Alicja: The exhibition at the Polish History Museum has a slightly different character. Its sheer scope is quite a challenge.
Boris: Work on this exhibition is now in its third year. It will be the largest exhibition space probably not only in Poland, it has almost eight thousand square meters, and we are telling a story in it over a stretch of a thousand years. The exhibition is unbelievably complicated from a curatorial point of view - it is divided into seven galleries, and there is a different group of curators for each gallery. From the beginning, we met with them and told each other step by step the most important things that relate to each scope of history. This is a huge process, linked to the realization of the new building. We won the competition for the exhibition before the design of the building was created, and we had to adjust the two designs with architects from the WXCA studio, so that their guidelines and our exhibition would come together. That's a lot of guidelines: from the simplest things to problematic colossi, such as the "four sleepers" monument, which requires special structures in the ceilings. Of course, the building's architects didn't know this, because the curatorial path was already being created after the building was designed. It is scheduled to open in 2022, so designing this exhibition is a five-year process.
Alicja: The architectural projects that your studio carries out are very commercial in nature. In this sense, is it also a break from theater?
Boris: I only managed to be independent in art by doing very commercial projects. I had a moment in my life when I worked very much in advertising. The commercial films I did were not very interesting in terms of art, but they gave me a very good income and at the same time taught me technology. How to look through the screen at the world, how it can be shaped, how to choose a slice, how to build an illusion in the film studio. I often used this experience in my operas. Such genre expansion affects horizons. I don't like to enter the safe mode of doing something I already know. It bores me monstrously. I prefer a path that is riskier and more difficult. After all, so is commercial theater. It's not art for art's sake - it's art for the audience, and we do it both for the audience and because we get paid for it. It's the same in architecture. Take Bohdan Pniewski's design for the Grand Theater - phenomenal! As we look today at the solutions that are used in this building: whether it's the corridors, the handles, the lobby, the lamps - these are works of art. And I think about the architecture in the same way. Take the Hotel Europejski, which is a retail and commercial space, a hotel. We approached every room, every floor with the same search process. At most, I can describe as commercialism the use of schemes, the application of ready-made solutions. But this can also be created in the theater. We create architecture to a certain idea, it has its function and meanings.
Hammam and Pool Outdoor is a spa and pool project at the Al Sadd Sports Club complex in Doha, Qatar.
© Boris Kudlička with partners
Alicia: Is it possible to have the kind of versatility in architectural design that you achieved in theater?
Boris: I think it is. It's an interesting discovery for me that architecture is able to tell so much or be so narrative. We are able to build a concept, an idea resulting from the interpretation of many elements: history, its characters, political, macroeconomic contexts, transformations. All this can be condensed into a certain statement, drawn, written a new script. Here an interesting parallel emerges between theater and architecture. And I see that my experience of theater and working with drama is an interesting element that I consciously use in working with space and with the people who inhabit that space.
Alicia: Where do you draw the line between architecture as a place to live and thrive, and architecture as a set design?
Boris: I'll give the example of the European Hotel, which was built thanks to Vera Michalski-Hoffmann and the HESA group. She was the main investor in the project and came up with the idea that she would create a hotel with the best offerings and services in Poland. She had an emotional attachment to it and wanted to create an uncompromising project. She invited the Raffles chain, which recommended a British design studio. The project was already prepared at the tender design level with a mock-up room on site, i.e. a small space of a 1:1 scale room with full furnishings: fabrics, bed, curtains and soap in the bathrooms. And Michalski-Hoffmann, looking at it, thought it totally didn't resonate with Warsaw. The whole thing was really well conceived and designed, but had no reference to the location. We had the pleasure of being invited to a small competition that included not the language, but the story of the object. With our team I started to work on the history of the European Hotel, to think about what this object is on the map of Warsaw, what it is on the map of Poland, Europe... We studied all its historical, political, meaningful, cultural threads, and it came out that it must be very Polish - cliché!
Interior of a private villa in Qatar
© Boris Kudlička with partners
Alicia: Just how do you do it?
Boris: Well, that's right. We started to mark on the map that the building is located on the Royal Route, next to the opera house, the Zacheta, the prestigious Bristol Hotel, and is also near the Academy of Fine Arts. We decided that it must be a showcase of Polish arts and crafts. And this was the motto we followed throughout the design mode: we pulled things from history that were interesting, that could inspire us, then processed them into our own language and looked for them. For example, we looked for the pattern for the carpet in eighteenth-century maps, which we processed graphically and in color, and as a result, each bed stands on such a "map." We looked for contemporary Polish art to present a cultural identity to hotel guests, using what is strong and world-class in Poland. We wanted most of the furniture and most of the lighting to be made in Poland, and preferably in Warsaw - from the floors, the cladding, the stonework to the lighting. We tried to make it a kind of concentrate of Polishness in a modern way, but keeping the historical character. It sounds simple, but you have to write it in a certain way, and then design and execute it consistently.
