Margaret: Do you think it's time to direct our attention away from big cities, because those are, in your opinion, "the spoiled fruit of populism"?
Jakub: I think that in general we are the rotten fruit, and not just of populism, but of neoliberalism and the deposits of nibisocialism, from which we are left with such wonders as Social Security. Today Poland seems to me a space of remnants of previous systems. The problem is that everywhere, not only in Poland, in the last thirty years we have become so focused on big-city self-indulgence that we have completely lost sight of people living in smaller centers and in the countryside. We've allowed ourselves to become ensnared in a bubble of consumerism and lajfstajl sublimation, losing any interest in the fate of millions of Poles, who were very easy for populists to take over, and will be taken over by young politicians of the extreme right after their natural withering away. Apparently, before 2015, the young PO suit commissioned sociologists to do research on potential new target groups, i.e. voters. Some really big names worked on the research and reports, demonstrating that this was the last moment for the party to seriously address people living outside of a rapt few large centers. When the reports reached the party's leader, unfortunately not the one who went to Brussels, that one, colloquially speaking, pounced on them sternly and shelved them. It was probably the same in many parts of the world, where anyone who doesn't look like the immediate entourage of the decision-makers was thrown out of the limelight. If we add to this decades of omission, whether in the United States or Poland, we have a ready-made recipe for disaster, next to which a rally of a deluded mob on Capitol Hill is a cinch. On top of that, according to a UN study, seventy-five percent of people will live in cities by 2050, a jump of twenty-five percent in just forty years. Imagine what these cities will look like, how they will cope with this level of migration, and imagine the transformation of everything that is not these cities: the death of small-scale agriculture, the global shift to a robotic megafarm model, the extinction of villages and hamlets, and so on. This is the last moment to do something about it!
Coal Heart Mother - a coxcomb in the form of a Gothic chapel designed for the 2016 Bitter Lamentations Festival,
organized by the Center for Thought of John Paul II
Photo credit: Radek Pasterski
Malgorzata: What can architects do about it? We are threatened by a global overpopulation on the one hand, actually it is already a fact, and on the other by an aging population, a silver tsunami that could collapse the pension and insurance systems of many countries of the so-called global North. Governments in these countries find the downward demographic trend alarming and are launching programs to promote fertility. The schizophrenic reality is becoming our reality at every turn. What role do you see for architects here? Could they become a kind of trendsetter designing new lifestyles?
James: Of course, architects can do little if they want to represent little. It doesn't have to be grand gestures, not everyone can have the causal power of Fernand Pouillon, protégé and friend of François Mitterrand, or the almost infinite (and consequently disastrous) possibilities like Robert Moses in New York in the 1960s. Often, small but suggestive gestures are enough, like the design of swings attached to the fence dividing the Mexican suburb of Anapra from El Paso in the United States, showing the middle finger to Trump. Its designers, Ronald Rael, Virginia San Fratello and CHOPEkE Collective, just got Beazley Designs of the Year for best design of 2020. The types of activities can be many, but the most important thing is to come up with initiatives that, through consistent lobbying, will become real guidelines that perhaps translate into physical results. We'll still be in the European Union for a while before they kick us out of there, indicating that our place is in the embrace of the fairy tale Bear, so for the time being, let's take advantage of the fact that there are forces out there that are consistently pushing for ecological change, which translates into building laws, for example. Regarding the issue of overpopulation, I see the following possibilities: we begin to see the Earth as a unity, we talk about the entire population, and we don't just deal with national slices of it, as is happening everywhere today, not just in Poland. We stop trying to salvage the existing assumptions of social policies, unsuccessfully persuading Europeans to conceive more children, and we open the doors in one way or another to people from Africa and Southeast Asia. We open them in Poland, in almost deserted Southern Siberia, in independent or still Danish-owned Greenland, central Canada and so on. At the same time, we are globally ending patriarchy in order to unscrew male inheritance, which has resulted in particular in the "overproduction of people" in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
We are putting in place a series of mechanisms for globally reducing, not locally promoting, fertility rates, also changing the welfare system and having in the back of our minds that pensions are a relatively recent invention perfected since the days of Napoleon by Bismarck and... Hitler. And that we must have a new idea for them, because, after all, old people used to manage somehow, even if that meant thirty years slept on a clay stove (just kidding). At the same time, let's marginalize all churches that call for continuous childbearing as a woman's main duty and "making the earth subject to herself," by taxing them at the same rate as those paid by other regular businesses, and introduce the principle that any religious group has the right to exist as long as only its registered followers pay for it. Imagine how many millions of people would throw themselves into unsubscribing from various churches just so they could increase their household budgets. Those churches willing to cooperate would be able to keep their existing properties, here we will be gracious. I know, my Christian colleagues are surely already very angry with me, so I won't go on about abortion and voluntary euthanasia. These are the building blocks of my global political agenda, which will require the creation of an international network, with Soros and Gates money of course, to be able to turn the head of the fundamentalist Spectra, which sponsors the "right-wing revolution" and composed of lawyers peculiar terrorist organizations operating in more and more countries, like the once Russian-paid Red Army Faction networks. Remember that anonymous villain from James Bond who strokes a white kitten in every episode? This guy sure has black socks on his garters, a razor-thin Pinochet mustache, and a Romanesque chapel where he promises his deity three times a day that he'll bring back the Middle Ages thanks to the millions he makes from the production of formaldehyde and MaBeNy, an invention of a certain brilliant professor from faraway Lechistan. I know James Bond won't help us crack down on this gentleman anymore, but I'm counting on Ms. Pelosi, Ms. Harris and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez.
