We have reached a point when the roof over one's head has become a product, and quite a luxury one at that. Is the price of new housing also followed by its quality? How is this product affected by the system under which it is built? Ola Kloc discusses how Warsaw apartments have changed since the communist era, the legal regulations affecting their quality, and whether this will always be the case with the curators of the exhibition "Product Apartment," Zofia Piotrowska, Lukasz Stępnik and Milena Trzcinska.
Responsible for the exhibition's set design are: Studio Views, Łukasz Stępnik, Milena Trzcińska, Dominika Bednarek
Photo: Kuba Rodziewicz
Ola Kloc: Let's start from the beginning - where did the idea for the exhibition come from?
Zofia Piotrowska: As RZUT, we have long sought to organize an exhibition on housing, the previous one - "Finally in our own home" - was held as part of the 8th edition of the Warsaw Under Construction festival in 2016. A great deal has changed since then, and the topic of housing is simply not or only vaguely discussed in the architectural community.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank Monika Komorowska from the Warsaw City Hall, who dared and trusted us, knowing that we would raise a topic that is difficult and political. Although the exhibition is quite critical of what is happening in Warsaw, we received the support of the City and the ZODIAK team.
At first we thought that the exhibition could accompany "Plans for the Future," as a legitimate commentary on the presented projects that are currently under construction. In the end, our project expanded and there was a separate exhibition and student workshops that happened in three departments at once.
The exhibition at ZODIAK Warsaw Architecture Pavilion is on view until February 16, 2025.
Photo: Kuba Rodziewicz
Milena Trzcinska: For three years we conducted a seminar at the Faculty of Architecture at the Warsaw University of Technology, which consisted of analyzing apartments, not entire buildings, according to different categories - for example, two-room apartments alone from different years, or atrial apartments. Under our supervision, students specializing in housing collected examples, drew, compared. We began to see the need for nuanced knowledge about housing. It's not obvious how housing differs from one another and that it has different qualities that can be parameterized and described. The exhibition is an attempt to understand what the shape of a particular apartment is made of. In a student workshop, we tried to see what would happen if we changed some important parameter or condition according to which such apartments are built.
The exhibition analyzes the way systemic changes affect the shape and quality of built apartments
photo: Kuba Rodziewicz
Lukasz Stępnik: We all deal with housing in different fields and levels. Although it is the most common topic that architects deal with in their practice, in the general discourse it is often treated as boring, related to making money, maintaining a studio. There is a lack of in-depth reflection and discussion. Especially since we observe the housing crisis in Poland on a daily basis, if only by looking at housing prices, which are soaring. For us, however, what was more interesting was that despite this crisis, which is related to economic conditions, to prices, to the availability of housing, we also have a quality crisis, which as architects - practitioners and theoreticians - we can address. On the one hand, apartments are getting insanely expensive, and on the other hand, their quality is declining. We have tried to grasp this topic somehow for many years, acting as editors of a quarterly magazine or at the Department of Architecture, where we work. Zosia is also active in the political field, publicizing housing problems. We try to fight on various fronts for the quality and accessibility of housing. That's where the idea for the exhibition came from.
Although we are now building the largest number of apartments in history, their affordability is falling all the time
photo: Kuba Rodziewicz
Ola Kloc: We will come back to the workshops themselves! You analyzed apartments built under different economic systems in Warsaw - from the communist era to the present day. Apart from this qualitative issue you mentioned, what are the biggest changes you observed?
Lukasz Stępnik: As part of the seminar, working with students and research work, we compared the projections of different apartments, focusing on the post-war era - from 1945 to now. As part of the exhibition, we showed only two-room apartments so that certain changes would be easier to see. The exhibition tells the story of how the form of apartments is systemically shaped. We show the various elements that make up the housing system - on the one hand, the physicality and spatial parameters of housing, and on the other hand, housing policies, legal, ownership, economic and demographic conditions. We looked at who influences what and how much is built. We looked at how many apartments are being built. Developers often say that housing prices regulate themselves because they depend on supply and demand. According to them, it is enough to produce more apartments for these prices to fall. However, if we look at the statistics, it turns out that it doesn't work that way at all. Since we have been building more and more housing, affordability has been falling.
So we have been looking at these determinants, the structure and a certain philosophy that affects the different characteristics and physical parameters of apartments. Developers build for profit, under certain planning and legislative conditions, so they care about extracting as many square meters as possible from each plot, which is pretty obvious. But what makes apartments narrower and deeper? The idea is to fit as many apartments as possible in a building, within a certain allowable building area, so we have deep-set kitchen annexes that are often 8 meters away from the window and living rooms that are each 2.7 meters wide, which means they are very narrow and long. This is not due to the architects' imagination, but to system conditions. So this exhibition touches on various aspects, including urban planning and legislation. We're not looking for culprits, we're not saying outright that developers or uneducated architects are to blame, but that the historical moment we're in and politics make this structure what it is. And it produces housing that looks like this and not like that. It is a very complicated process in which there are many actors.
