Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
New house in an old neighbourhood of Wroclaw, Poland, in the NYT today. Spruce on the outside, particle board on the inside, and the whole thing cost US$80,000 to build. It will fade to grey. This seems equivalent to laneway housing in Vancouver – and memo to Vancouver: modern mixes well with traditional architecture. Take a chance! I just hope they used non-formaldehyde particle board in the interior, because if not that’s a lot of off-gassing. Photos: Olo Rutkowski. See more current Polish architecture here.
Tags: architecture, chipboard, DIY, favourite, house, laneway housing, mixed, modern, particle board, Poland, Polish, spruce, traditional, wooden, Wroclaw
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Sunday, November 8th, 2009
This chapel in Tarnów, Poland, is by Marta Rowińska & Lech Rowiński of the firm Beton (photos by Beton) and was completed in 2009. Like so many wooden churches, it feels like an inverted wooden ship. Being a completely non-religious non-churchgoer who really dislikes all the tortured religious iconography and narrative (and could do without the cross), I don’t know why I’m so attracted to all these humble churches (see also here and here). Maybe because there’s something surrealist or fantastical about their architecture, not just in that they suggest poetical barns or ships, but because their utility is somewhat non-utilitarian and undefinable. Having said that, the design of this church grew out of very practical, material concerns (like so much successful architecture): Via archdaily:
“Building the church had also a “side” purpose: to bring the local community together. It was built by not very skilled workers, so the technology had to be really simple. Concrete slab as a foundation, timber structure as the main “spine” of the building and the wooden cladding. There is almost no detail, no fancy elements. This is also a kind of experiment – how to create a certain quality of space with the use of rudimentary technical simplicity. The investor, who is a quite well-known Polish writer, decided to save this small bit of the Vistula bank from becoming an another wild beach with a cheap bar on the side.”
Tags: Arch Daily, archdaily, architecture, Beton, church, design, Eastern Europe, Eastern European, favourite, Lech Rowiński, Marta Rowińska, Poland, Polish, shingles, Tarnów, wood, wooden
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