Finger licking, or what it's like to be an architect in Poland

19 of October '20

Temporary community center in Lublin - collage from the series Transfunctionalisms presented at the exhibition "Architecture of Temporality", NIAiU, 2019

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Catherine: You also often get involved in social, artistic or activist activities. What drives you in them?

Dominika:We live and work in Poland, in Krakow, in a particular political-social-spatial space, we are part of it, it influences us. We get involved in various projects, ideas and actions that we believe in, and sometimes we help these initiatives architecturally and graphically. Drawing, conceptual design or visualization is what we know how to do and can give from ourselves. Thus, it can also become our language of protest or agitation.

Barbara: We are also invited to various art projects. Last year, during the Warsaw Biennale, we had the pleasure of co-creating with Dima Lewicki and Szymon Adamczak an immersive audio tour of Warsaw's Praga district. It was a production of an experience that allowed us to look at a piece of the city from the perspective of a migrant or a migrant woman, and at the same time was a study of spatial changes generated by the capitalist system.

Referring to your first question about what or who inspires us today and broadens our field of vision, it would be collaboration with experts in other fields, preferably completely unrelated to architecture.

A project for the Krzeslawice Culture Club in Krakow

Catherine: Looking at your projects, one can see a respect for the existing, a willingness to use existing resources. Does this approach stem from your love of retro fashion or are you rather close to the idea of recycling as environmental protection?

Barbara: On the one hand, we would like the buildings to tell about themselves. By uncovering their layers, we show what they're made of, what's underneath, what the place was before and what function it served. A few years ago, we opened a temporary community center in an abandoned pavilion in a modernist housing estate of the Lublin Housing Cooperative. As part of the Days of Modernism festival, we did an exhibition of architectural stratigraphy there, uncovering successive layers of wall and floor coverings or traces of metalwork. There used to be an emporium there, the center of neighborhood social life. The political transformation turned it into a second-hand store and a language school. The study of the material became a pretext for meeting people living on the estate and activating memories associated with the place.

Dominica:There are no "fashions" or "styles" on our agenda, but we would like to develop the idea of recycling in our work. I understand it not only as the reuse of a material or the renovation of an old piece of furniture, but as an element of spatial collage with a new function. At Massolit Cooks bistro we made seats out of the wood of old veneered cabinets, and then at Massolit Bakes we draped the ceiling, walls and bar with the same cabinets. We have more fun playing with function and form than buying new things.

Catherine: In your projects you often leave space for greenery. Various kinds of flowerbeds, structures supporting flower pots are like your signature. Where does this fascination with plants come from? And do you consciously play with this "feminine" element?

Dominika:Actually, we would like greenery not at all to be just an "added flower", another material or decorative element, but to coexist with the architecture, and sometimes even burst this concrete a bit. When designing, we think of greenery a little as architecture, and a little as a user, for which we secure a certain space for development. The flowerbeds present in our interior projects are some fraction of the greenery we would like to see in an urban environment. I imagine that nature can connect interiors and exteriors, come inside and spill out onto the street. The urban designs we are developing are rich in greenery. The surface is already hardened enough that we should now return spaces to nature and create places where biodiversity will be the starting point.

A project for the Consent Culture Club in Krakow

Catherine: There is a lack of residential projects in your portfolio - does that mean you haven't had such commissions yet, or are you not quite interested in them, because, for example, you prefer an institutional client to a private one?

Dominika:One of the projects we're working on now is the remodeling of an old house. We refer to it as Villa Libreria, but we should probably use Greek in this case. It's a magical place where social gatherings, concerts and philosophical exchanges of ideas are intertwined with everyday activities. A clear gesture we have made in this beautiful historic building is to vertically organize the functions. The owners have a huge collection of books, so the wall connecting the two floors will primarily be a library. The house stands in the middle of a garden, on a hill, with old-growth trees, magnolia and ivy. Despite being located close to the city center, all you can hear around are birds. In the design we weave this environment into the building. We like work that cannot be divided into typical stages: concept, construction and detailed design. Often it's only after explorations that we decide what to do next.

