"10 Questions to..." is a series of short conversations with architects and female architects, to whom we address the same pool of questions. In today's installment, we asked Wojciech Targowski of the FORT TARGOWSKI studio for answers.
Wojciech Targowski graduated from the Faculty of Architecture at Gdansk University of Technology, where he has worked since 1982. He was a co-founder of the design studio at the Work Cooperative "Twórczość Architektoniczna" in Gdansk and the FORT studio, which has been operating since 1989. Since 2017, he has been the owner of FORT TARGOWSKI office.
1. architecture in three words...?
I don't know how to answer this question. Such a far intellectual succinctness is beyond my capabilities. So maybe half in jest, half seriously:
a. freedom,
b. equality,
c. brotherhood.
2. the three most important buildings for you...?
a. The first architectural fascination was a modernist villa on the street of my childhood. There was something about this essentially inconspicuous building that I obviously couldn't name. However, it must have distinguished it from a number of pre-war developments of Legion Street in my hometown of Toruń. Years later, I discovered that it was the own villa of the prominent architect-modernistand architectural historian Kazimierz Ulatowski, author of "Architecture of the Italian Renaissance" - a book-teacherto generations of architects. It is significant and instructive to see the meeting of these two seemingly opposite fields of interest in one artist.
b. In my earliest student architectural journey, I ended up in Helsinki. Charles Jencks had already declared the death of modernist architecture, but Finnish achievements invariably fascinated my professors. I finally had the opportunity to confront my idea of the greatness of the work with the real world. This is how I became acquainted with Alvar Aalto's Finlandia Talo. The admiration for the restrained elegance of this building has remained to this day.
c. Later and current fascinations are ever different, too plural and fleeting to be permanently recorded. I remember admiration for the brilliantly intelligent, uncommonly witty facade of Jean Nouvel's Institute of the Arab World, infatuation with the City Hall inMurcia, where the accuracy of Rafael Moneo's work can only be experienced in the middle of the square, when one is aware of the towering Baroque opulence of the Santa Iglesia Cathedral facade behind one's back, or surprise at the boldness of the Herzog & de Meuron duo, endowing the laid-back Hamburg with the unexpected expressiveness of the Elbphilharmonie.
Thus, with each trip there are new fascinations, the temperature of which, in the flood of sensations, rises and falls every now and then.
3. the most important book on architecture...?
Here I invariably answer: the "Barbarian in the Garden" by Zbigniew Herbert. I do not know if you can call this book, a book about architecture? It is a collection of essays about the fascination of beauty, creation, European identity. In it you can find a chapter devoted strictly to architects - our predecessors, builders of cathedrals. Reading into the evocative prose, one succumbs to nostalgia, longing for the sublime, seemingly unattainable vision. The greatness of those who brewed to realize it sets a standard that is perhaps impossible to live up to.
4 Most inspiring city and why...?
In the nineties, I deliberately, returning from every trip to western Europe, visited Berlin at least for a while. I did so not to admire the hits of modern architecture, but to observe with envy the iron consistency in the ordering of the city's urban planning, according to which architecture had to recede into the background. This is still a useful and timely, but very pragmatic inspiration. The search for a deeper experience is encountering a difficulty with abundance.
Nowadays, many of the cities I visit with unabashed delight echo the multitude of experiences on offer. This abundance wears off and at some point cools the sensibility. So maybe the most inspiring cities are those that don't exist, Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities"?
5. architect with whom you would like to design something and why...?
Certainly none of the stars. I would not put up with greatness, with which it would not even be appropriate to argue. A great architect I would like to work with would have to give up part of himself, give up at least a fraction of his personality. This is difficult to imagine. One can only co-create with an equal. This is what I adhere to.
6. hand-drawing or computer drawing?
Obviously forgotten, nowadays almost completely supplanted by technological advances, hand-drawing.
Computer drawing perfectly reproduces geometry. It reproduces colors and textures more and more efficiently. It provides a perfectly objective attachment to civil-legalcontracts. It is an ideal or rather idealized postcard from the future. Computer simulation focuses perspective confluences in the eye of the beholder. It necessarily ignores peripheral vision, which many believe is more important for effective perception. Focused on detail, computer vision finds it difficult to convey the genius loci, a property that is fleeting but intuitively perceivable and universally desirable.
A freehand drawing can convey something more. Something that is perhaps more important - the atmosphere of the built space. Moreover, in a representation it is sometimes worthwhile not to add something, to leave it to the imagination of the viewer, to postpone the decision.
How much we have longed for manual drawing is best evidenced by the growing proficiency of software trying to perfectly pretend an imperfect, hand-drawn line.
7 Mock-up or 3D model?
As with computer drawing, it is difficult to imagine design without 3D models. A mock-up, however, and especially its modeling, is a real adventure. A mock-up delights with the ambience of miniaturized worlds of children's play, where real life takes place among houses made of blocks. When building a mock-up, we really play with architecture. This is finally that moment of joyful play that we so long for in everyday life. Nowhere else is fantasy activated to such an extent, nowhere else is fantasy so convincingly authentic. It is a pity that we can so rarely afford to take the time to play with it.
8. modernism or postmodernism?
I belong to a generation in which the dream of postmodern life in a postmodern setting blossomed for a blink of an eye. Exhausted by the unbelievable boredom of the extreme product of the modern era - the refabricated socialist bloc - it was hard not to believe that "less is more boring." The infatuation did not last long. When, with the changes of the 1990s, the era of de-revival dawned and the country became overgrown with stately mansions and townhouses, there was an irresistible longing for the restraint of modernism.
So modernism, however, and with a deepened bow to extreme, "seasoned" brutalism. The unforgettable exhibition "SOS brutalism" at Frankfurt DAM 2017/2018, warned against hasty judgment, taught humility. Who knows if the time of brutalism is not the last moment when architecture was still, perhaps indeed overly oppressive, but a dignified queen of the arts?
What remains of postmodernism is a reverence for traditional urban space. Here modernism seems to have lost.
9. working after hours or sports?
Sports, of course: a sprinting race against deadlines, running against obstacles set to perfection by an increasingly clever bureaucracy, advanced combat sports against everyone, and finally lifting weights of responsibility. Of course, this is all after hours.
10 - Architecture or business?
Here there seems to be no choice: both architecture and business. Authoritative architectural studios are giving way to specialized design corporations. Advanced technologies, formalized requirements, thickets of administrative encumbrances favor organizations composed of increasingly specialized, anonymous staff. This, of course, is already a business, and without understanding it, architectural creativity has no raison d'être.
If you have suggestions for questions you would like us to ask, or persons of architects whose answers to these questions you would like to know - let us know in the comments.