The exhibition also raises the question of the evolution of the form of housing, that is, why do the interiors of apartments look the way they do?
Photo: Kuba Rodziewicz
Ola Kloc: A stalemate.
Zofia Piotrowska: The title of the exhibition suggests that an apartment is the product of a certain process. In order to change what the final apartment looks like, not only what its price is, but also what its spatial layout is, we need to influence this process.
Ola Kloc: Are you proposing any systemic changes in the exhibition? I think that would be quite a breakneck task.
Zofia Piotrowska: Rather, we point out where to look for solutions to this problem. In the research part, we undertook the task of collecting conditions and finding out what elements make up the housing production process. This information was not available, it required sitting in the archives of the Central Statistical Office and writing down all the data on Warsaw apartments from the paper statistical yearbooks. For me , it's a bit of a surprise and disappointment that we are trying to create housing policy without any support on data and understanding of this system.
As for solutions - although we are able to give our opinion and assess which elements of this system would need to be changed - we asked experts to comment on the data. We asked people representing various disciplines, from a real estate consultant to a sociologist who is more involved in analyzing the social problems resulting from this, and not that, housing system. They suggest some solutions.
From our architectural perspective, the regulation of housing space would need to be changed - the scale of deregulation is something that surprised us! We couldn't believe that we, as an architectural community, had allowed ourselves to be taken in by the fact that even this law is no longer on our side, on the side of quality assurance. In the People's Republic of Poland, we had very well researched and measured how an apartment works, what a person needs in an apartment. Today these regulations are already really minimal, we have abolished almost all of them, except for the minimum apartment area of 25 square meters.
Milena Trzcinska: And the size of the parking space for cars. It's quite humorous that the parameters of the garage are precisely written in the law - the width of the driveway, the parking space for the car, the distance from the pole or wall, so that our door doesn't get scratched when we open it, while apartments are deregulated and reduced to two parameters - the size of the apartment and the width of the corridor. There are other regulations related to access to daylight or the location of the building, but when it comes to the spatial dimensions of the apartment, only these two remain.
Systemic conditions influence the current shape of apartments
Photo: Kuba Rodziewicz
Lukasz Stępnik: Referring to your question - it was also our deliberate strategy not to write down demands, it's a bit too small an exhibition for such a heroic movement. We felt that our task was to organize knowledge and collect certain data, we wanted them to speak to the imagination by themselves. Certain conclusions necessarily emerge, we show how much regulations have disappeared over the years, how little of them remains, and what this means for the parameters of housing. We point out that the idea of housing policy in Poland is lacking, and there is not even specifically some kind of desire and political will to change it. We point out these weaknesses, but more to understand where we are, not to push one vision of how to get out of this crisis. Although such a polyphony of ideas appears in the section that is underground and the result of workshops with students - it is heavily speculative and serves to create visions of potential futures. Sometimes it's more of a tongue-in-cheek attempt to answer the question of what housing could look like if these systemic conditions were different.
Milena Trzcinska: In Poland we actually had two periods of a very homogeneous investor structure, in the People's Republic of Poland it was cooperatives, and now it is mainly developers. In communist Poland, there was strong prefabrication, which at certain points accounted for more than 90% of what was built, so the traditional system was practically eliminated. It can be seen that these monocultures often lead to a homogenization of development structures. Now the developer monoculture, the lack of other entities that build, makes housing very similar to each other. The market is forcing similar solutions.
Lukasz Stępnik: Looking at the offers of contemporary apartments, one can see two or three types among them that repeat themselves. Regardless of the location, the standard of the building and the price per square meter, practically these apartments look identical.
mock-up of an apartment
Photo: Kuba Rodziewicz
Ola Kloc: So housing has become a commodity, and an expensive one, which few can afford, and often not of the best quality. So why do we still take out long-term loans to buy it?
Zofia Piotrowska: This was a surprising finding of the research for me, too, something I had not hypothesized before - the period of developer construction was not uniform. The problem is that for the last 10 years, apartments have been built that are not bought by families to live in them, only 1/3 or even more of the apartments in Warsaw are investment apartments, that is, someone buys them to rent them out. Therefore, these quality criteria are of secondary importance. What is of primary importance is how much he will rent the apartment for later.
Milena Trzcinska: Or he won't even rent it, he just benefits from rising housing prices.
Zofia Piotrowska: Theoretically, in Warsaw, the percentage of such vacant speculative apartments is not high, although there is no research to confirm this. At the moment in Poland you can make a very good income from renting apartments, because it is low-taxed. We also don't have tenant rights, so it's easy to kick tenants out. We have system conditions that make it quick and easy to make money on this rental, so a lot of people decide to put all their capital into buying apartments for rent. And this affects the layout, spaces and quality of apartments even more than the fact that a developer builds them.
The apartments that were built until 2008 were a bit larger, and now, in addition to becoming deeper and narrower, they have shrunk considerably in terms of space. Just as a two-room apartment in the People's Republic of Poland had 47 meters, now it has 39. We are talking about two rooms with a kitchen, in the People's Republic of Poland this kitchen had a window, and now we have a bedroom and a kitchen with a couch and a table.
