The site, in the heart of Bydgoszcz, right by the river, was supposed to house a shopping center. However, the fate of the post-industrial plot turned out differently - the site ended up in the hands of a local investor, who focused on the comfort of residents instead of squeezing out PUM. Faced with the challenge of creating one of the largest residential developments in Bydgoszcz in recent years (almost six hundred apartments are planned on 2 hectares), and at the same time maintaining the human scale of the development, faced architects from Warsaw's BBGK studio. Ola Kloc talks with Wojciech Kotecki and Jan Belina-Brzozowski about what responsible investors can change in Polish cities, whether there is a recipe for a happy neighborhood and whether it is possible to build cheaply and well.
New Port in Bydgoszcz
vision: © BBGK Architects
Ola Kloc: Before we talk about the Nowy Port in Bydgoszcz project, I would like to ask about WDS. The Warsaw Social District was supposed to be a model project, an experiment in combating the pathology of the current housing model. What did your work on this project teach you?
Wojciech Kotecki: The Warsaw Social District was created as a reflection on fifteen years of professional experience, in which - in my case - the main subject was residential buildings. Although many of them were awarded, I had the feeling that they were not good at all, and that solving the issues traditionally associated with design work, i.e. nice elevations, flashy projections, good details, did not provide answers to the questions of what a modern city is and why it is so difficult to live in residential buildings. This reflection also appeared elsewhere, such as in the voice of the Museum of Modern Art, which organized exhibitions as part of the "Warsaw Under Construction" festival, or in literature, such as that of Filip Springer, which diagnosed the problem well. When we met with Joanna Erbel, a sociologist, and Tomasz Andryszczyk, a local government official and former spokesman for Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz, we said that somehow this problem had to be answered.
Ola Kloc: That's when the idea of a Warsaw Social District was born?
Wojciech Kotecki: First there was the idea of a name; the Warsaw Social District was supposed to be the answer to the question of how to better build the city. None of us had a clue what it actually meant. All we knew was that there was some need that architecture couldn't quite handle. And with this idea of a Warsaw Social District, which would try to respond to today's problems, we went to Michal Olszewski [then Deputy Mayor of Warsaw - editor's note]. It was clear that it was the City, not the developers, that should show what the future could look like. How it is built, and the fact that people are unhappy living in neighborhoods without parks, schools and transportation, is also a matter for City Hall. It was quite an amazing moment - thinking that these maybe nice buildings, however, do not build a city that can be liked, was part of the mood in various circles.
Site plan for the New Port quarter
© BBGK Architects
Ola Kloc: What was next?
Wojciech Kotecki: Michal Olszewski agreed to finance the project, which was formally commissioned by the Bureau of Architecture. Its purpose was to create a model, study project. It was preceded by research lasting almost a year. A multidisciplinary team was formed, which included, among others, Agnieszka Labus from senior politics and the most progressive speculator on transportation solutions, namely Jan Jakiel. They were highly skilled individuals willing to look for solutions. Together with the Office of Architecture, which not only commissioned the project, but was also involved in the work (it is worth mentioning here, among others, the acting director of the City Architect Bartosz Rozbiewski today), we began to explore existing solutions. We went to Paris, where we looked at the Clichy-Batignolles, to Vienna's Aspern Seestadt, to Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Copenhagen to learn about model housing solutions. Instead of inventing, we wanted to see what others had already discovered. It turned out that every Western European country has such a model housing development for experimenting and searching for what the future might actually be.
Ola Kloc: What was the most memorable for you?
Wojciech Kotecki: The estate, or rather the city of Clichy-Batignolles, on every level is so progressive that it is dazzling and fascinating. From the public-private partnership financing model, to all the functional mixes, social mixes, technological solutions, waste handling, emissions management - it was amazing! Upon our return, we prepared a summary of all the solutions and did a study called "Tools and Ambitions."
Ola Kloc: What was included in it?
Wojciech Kotecki: We defined tools that we thought could be applied in Poland, many of which were still beyond our reach. We also defined the basic goals. So that this mass of acquired knowledge would not turn into formless information, we divided it into chapters that deal with key aspects.
The architects have introduced a variety of development typologies
© BBGK Architects
Ola Kloc: So what was to be addressed?