Simple House - a frame house
Photo: © Simple House
Margaret: Let's talk for a moment about your most famous recent project, Simple House. Do you think we are going to move towards minimalism in life? Will we thus consume less, need less and live more modestly? Simple House is a success story, people are interested in small houses, which are cheaper both to buy and to operate. This is already becoming a trend.
James: Since the owners of Simple House came forward to invent a product and an entire brand for them in 2013, we can see far-reaching changes in consumer behavior in terms of choosing a place to live. At that time, we all took the risk of "revitalizing" timber-frame construction in a new, energy-efficient design, on the assumption that this should be a "product" for the broadly defined middle class, but not at all costs cheap at the expense of technical and design quality. One of the basic assumptions was to design from the inside out, using furniture from popular global and local brands, so as to minimize unused spaces and to make it clear that these are not homes into which 19th century cabinets fit. Simple House are meant to be efficient and relatively small, with as little communication as possible. A lot of three-bedroom house models were successfully created, with areas ranging from 75 to 92 square meters. Suddenly it turned out that Poles wanted houses three times smaller than those with which they cured their post-communist complexes in the 1990s, that they came to meetings familiar with energy-saving technologies, that they were willing to use the methods of individualization we proposed, accepting the limitations. When I proposed to Simple House in 2015 to create a range of micro-houses, the owners were suspicious that I was trying to push my Keret House-era intelligence fantasies on them, but less than three years later a wave of orders for submission houses of up to 35 square meters began. Covid compounded this wave, because after several weeks of putting up with their families in too-small apartments, Poles finally decided to dust off their grandmother's recreational plot. We were stunned by the very wealthy business people and managers coming to pick up our micro-homes, the cost of which is equal to what we later saw in interiors with all the attributes of Poland's upper middle class, from Smega to KitchenAid. Looking now at the deluge of "homes without permits" on Instagram, I feel like I am co-creating some important change. I think the situation is dynamic, but I also have a suspicion that the trend of building ever-larger bubbles separating us from our surroundings, whether in the form of over-intelligent residences or over-huge SUVs, will be reversed for a long time to come. Its manifestation is traveling around one's own country by bicycle, or the desire for nomadic living in RVs, walruses, tiny houses straight out of Cabin Porn, and various attempts to detach oneself from over-computerized reality, including building new causalities by learning carpentry, for example. Simple House is doing well today, and I'm launching a new brand of houses with a different technology soon, thanking fate that I met moneyed people who weren't afraid to trust an architect with an ad man's past.
Margaret: That is, we can clearly see the need for change - from apartments on credit, large houses we are moving to smaller and even very small ones, precisely thirty-five meters, for which we don't even need a building permit. It turns out that it is possible to live this way, in addition, it is even pleasant. Blogs and Pinterest are teeming with beautiful examples straight out of Cabin Porn somewhere on the edge of the woods. Here we have the promise of a simpler life and respite. However, I get the impression that this is due to fashion and temporary fatigue with city life, especially in a pandemic city, and less to an understanding that it is impossible to live in a paradigm of constant economic growth resulting in speculative real estate bubbles, which in turn results in low housing availability. A lifestyle focused on simplicity is starting to become simply fashionable, but will this kind of thinking break through to the mainstream? How should architects moderate this discussion?