Catherine: Do you think that the fact that you are women somehow affects your design practice? Does it give you any distinct approach?

Barbara: If you are an architect and not an architect, then all your life you more or less consciously have to fight to make the word "expert" mean exactly the same as "expert." Everything else will come from the character of a particular woman. We like to collaborate interdepartmentally - to treat industry women and industry men as collaborators and associates, not subcontractors or subcontractors, to get involved in art projects, to work with the community, to get assignments for functions we haven't done before, to compete and win. What we like most about architectural work is the lack of monotony and the fact that we can improvise with the space. We'll never know which of the above are generated by estrogen, but sometimes we'd like to think that concern for the common good, dealing with non-prestigious spaces or democratizing collaboration is our architectural feminism.

However, I think a much more interesting issue than "design by women" is "design for women." For years, the Catalan group Col-lectiu Punt 6 has been studying spaces to meet the needs of different groups, arguing that urban design is not gender-neutral. Last November, it published a book entitled "Urbanismo feminista," which may be a supplement to the "right to the city."

Catherine: It's true, the gender perspective in the design of urban spaces has been a subject of interest for some time now, mostly (however) to female researchers. Have you had a chance to use it in your work?

Barbara: At the level of implementing solutions, we are at the very beginning of the journey. The research covers a very wide range of issues that are difficult to reduce to a few architectural postulates. The deeper you go into the subject, the more multithreaded and systemic the problem turns out to be, and design alone - as you know - will not save the world. For the time being, legal tools are available. And political ones. The cited collective from Barcelona is an interesting example insofar as it is made up of female researchers, architects and urban planners who are active in various fields. They conduct research walks, trainings, issue publications, and highlight the problem, while simultaneously creating guidelines for urban design. We have a whole spectrum of issues concerning security, including economic security, night life in the city and working at night, concepts related to the body, communication and transportation, locality or neighborhood assistance, as well as infrastructure that facilitates education and career entry.

Dominica:Imagine a city composed of local centers, where all basic services are within walking distance, with a dense public transportation network with short distances between stops and a mix of functions, so the streets don't empty after dark. These are neither new ideas, nor are they a sufficient answer to the problems facing urban women, but they are a start.

On the scale of architectural design, I would instead start with the very mundane equalization of toilet queue lengths. For that, you simply need changes to the provisions of the technical conditions.

Villa Libreria - cross-section overlooking the wall with the library
Collaboration: Jakub Chrząstek and Weronika Kozak

Catherine: You design, as you call it yourself, meeting places. Nowadays meetings are a rare human activity, I mean, of course, the situation of lockdown and social distance. Has and how has the pandemic affected your work, and what future do you see for it?

Barbara: On the first weekend of the shutdown, probably like everyone else, I was doing some housecleaning. Then I found a ticket from the Venice Art Biennale printed with the large title of last year's edition, "May you live in interesting times." Well, we are living. This year is a very interesting year for us, a lot of good things are happening, so it's not at all appropriate for us to complain. We are lucky to have interesting assignments and wonderful people to work with. The system of working from home has not hindered us from doing projects, but it has made there is much less space for free exchange of ideas and learning from each other. We separate tasks, each person focuses on what they do best, and that's it.

It's also still too early to say if and how what we design will change. The reason we started looking into meeting places is that for years we have been observing the progressive disappearance of human ties.

We are worried that hastily introduced hygiene requirements are not conducive to the use of natural materials. At the same time, the pandemic may contribute to more safe toilets and bathhouses in the city. We keep track of statements and publications describing what our future might look like, and we see that with each week the predictions are less and less crazy and different from what we already know.

In a pandemic, everything is also "more." For now, this is an opportunity for an even stronger manifestation of the existing agenda. If we can add our voice, then yes, we really think that the lockdown has proven that it's worth investing in locality, and has shown how much we may be missing encounters and contact with nature.

Catherine: Thank you very much for the interview!