Proprietary, developer housing has changed from a condo to live in, which someone buys on credit, to an investment product. And this seems to have had a major impact on the deterioration in quality.
33% of apartments bought in Warsaw today are for rent
Photo: Kuba Rodziewicz
Lukasz Stępnik: This is related to the fact that we entered such mature or late capitalism, back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the development market in Poland was, in fact, just beginning. All the time architects and investors, often still educated in the previous regime, referred to those patterns and forms that were developed then. This transfer to the rather difficult and stalemate situation in terms of quality that we have now took place gradually. And we noticed this, too, when analyzing housing. The sharp decline in the quality of housing took place in the last decade, at a time when we, as architects, were functioning and began to draw these apartments in offices. Indeed, developers have no competition - the public sector builds far too few apartments. Secondly, these companies have become very professionalized, they are already joint-stock companies, listed companies that are accountable to investors from their financial results, so the logic of the market has completely taken over thinking about designing apartments. Apartments have become a product, a capital investment. They are not designed for habitation, they are designed to become a tool like bonds or stocks.
The author of the mock-ups presented at the exhibition is Piotr Musiałowski
Photo: Kuba Rodziewicz
Zofia Piotrowska: The exhibition recently included a lecture by Joanna Kusiak, which gave us a new perspective - it's not just that someone is doing something for sale or commercially, but that these companies have started to be managed by shareholders, global capital that has no connection to Warsaw. It used to be that developers operated locally, such as the likes of Ataner in Poznan. The name itself is charming, because it's the name of the owner's wife - Renata - spelled backwards. People were proud to have apartments from him, and he boasted that he was building Poznań. Without judging the architecture he realized here, he created a certain legend of this city.
Milena Trzcinska: In this global system, there is not even a person who takes responsibility for it. Companies are owned by other companies. Packages of apartments, located in different parts of the world, are bought. There is no person in this process who can say "but we have to worry about the fact that this will destroy Warsaw if we build this housing development this way." There is no one to say stop.
Lukasz Stępnik: The president of the development company is carrying out the will of the shareholders, who are, for example, retirees from Germany.
Ola Kloc: This is scary!
Zofia Piotrowska: What surprised us is that this is about the last 10 years. Commercial construction does not always have to be associated with these negative aspects.
Milena Trzcinska: Which also means that it probably won't always be that way.
Zofia Piotrowska: We shouldn't accuse developers, but just pay attention to the way global capital works.
Who is building apartments in Warsaw?
Photo: Kuba Rodziewicz
Ola Kloc: So let's move on to something positive - what vision of residential architecture of the future do students have?
Zofia Piotrowska: After we put all the elements together, created the frame of this system and explored the connection between some of its elements and what the apartment looks like spatially, what kind of layout it has, what kind of depth, we wanted to connect it to that physicality, to the space that eventually appears, that we build. We thought it would be interesting to take one element out of this system and ask students to see what an apartment could look like at that time.
Students at the University of Arts in Poznań leaned over what the apartments would look like without regulation
photo: Kuba Rodziewicz
As the first element, we chose the issues of law and legislation, that is, to push to the maximum the deregulation process that is happening now - what will be the spatial effect if we take the aspect of regulation out of our housing process. And this is probably the negative future and some warning. This was dealt with by students from the University of Arts in Poznan assisted by Hugo Kowalski.
The second element was to stop building. We diagnosed that a great deal of housing is being built, in Wroclaw even more housing space per person is being built than in Warsaw! So we asked students what would happen to housing needs if we stopped this building. And this task of "housing without building" fell to students from Wroclaw, where they were led by Wojtek Mazan, Wojtek Januszewski and Jurek Lątka. It was such a more ecological utopia.
The topic of living without building was tackled by students of the Faculty of Architecture at Wroclaw University of Technology
Photo: Kuba Rodziewicz
Lukasz Stępnik: In Warsaw, we conducted a workshop together with Karolina Tulkowska-Słyk and Jakub Heciak. We wondered what an apartment could look like if the profit aspect was taken out of the equation altogether. There were some utopian designs related to the ratio of apartment space to common areas or outdoor areas, and various ideas about how one could act anti-speculative in apartments, such as an apartment-camper, which, when the resident moves out, takes everything inside in the form of camper equipment that rides along with the user. In addition to coming up with the form of these apartments, the students also came up with certain mechanisms that could be implemented, which could work against variously understood profit - the investor selling such an apartment, or the speculative profit of the user - how to design an apartment that will not gain in value over time, but lose? These were often utopian proposals, verifying certain assumptions, going beyond the logic of the late capitalist system. Which also turned out to be very difficult, because we have so inculcated these patterns of what an apartment in Poland should look like, that working to start thinking in slightly different terms at all was a big challenge.
The nonprofit apartments were designed by male and female students of the Faculty of Architecture at the Warsaw University of Technology
Photo: Kuba Rodziewicz
Ola Kloc: Thank you for the interview.
