Affordable housing in the city center? It sounds like an oxymoron, the title of an article about Viennese housing, or a harbinger of an architectural disaster in which PUM is squeezed to the limit. It turns out, however, that such projects can be built not only in the West, but also in Poland, and on top of that they don't look at all worse than high-end developer investments. The best example is the unusual TBS building in Rybnik, which was designed by SLAS Architekci.
One of the solutions touted as a way out of Poland's ongoing housing crisis is support for social housing. Communal housing, social housing and TBS make up only a small part of the housing available in Poland. Those that do exist are for the most part designed and built "at cost," so it is difficult to look for architectural gems among them (although there will be some, as is well demonstrated by the Housing Plus Estate in Lowicz, designed by GDA Lukasz Gdaj and Pracownia Architektury Filip Mazur).
TBS Ajnfarty in Rybnik
Photo: Hedronista|Tomasz Celeban © SLAS Architekci
This seems to be the natural course of things - after all, public funds are limited, the units are to be built as many as possible, and ultimately they are to go to people with less affluent wallets. However, one might ask what would happen if, however, one were to break this pattern and create striking architecture in a good location, surrounded by high-quality public space, and at the same time operating in a system that would allow one to live without taking out a very high loan? Such an experiment has been carried out by Rybnik, where the TBS "Twój Dom" building, designed by the Katowice-based SLAS Architekci studio, has been built. Get to know Ajnfarty.
TBS Ajnfarty in Rybnik
Photo: Jakub Certowicz © SLAS Architekci
TBS from the competition
The TBS building on Generała Józefa Hallera Street in Rybnik was built as part of a project to revitalize a quarter located in the center of Rybnik. The city, in cooperation with the Katowice branch of SARP, held a competition to design a multi-family residential building in a difficult location - near historical buildings, in a conservation zone, and at the same time heavily degraded. The winning concept was that of SLAS Architekci studio, according to which a five-story building, consisting of three interconnected cuboid blocks, will be erected by summer 2024.
TBS Ajnfarty in Rybnik - axonometry
© SLAS Architects
tidy work
Inside, there are 80 apartments with favorable layouts - almost every one of them has a terrace (some even have two!) and large windows, providing plenty of light, and it's in vain to look for excessively long corridors and slanting walls here. Underfloor heating comes as standard, and each staircase is equipped with an elevator. The apartments are offered in sizes ranging from 38 to 65 square meters, in addition, 6 commercial units are planned on the first floor, with areas ranging from 76 to 103 square meters. This sounds like a description of a well-designed development, a developer rather than a municipality. Ajnfarty in Rybnik, however, is much more than that.
TBS Ajnfarty in Rybnik
Photo: Jakub Certowicz © SLAS Architekci
Ajnfart means gate
Ajnfart in Silesia is called the entrance gate, usually leading to the outbuilding located at the back of the tenement. SLAS architects chose the "gate" motif as one of the main modus operandi conditioning the shape of the body of the building they designed. In Rybnik's TBS, "ajnfarts" are monumental passageways that, according to the etymology of the term, open onto a square inner courtyard. However, these are not ordinary gates - in Ajnfarts they reach the height of the third floor, and are also relatively "deep", as they stretch across the entire cross-section of the building. No wonder the authors called them "urban rooms."
TBS Ajnfarty in Rybnik
Photo: Jakub Certowicz © SLAS Architects
The expansive space they create serves many more functions than their primary purpose might suggest. In the passageways you can protect yourself from the rain or the scorching sun, small benches promote social integration, and thanks to their large cross-section they do not have the character of a "bottleneck", on the contrary - they order pedestrian traffic, create opportunities for meetings. A great deal of light enters them, and lamps have been installed on the vaults, so the urban rooms are safe spaces, which cannot always be said of the traditional, dark and cramped gates of historic tenements.
Their considerable dimensions did not come from nowhere. As the authors of "Ajnfart" explain:
The starting point for the project is to treat the two existing - historic buildings as the main anchor of the premise. The authenticity of the existing buildings becomes a pretext for developing the entire quarter as a space based on the identity of the place.
TBS Ajnfarty in Rybnik
photo: Jakub Certowicz © SLAS Architekci
the second life of the slaughterhouse
At issue here are two buildings, standing on Generała Józefa Hallera Street since 1904. There used to be a slaughterhouse here, later an entrance to a parking lot located in the center of the quarter was located between them. According to the record card, prepared in 2018 for the purpose of organizing an architectural competition, each of them:
[...] was built in 1904 as a communal residential building, with a typical workers' character expressed in brick facades and modest decoration. It was part of a complex of buildings in a similar style stretching along the former Butcher Street (Schlathofstrasse), today's General Józef Haller Street.
Both buildings had stood vacant for years and, as the preservationist found, were not suitable for full adaptation. Despite this, their silhouettes, characteristic of the neighborhood, did not disappear from the urban space, as the architects included in their project the intention to renovate and modernize the buildings. The facades were painstakingly cleaned, while the interiors were arranged with new layouts of rooms covered with reinforced concrete ceilings. The individual elevations featured large glazed windows that act as storefronts and provide light to the interiors. Today they house service establishments, such as a tattoo parlor and a restaurant. The cubic volumes of the 20th-century buildings also set the tone for the entire "Ajnfarty" development - their size is reflected in the dimensions of the "urban rooms."
