The year 2024, I must confess to you, pleasantly surprised me. I began to see the charms of the spatial development of our country. And this here someone cast a spell, and that there. And although the average quality of what is being built in this country is still a charm, at least in the category of spectacular things the competition between negative and positive delights has become more even.
Let me start with the positive delights. This will be subjective, of course, because no one can be everywhere in this country at once to experience everything. The biggest wow effect of the past year, which has rather no competition in its immediate stellar surroundings, was the opening of a pedestrian bridge over the Vistula River in Warsaw. It's rare to see such amazing investments that simultaneously affect so many people and change so much in space for the better. Suddenly, a new attractive public space has landed in the center of our capital city, connecting the old lumpers-and-cheap Praga district with the hipster vege Powiśle district via an emotionally calming walk with the skyline of Warsaw's Manhattan in the background. If someone who remembers this world from thirty or forty years ago goes there in nice weather, they will undoubtedly feel pride in the country. And this is not such a common feeling, which is why I am of the opinion that walking on this footbridge should be prescribed for depression, because it has therapeutic properties. The perfect object for suicidal people to change their minds at the last minute.
The revitalization of Chmielna Street, an element of the green and pedestrian revolution in this part of Downtown, which, to my eye, began with the reconstruction of Five Corners Square, deserves an honorable mention, and today you can see its effects progressing in all directions. What is worth noting and necessarily praising in this context is that the Warsaw authorities often carry out these extremely useful investments that transform the image of the city, in spite of a whole lot of malcontents and hecklers who tease the capital like in no other city.
The next positive delight I experienced this year was the creation of the Nowy Port housing development in Bydgoszcz. It might seem like a bit of a surprising choice and a realization that probably many might not have heard of, as well as the city of Bydgoszcz, which I consider the most underrated city in this country. What we have here, however, is an urban masterpiece in the category of those unheralded revitalizations. Thanks to a great intellectual effort and the goodwill of the authorities and the developer, it was possible to create something absolutely amazing - an ordinary, multifunctional quarter of urban development. Something that urban planners a hundred years ago were able to do completely effortlessly, and that the communists after the war were still able to do as well as they could, and that for today's city builders in free Poland is usually an effort beyond their strength. I won't hide the fact that it's a bit sad that carving out a simple, multifunctional development quarter in the center of a city in Poland is becoming a feat, but we live in a country where we have unfortunately destroyed all the principles of designing good cities on a human scalehuman scale and we have given this task to road designers, installers, firefighters and many other industries, as long as it is not handled by architects and urban planners who know how to do it. All the more reason, then, to show that creating something normally is possible deserves publicity and applause.
It's time to move on to less pleasant topics. And here the choice is as simple as a footbridge over the Vistula River. When I think of my greatest admiration for the inverted spin, unfortunately, an equally glaring example is Rzeszow and its Buhr al Olszynki skyscraper, the tallest in this part of the Emirates. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against tall buildings, in fact I'm a fan of them by virtue of the fact that they can look impressive and are inherently kind to Mother Earth, but these types of developments placed in questionable conditions, on floodplains, laced with parking andbuilt on terms and conditions found in a packet of potato chips, instill distrust among residents toward investors and the administration, which translates into increasing resistance to major investments that could push the country forward and contribute to its economic growth. And to top it all off, the architectural robes are still stretched to be associated with the showcase of some Asian country with great social inequality and problems with human rights violations. There is no denying that Rzeszow with this architectural performance has clearly marked its presence on the map of the Caspian tigers.
Another gargantuan architectural performance this year turned out to be the Orle Gniazdo hotel in Szczyrk, which shone in the fact that its scale refers to the size of the surrounding mountains, throwing down the gauntlet to such well-known colossi of this country as the wave towers in Gdansk or Katowice's Superjednostka. It is defended only by the fact that it is a reconstruction of a communist-era moloch already existing there, but it is regrettable that such an investment perpetuates architectural pollution of the landscape instead of eliminating it.
Szczyrk, by the way, is not alone in this, it goes hand in hand with Wisla, where an even worse landscape complex, Wisla Mountain Resort, which has become famous for the fact that the main building of the hotel is the first example of architecture designed in Minecraft, has been expanding for years.
Looking at the investments, one gets the impression that we have completely lost control over what is happening in the Polish mountains. More towns and cities are starting to compete with each other for more and more absurd hotel landscape mammoths, bridges between mountains and gargantuan, gaudy observation towers. So as not to drown in the subject, I'll just mention Walbrzych and its rusty observation tower, which as of this year towers over this tormented city and looks like part of an abandoned industrial installation. All in all, clever. Against the backdrop of the city's ruins, one might say it even fits in somehow, but Walbrzych's image is unlikely to be improved by such measures.
Heading north, it's worth stopping by Oborniki and taking a look at the new castle in the Notecka Forest. While I believe that the architects who designed it had a great time, it is an example of investment beyond all measure worthy of criticism, because it shows the weakness of the law in this country and our country in general as such. People sometimes can't build a stupid garage for years, and this investment proves in a glaring way that if you pour absurd money and design something so strange that it will amaze absolutely everyone, you are able toable to paralyze the action of state bodies to the point that you can disregard environmental decisions, spatial planning, and the documents themselves will be filled out and reconciled retroactively, while all charges will miraculously manage to expire or be dismissed for procedural errors. Well, but you can say that this makes the castle even more magical, because the knowledge of how it was all possible still remains a mystery. There is nothing to say about the architecture of this thing here. Amateurs of Disneyland will like it, from afar it's a cool movie decoration, and to get so close as to point a finger at all those stylistic anachronisms that make your teeth hurt is impossible anyway, because the castellan will sic the dogs.
Of the other things that have disappointed me a bit lately, I still have to mention two developments in Warsaw that I've only had the chance to see this year, thanks in part to Warsaw's footbridge over the Vistula, which has brought Praga closer to many people. These are the Koneser Vodka Factory and the Praga Port. Two developments that sparked interest, but which in person are sadly disappointing. Koneser is a concrete berm devoid of tall greenery, which I think was realized after time, so pots of greenery were thrown in there without any order or composition. One gets the feeling that something didn't quite work in this development. It evokes a slight weariness. Repeated for the twentieth time, the same orchestrated melody trumpeting plastic, involving the routine juxtaposition of the soiled new with the airbrushed old in the most banal way, in the hope that something hipsterish will emerge. For Prague, this may be a step forward, but overall it is nonetheless a step backward. The Port of Prague is much more chaotic, and doesn't keep an even keel, perhaps because of the different investors. Granted, there are some really decent and intriguing places there, such as a section of Jozef Sierakowski Street, but there are also real spatial dramas, such as the plaza-parking area on Wrzesinska Street or the real novelty of public spaces in the form of the clash between Praga Port and the Kosciuszko Monument space. The intersection of these two spaces smacks of the charm of open leg breaking, and is filled with walls, roaches and graffiti in smelly alleys that lead nowhere.
I'll just share one more thought with you: sometimes the unruly thought comes over me that we're really living in the best of times in this country, and it's only for completely unknown reasons that we need psychologists to figure it all out.
{tag:AuthorA&B}
Read more: A&B 1/2025 - Wood in architecture,
download free e-publications of A&B