James: He has already broken through to the mainstream, only that it's not the mainstream of Pols viewers, but rather the trend of Netflix or Canal Plus viewers, to use media references. For several reasons. First, because, in my opinion, broadening the scope of influence looks like an onion. A small group that suddenly either frequently or even continuously has access to the tools to produce quality content is at the core of the onion, and the next layers are the next scopes of influence. The widest group is, of course, the outermost layer. To it, ideas arrive already filtered through the previous layers, often faded and lacking depth, but if these ideas by some miracle are compelling to it, they can "settle in," producing a very long-lasting effect. The second reason is that this viewer of Polsat usually already lives in small, ba, grossly small apartments and houses, which are the heirloom of a desperate patching up of the housing deficit after two wars. It's not easy for people nesting in Gomulka-era burrows two hundred and forty centimeters high to say that it's actually cool that they have them so small, because they're not destroying Mother Earth as much as those who managed to build four hundred-meter-high mansions in the 1990s. The logic of "buy less, but better quality" is not easy to sell to the broad masses, because they remember one pair of shoes and the bare feet of their grandparents, so offering cheap clothes and shoes from global companies that produce fashionable-looking junk for two zlotys in developing countries is salvation for these people. Hans Rosling's book "Factfulness" makes a good point. The change should be more about the narrative: "let's be proud of who we are, let's not pretend to be rich with cheap botox and a 20-year-old Mercedes." For now, "let's be proud" is a space of nationalistic patriotism, but with a lot of Tokarczuk sensitivity, the wise politicians who are sure to come around someday may be able to redirect these needs to be recognized toward being respected for co-creating a community that cares about the common interest. If they don't, then woe unto us: the outer layer of the onion will be managed by tribal territorialism and hatred of elites, which has been skillfully exploited by populists for several years now, with no small amount of help, often unwitting, from some leftist intellectuals. But back to the trend under the name "I want less": a paradigm shift is taking place before our eyes that has lasted for at least thirty years, where every possible marketing tube cried "want more!" because the economy was based on constant mass consumption of easily interchangeable and low-quality goods cheaply produced in China. If covid has done anything good, it has first and foremost shown corporate senior managers, my age and younger, usually with children, that they are the ones who must undertake paradigm shifts. Listening to Greta's voice or not, but if they continue to make cheap junk that pollutes the Earth, they will do their children wrong, because while you can pay for a rich kid to study in London, you can't then send him to an unpolluted backup Earth. It's these managers, boards of directors and majority shareholders who are key today, they're the ones who rule the world, while the Borsuns only rule Lechistan. And on top of that, if these managers don't even manage a large but Polish company, but Amazon, Uber, Microsoft or some other US-derived giant, the money behind them changes the game, perhaps this time, however, in a positive direction for the Earth. We are closing out these thirty years with new trends, including the consolidation of the role of the Internet and social media, but also a general fatigue with this Internet and fey pleading, to which covid has just contributed. I think we're also tired of the extreme individualism promoted by neoliberalism and expressing our highly original personalities through more purchases made at the cost of longer, but not at all better paid jobs, as seen especially in the US. We want more time for families, friends, acquaintances. "That's something you can't buy with a credit card," to paraphrase a certain commercial. And this applies to architects as well, just as it does to any bread eater.
Implant retail and service complex in Warsaw - a green multifunctional space consisting of 272 containers;
Implant contains three zones: gastronomic, service and commercial, and event zones for socio-cultural activities
Photo: Jakub Szczęsny
Margaret: I still have a question about how to build today so as not to harm - the planet, the air, non-human cohabitants, the climate? We are facing a climate crisis, an economic crisis, a pandemic crisis, air pollution, light pollution, the effects of which we all feel every day. The simplest thing would be to say: don't build! Only such a statement closes the discussion. Architects and investors, including city managers, face the challenge of redefining needs and how to meet them. After a year of remote work, do we still need more premium office buildings? What is the role of architects here?
Jakub: A colleague of mine, a respected Warsaw architect and an unusually business-savvy person, once told me that he was advising some developer and a printout of a "cost ladder" of some development fell into his hands. The items were lined up from most expensive to cheapest. He then saw that "architectural service" was second from the bottom, just above "cleaning and maintenance." That's when he realized that he could do design more for joy than for money, and that he didn't want to become a victim of his own ambitions as a creative architect. The holy truth: we are not in Switzerland, but on the other hand, we also don't want to give away our souls by turning into mercantile technocrats. As architects, we know a lot, we understand the logics of different sectors, we can combine facts, we can help those smarter than us make money, but we can also direct their activity with visions, as the modernists of the CIAM era tried to do to some extent. Now things are really changing a lot. I myself advise various companies, and I see that the openness to what I say has increased, because the level of conservative instinct has jumped up for all of us, and we know that complacent and with our bellies filled, we will not be able to escape the dangers of the new reality. Now solutions are taking shape that we still call "hybrid," but soon some of them will be the norm. Fortunately, office buildings are more easily converted into apartments than the other way around, as in visions straight out of "Hotel Polonia" from the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. I think that the time of splurging on construction activity understood as erecting the largest possible structures from scratch is over. Now is the time of clever adaptations, reconstructions and also demolition, changes in the program or reduction of activity. Let's remember that architects, with the broad competencies I've already mentioned, can really do a lot of different things, not just draw hectares of housing in a field near Radom and squabble at coordination.
Margaret: Thank you for the interview! Tell us more at the end, was it successful with the sandals?
Jakub: No, in the end we bought eco-rubber wellingtons, in which supposedly the leg doesn't sweat, but it's rubbish.
interviewed by Malgorzata TOMCZAK
Illustrations from the archives of Jakub Szczęsny