TBS Ajnfarty in Rybnik
Photo: Jakub Certowicz © SLAS Architekci
as they see you, so they write you
The building's finish also draws from its immediate surroundings. SLAS architects are accustomed to putting apt solutions in the facades of their buildings. For the concert hall of the State Music School in Jastrzębie-Zdrój, it was a wavy, glossy sheet metal, while for the Academic Performing Arts Zone building in Katowice they opted for red clinker. A similar effect was achieved in Rybnik's Ajnfarty, as these were finished with tiles alluding to the brick buildings of the former slaughterhouse and the development on the opposite side of Haller Street.
TBS Ajnfarty in Rybnik
Photo: Jakub Certowicz © SLAS Architekci
backyard behind the bush
Ajnfarty is, of course, not only a volume, but also the surrounding space. Clever zoning plays the first fiddle here. The plazas created around the historic buildings are open to the public. There are benches, trees and lower plantings, growing in rounded breaches in the pavement. The circle motif here perversely breaks the rigor of the rectangular and perpendicular elements that dominated Ajnfarty's architecture.
TBS Ajnfarty in Rybnik
Photo: Jakub Certowicz © SLAS Architekci
From the public square, but also from each of the urban rooms, one can access the semi-private space, which is the inner courtyard of the building. The architects made sure that the courtyard did not become a breach in the urban fabric of the neighborhood. Instead of using a fence, they subtly suggested a change in the use of the area, marking its boundary with rows of low plantings, several inches high, which do not disturb the visual continuity of the space. Inside, there was a plaza with plenty of greenery, lighting and small architecture - here the designers returned to the repetitive, square motif that is most evident in the layout of the pavement.
TBS Ajnfarty in Rybnik
Photo: Jakub Certowicz © SLAS Architekci
River Zone in Rybnik
Ajnfarty was not built in an open field, although the site was formerly a threshing floor. The quarter located between three streets - Hallera, Rzeczna and Pocztowa - and a section of the boulevard on the Nacyna River, completed in 2019, has been named by the city as the "River Zone." The degraded fragment of the urban fabric, located a few hundred meters from Rybnik's market square, for many years served as a large downtown parking lot surrounded by deteriorating tenements that once housed, among other things, the headquarters of the Municipal Police or the old slaughterhouse. Since 2017, a four-story parking lot, the River Art Gallery and the TBS building discussed in the text have been built here.
TBS Ajnfarty in Rybnik
photo: Jakub Certowicz © SLAS Architekci
There is still one plot of land waiting to be developed, located between "Ajnfarty" and the Gallery building - according to previous plans, the city wanted to allocate this area for another building with a residential and service function. However, this will not happen, because last summer Rybnik officials decided that the River Project will be closed by arranging greenery on the vacant plot. A Sculpture Park will be created here, which will ultimately serve both the residents of the model TBS and an extension of the exhibition space for the nearby Art Education Center "River Gallery." According to preliminary information made available by Dziennik Polski, implementation of the project is planned for later this year, but no further details are known at this point.
TBS Ajnfarty in Rybnik - Entrance to the staircase
Photo: SLAS Architekci
Communal, social or TBS housing - what does it involve?
There are currently three basic models of publicly supported housing in Poland, primarily municipal. The largest number of units are available in the municipal formula - these are apartments that usually do not differ in standard from those offered on the commercial market, rented for an indefinite period to people whose income does not allow them to buy an apartment or take a loan. Social housing, on the other hand, is intended for the poorest - mainly the unemployed and the homeless. In this case, the standard and available square meters are significantly lower than those characterizing municipal housing, the difference also appears in the type of contract entered into - in the case of social housing, rent is granted for a fixed period.
TBS Ajnfarty in Rybnik - Interior of the staircase.
photo: SLAS Architekci
The situation in the case of TBS presents itself a bit more complicated. TBS, or Social Building Society, is a municipal company whose purpose is to build apartments for rent for people with average incomes that are not always enough to take out a mortgage. Land for the construction of TBSs is provided by the municipality, while funds for the project come from two main sources - low-interest loans taken from the National Economy Bank and participation fees, which tenants pay before living in the units offered to them. The amount of such fee can be up to 30 percent of the value of the apartment, and the amount is refundable if the lease agreement is terminated. An apartment in TBS is an attractive option for some people whose earnings place them in the so-called " rent gap," a situation that prevents them from both buying or renting their own place and getting an apartment from municipal and social resources.
TBS Ajnfarty in Rybnik
Photo: Jakub Certowicz © SLAS Architekci
you can, you can!
So far Rybnik's TBS belongs to the qualitative avant-garde. It is in vain to look for a social building in our country that would combine all the qualities of Ajnfarts. However, the example from Rybnik shows that the creation of such good architecture within the framework of public investments is possible, although it does not happen often at the moment. We can only keep our fingers crossed that the Rybnik realization will not remain the exception that proves the rule.
Read more about this remarkable project and about residential architecture in the upcoming March issue of A&B!
