Catherine: What did the artist care about, besides attention to detail and execution. What did she want to get from you as designers?
Karolina: Monica wanted a new space to work in, larger than her current studio.
Paul: The fact that she had no specific expectations was most stimulating. At the first meeting, we presented three scenarios. The most intriguing was a wooden cube that illustrated the maximum volume.
Karolina: It inspired her. Suddenly she saw that on this small plot of land she could have such a huge space to work in.
Paul: The fact that she herself didn't yet know what she would be able to do there was most interesting for us architects, as well as for her - the investor - the artist.
Karolina: Of course, the light was important. It had to be a well-lit studio with daylight. We decided to completely glaze the studio from the north, opening it to the garden, but also from the south - from the street. After a lot of research, we chose reinforced glass, which diffused the light beautifully and gave the artist more intimacy. Along the way we had ideas for a mezzanine, movable elements, but in the end we settled on simplicity. The kitchen, toilet and storeroom - enclosed in a wooden piece of furniture - do not distract during creative work. Because, after all, the most important things in an artist's studio are her works and herself.
Paul: Recently Monika sent us photos of her first major sculpture hanging on the wall.
Karolina: At one point she spilled sand in the studio, as she was taking photos of mock-ups of her sculptures for a project in the desert. We're glad that the building gave her a lot of freedom to work.
Monica Sosnowska's atelier, a concrete bench along the entire length of the south facade
photo. © Hélène Binet
Catherine: Did you treat this project as a test of your own capabilities and the limits of what a developer can agree to? This project is a showcase in your portfolio. Are you able to work with more clients in the way you did with Monika Sosnowska?
Paul: Whether we are able to, time will tell, but this is certainly how we want to work - uncompromisingly.
Karolina: Even when we have the first strong idea, we come up with further options to challenge the first one. We try other solutions, sometimes just to see which concept is more interesting. We always try to do something radical.
Catherine: Monika Sosnowska's studio is now a finished project. It is summarized in a beautifully published book with photographs by Hélène Binet. What are you working on now?
Paul: We are currently developing a house with five gardens near Warsaw. The rooms interspersed with intimate green courtyards create unique spatial sequences. A very intriguing topic is a studio house in Basel on a parcel of land protected by a conservation officer. We have to convince the client, the preservationist and the residents that historic and contemporary architecture can complement each other harmoniously. It will be a building made of brick-colored concrete.
Karolina: It was a question of how to replace the old garage with something new of a higher quality, matching the historic building, which is under protection. The more restrictions, the more interesting it is. We are also very excited about the project in Davos.
Paul: A radical expansion of a house on the side of a mountain. It will be a beautiful project.
Karolina: We also did a study for the city of Basel. It's an urban planning project on a larger scale. The task was to propose a wide range of possibilities for transforming industrial architecture. It was interesting to see what could be done in spaces that today still serve industry, but are about to be given back to the city. We proposed some risky ideas for public spaces: a fifty-meter Olympic-sized swimming pool on the roof of a loading bay, a theater on water, but also a storage facility for car batteries, where renewable energy can be stored for the entire district. We liked the ideas very much, but this is the kind of project that, if it happens, will only happen in a few years. Of course, we hope it will happen. So we are occupied with projects of different scales.
Paul: I'm still designing a low-budget house near Warsaw. It's a case study project to practice the new typology of the house.
Karolina: And we still enter competitions to stay in shape.
Monika Sosnowska's atelier, street view
photo. © Hélène Binet
Katarzyna: Architecture Club - where did the name come from?
Paul: We create a club of people we work well with. We try to work with the best engineers and specialists, because these meetings always make our projects stronger. We test our ideas together, and there should also be smart buildings behind the ideas.
Karolina: Already at the concept level, we try to bind all disciplines so that our buildings have good climate, good acoustics, ecological solutions. We learn from each other. Architecture is not working alone, but always in a team.
Katarzyna: And didn't you want Slaweck & Krzeminski Architecture Club?
Pavel: That would be unpronounceable here....
Atelier of Monika Sosnowska
Monika Sosnowska is one of the most recognized Polish artists - both in Polish and international art circulation. She has exhibited her work many times at the Venice Biennale, her monumental installation inaugurated the Susch Museum recently opened by Grażyna Kulczyk in the Swiss Alps. Her work is at the intersection of art and architecture. The term sculptor of space perfectly characterizes her. She creates spatial forms for a specific place. She is often inspired by elements of architecture of modernist provenience and reaches back to the aesthetics of the People's Republic of Poland. She borrows from it the forms of stairs, balustrades, bars. Her works are constructions reduced to their essence. She often works on a large scale. She often transforms space, applies illusion, uses models.
It seems to me that the work philosophy of Monika Sosnowska and Architecture Club are very close to each other. No wonder they found a common language. The space of the artist's work is an intimate sphere. It was not created with representation in mind, to admire it, but form and shape are governed by function here. It is supposed to give comfort, allow momentum - so necessary for large formats, provide as much daylight as possible. The models that define the nature of Karolina Slawecka and Pawel Krzeminski's work have become a symbolic extension of Monika Sosnowska's creative process. A 1:1 scale model of a fragment of the atelier's structure made at the design stage was buried under the studio. Sosnowska's atelier became one of the spatial forms in her oeuvre. A creative process in which three architects and three artists met.
{AuthorAiB}
Architects' answers to 10 questions: brief on the topic