For me, it's a kind of storytelling: a viewer who comes to the hotel touches Polish art, which is a processed map in Wlodek Zakrzewski's neon installation, encounters a chandelier from the 1960s on the model of the furnishings of the part of the building designed by Pniewski. Then this viewer turns to the left and sees an installation by Leon Tarasewicz painted directly on wooden panels and a forty-foot carpet with his paintings. These are things that required direct contact, conversation and consistent implementation. A spa made of beautiful Polish sandstone, a swimming pool that is an interpretation of a pre-existing vault in this space - each alley can tell its own story. To enhance this, we used so-called memory areas in the four corners of the hotel, which are a compendium of the history of the European Hotel and tell it with exhibits. There are photos of the Rolling Stones, the first LOT logo, the first Fiat showroom, and there's Jozef Chelmonski, who lived in the attic.
Alicia: Are audiences actually able to cope with such "literature"?
Boris: The question is whether they have to. What I find attractive is building a strong DNA. The user can find certain associations in this, and by knowing the subject matter, this space will be more interesting to him. He will see that she is not just a visual effect, everything is very grounded.
Interior of a private villa in Qatar
© Boris Kudlička with partners
Alicia: For projects in Qatar, the process of finding a context, a story looks similar?
Boris: Architectural ideas travel. And so it is in Doha, where a generation of young people studying abroad and living all over the world bring their experiences home and often refer to them. Qatari architecture itself is very interesting, quite simple, but with a wealth of beautiful functional solutions, such as the wind (ventilation) tower, various types of shadings, or canopies. There are many elements that go from function to decoration and become a recognizable element. Doha is concerned with its identity and maintaining its character. At the same time, the projects we do are private residences. I would compare it a bit to Konstancin, where we are currently preparing several developments. These are the dreams of investors - we call them "postcards from vacation". Investors bring themselves such a postcard from Zakopane, Switzerland or other corners and want to live in this postcard. For us, this is also a kind of a certain narrative, which we need to understand, skillfully intertwine our sensitivity with it and create together with investors. It's like designing in an opera house: I open a notebook, take this blank sheet of paper and start again from some base.
Alicia: The investors who hire you are not interested in getting something "Kudlička-style"?
Boris: I had such a pedagogue at the Academy of Fine Arts, who kept telling me: "Boris, you have no style!". And I, as a young man, felt this as a monstrous problem, in my second year of studies I was terrified that I didn't have my style. Today I find such pursuit of my style completely uninteresting, a dead-end road for me. On the other hand, it is not impossible that even despite the variety in which I work, there are some features that can be considered a style. Because I understand scenography in the same way, and I understand architecture in the same way. I'm not afraid of sharp angles or curves, I'm not afraid of convexity or flatness, I'm not afraid of graphics, color and so on. It's a matter of skillful use of tools in a particular project.
Alicia: What does your studio look like now?
Boris: There are currently fifteen architects in the Boris Kudlička with Partners team. Fortunately, we have not been affected by the pandemic crisis, so far we don't feel it. I would say the opposite is true. At the moment we have more or less twenty projects going on, and it's all happening at once. Among other things, we are working on a villa in France, three villas in Doha, a palace in Naleczow, a manor house in Obory, another interesting project in Wroclaw. These are mainly interiors, architecturally modern buildings, renovations, contemporary arrangements in the context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century architecture. We have more and more experience in working on monuments. At the same time, we try not to define a clear profile, we do not limit ourselves to any one area of architecture, developing the scope of activity into newer and newer zones of creation. What they have in common is that they are such demanding custom-made projects, we simply do projects that require a story.
interviewed: Alicja GZOWSKA
Photo: © Boris Kudlička with partners
Boris KUDLIČKA - a graduate of the Department of Scenography and Costume Design at the Theater Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava. He also studied at the Dutch Academy of Fine Arts Minerva in Groningen. Since 1995, he has been associated with the Grand Theater - National Opera in Warsaw, where he gained international fame for his stage designs realized in tandem with Mariusz Treliński. He collaborates with leading opera houses, directors and festivals around the world. Since 2009, together with Marcin Mostafa and Natalia Paszkowska, he has run the WWAA architectural studio, before expanding in 2018 under the brand Boris Kudlička with partners. He has received numerous awards and honors, including the Silver Medal "Meritorious to Culture Gloria Artis" (2015). In the field of architecture, his team received, among others, the Eurobuild CEE 2018 award for the interior design of the European Hotel.
