store of the Fuchs&Söhne company on Zapolska Street. And while all of the locations mentioned are separated by short distances, some of the office's other headquarters extend beyond the downtown area.
Warsaw - Blue Skyscraper
Photo: LoMit © Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0
In some of the centers - unlike in Wrocław - the City Council does not meet in the same building where the mayor and his deputies work. It has a separate address in Warsaw, Lodz and Gdansk. In the latter city it occupies, in conjunction with the Architect of the City, the building of the New City Hall, built for military purposes and later the headquarters of the High Commissioner of the League of Nations, briefly the city committee of the Polish United Workers' Party, and much longer the student club Żak.
Anyway, there is a certain logic and sense in city offices occupying historic buildings or those with a certain historical value. Public funds, which are necessary to spend anyway, find a dual use here, important especially in the case of buildings that are difficult to use for purposes other than administration, education or cultural institutions. This is how we can assess the functioning of the offices of the conservator of historical buildings in Warsaw's Branicki Palace on Nowy Swiat, the offices in Lodz's townhouses on Piotrkowska Street, or the headquarters of the City Architect in the Beyer Villa in Lodz.
Warsaw - Intraco II, 2022
Photo: Adrian Grycuk © Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0 en
It is more difficult to justify locating the urban public sector in buildings whose form is a symbol of temporariness, makeshift, carelessness. Such locations more often happen to municipal organizational units than to city hall itself. But there is no shortage of such cases either. In the last decade we have also had cases of city structures moving out of buildings slated for demolition.
An interesting phenomenon is the occupation by city offices of part of the space of former office buildings, Biprokom in Cracow or Techma in Wroclaw. Such a phenomenon is also taking place in Warsaw, where several offices related to infrastructure and urban development have found a location in the building of the former Horticultural Headquarters and the Metrobudowa Industrial Construction Union, dating back to the 1950s, located at 77/79 Marszałkowska Street.
The city also leases space in a modern 2014 Class A building on Kruczkowskiego Street - Powiśle Park (design: Kuryłowicz & Associates), which is also the headquarters of the Mazowiecka Gas Company, as well as in skyscrapers: Błękitny Wieżowiec at Bankowy Square (designed by Jerzy Czyż, Andrzej Skopiński, Jan Furman, Lech Robaczyński, Marzena Leszczyńska), the former Intraco II at Chałubińskiego Street (designed by Jerzy Skrzypczak, Halina Świergocka-Kaim, Wojciech Grzybowski, Jan Zdanowicz, Jerzy Janczak) or Widok Towers at 44 Jerozolimskie Avenue (designed by Piotr Bujnowski, Martin Troethan). The Warimpex building (reconstruction proj.: OP Architekten) on Mogilska Street houses the Cracow Department of Architecture and Urban Planning.
Warsaw - Widok Towers, 2021
Photo: Adrian Grycuk © Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0 en
In the context of fantasies about turning the Palace of Culture into a large city office, it is worth adding that also in this building, on the eleventh, eighteenth and nineteenth floors, the city offices - Sports and Recreation, European Funds and Development Policy and Corporate Governance - have been located. The Warsaw City Council meets on the fourth floor of the PKiN, and has its office bagatelle - sixteen floors above. In the same building, moreover, are the offices of the Union of Polish Metropolises and the Union of Polish Counties.
However, it seems that Warsaw's problems are the most serious. If only because the mayor of the capital is in office in the buildings of the former Government Revenue and Treasury Commission, which, incidentally, he shares with the governor as a minority user. The building itself houses only the units that directly serve the city's top leadership: the mayor's office and the press department. The closest offices outside the building are across the square in the Blue Skyscraper. A few more locations can be pinpointed within a few minutes' walk. But most offices are scattered throughout the broad downtown area. Only Krakow can speak of greater distances, mainly due to the location of two departments in the Nowa Huta residential area of Zgody. While the tendency, present in some cities, to locate offices serving residents near large housing estates and in locations far from the center is commendable, peripheral locations of offices with common functions are not necessarily a good solution.
Krakow - Wielopolski Palace, 2015
Photo: Kgbo © Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0
Particularly in this context, a complete breakthrough and an experiment worth observing is the Lodz project to concentrate, in the words of the city's mayor Hanna Zdanowska, "almost all cells" in one building, a new large "city hall" located in the center of the city. The competition for the building of such a large city office, which was distributed by the city, was won by the authorial team Draft + Lumioo + Projekt Oficyna + AMP, composed of Michał Karpiński, Łukasz Chodorowski, Piotr Cegielski and Michał Piech. But two key decisions: the scale of the building and its location are the domain of city officials.
This is because the New City Hall conceived in this way is in keeping with the managerialist and centralist trend of thinking about local government, which has developed over the past two decades largely due to changes concentrating strong power in the hands of the mayor on the one hand, and technocratic functions related to the absorption of European funds on the other. In the pages of A&B, Błażej Ciarkowski also pointed out other consequences of the decision to locate the new city hall and, last but not least, to move offices out of Piotrkowska Street and other downtown addresses. Its unintended effect could be to weaken traffic on and around the city's recently revitalized central street and shift it to the vicinity of the Łódź Fabryczna station.
Add to this that the mere concentration of all administrative functions in a narrow downtown area is not necessarily a good idea. Today we think that a decentralized city is better, to paraphrase the fashionable slogan "as fifteen minutes as possible." In practice, probably even forty-five minutes. On the other hand - someone had to do it eventually. To try a solution that actually promises less than one might expect. It organizes in the simplest and most expensive way. But at the same time an answer to the annoying and deepening organizational chaos.
The result of the Lodz experiment will certainly be closely watched in other cities. For now, the Poznan path of adjustments and modernization seems to make more sense. Least sensible - institutional drift, to which many urban local governments today succumb, organizing their own functions and their own space in a shabby way, caring only for the prestigious spaces of top officials, fitting perfectly into the spatial chaos and widespread randomness of solutions.
Krakow - Wielopolski Palace, 2015
Photo: Kgbo © Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0
Hanna Zdanowska took a risk and will certainly face complaints. The balance of this settlement will go far beyond the horizon of her term and will shape the new face of the city. Together with the surrounding buildings of the Łódź Fabryczna station, the intriguing EC1 area will be a sign of the changes that took place at the beginning of the 21st century. I don't know how aware of this risk the architects developing the City Hall project were. Perhaps by accident they included a thought-provoking detail: a separate "escape staircase for the City Council." After all, success has many fathers....