Wojciech Kotecki:The idea was to take care of what is unattended. We set three environmental and three social ambitions. I put forward the thesis that in Poland the public is less cared for than the environment. Among the social ambitions we included: urbanism, i.e., thinking not about architecture and building, but about building a city, designing a building not as a finite form, but as a part of a larger whole; communityism, i.e., thinking aboutpeople not as individuals, but about relationships between people at different levels, because a city is made up of people who form relationships and communities at the level of the city, neighbors living door-to-door and family or other cell. The third ambition was diversity. It can be understood in various ways: at the architectural level, it is the antithesis of modernism, that is, simplification and zero-sum, the use of absolute logic, going in the direction of humanism, more complex and mind-blowing solutions. After the last thirty years of economic rationalism and free-market modernism in architecture, after all those white boxes, we need to start looking for something that is closer to the diverse needs of people. This includes being sensitive to the fact that people are very different, both users of architecture and participants in the investment process. Openness makes it easier to create good things.
Ola Kloc: And the other three?
Wojciech Kotecki:The environmental values are: Mobility sustainability, that is, a balance between cars, walking, bicycles and public transportation; Environmental sustainability, that is, all aspects of green architecture; and Sustainable construction, that is, building with the future in mind, and to make things that are technically and aesthetically sustainable within the free market, because that's how housing is most often created.
Ola Kloc: How do these values (you can read more about them in the A&B 1/2022 issue edited by the BBGK studio), which have become the basis of the philosophy of your work, manifest themselves in the New Port project in Bydgoszcz?
Jan Belina-Brzozowski: All of these values are present, and most of all, in my opinion, city-making. We were dealing with a piece of the city on the edge of a defined urban structure in Bydgoszcz. It wasn't a greenfield site, but a place where we had to adjust to many conditions, including individual historic buildings. The local plan called for buildings of a much larger scale than the surrounding ones, with three to five stories - it gave the possibility to build up to eleven stories.
The architects wanted the hitherto fenced-off fragment of the city to become a part of it
Photo: Mariusz Guć © AWZ Deweloper
Ola Kloc: What was the biggest design challenge?
Jan Belina-Brzozowski: It's how to build a new section of the city on a large plot of land in the very center of the city, which should be a contemporary place to live with high standards. We wanted the area, which until recently was cut off from the city, fenced off, to become part of it. We decided to complement the publicly accessible urban spaces, we designed a waterfront on the side of the river, we created a complement of Obrońców Bydgoszczy and Marszałka Focha streets with a new urban street, which we designed as a green avenue running through the center and a transverse pedestrian passage with a square. We focused first and foremost on defining spaces that would fit in with the surrounding streets so that traffic would be natural, so that new urban connections would be created, so that this premise would become part of the city, not a carved-out part of it.
Similarly, we tried to link the historic buildings with the new ones. For example, on the side of the river there were small-scale, two- and three-story buildings, while on the side of Obrońców Bydgoszczy Street there were five-story tenement buildings from the early 20th century. We wanted to shape the architecture we introduced in such a way that it would adapt in scale to the existing one, not overwhelm it, and that the new buildings would be diverse. So we introduced frontages in the new streets with six-story buildings, the two upper floors of which are set back from the building line. Also appearing in the depths are eleven-story buildings, residential "towers" that are height dominants, but placed in the second line in relation to the boulevard.
The vertical dominants of the establishment are two - and eventually four - "towers"
photo: © AWZ Deweloper
Ola Kloc: The project is at the halfway point?
Jan Belina-Brzozowski: A quarter of the premise has been realized.
Wojciech Kotecki: The architecture here is a consequence of thinking about the city, not the main goal. Before we started designing it, we developed a master plan. What has been realized is the first step. The masterplan envisioned the realization of a section of the city that, in addition to being integrated into the existing context, would also incorporate existing historic buildings. Its premise was a very coherent functional and spatial layout, the fact that the city is formed by quarters that clearly delineate squares, frontages and street space. The higher level of this spatial assumption is formed by four "towers," that is, quite small in plan, designed in the form of towers, but relatively low spatial dominants. Two of them have already been realized in the first stage.
Ola Kloc: In summary, this is an entire development quarter, or in fact four interconnected quarters, between which runs an internal street overlooking the modernist opera house (proj.: Jozef Chmiel, Andrzej Prusiewicz), perpendicular to it you have planned a pedestrian route, there are public spaces, historic and new buildings, in the plan four height dominants, service functions in thefirst floors, green roofs, quality materials - light slabs of granite and sandstone on the facade, corten, red brick, light architectural concrete, wooden window frames - sounds like a dream come true for a place to live. At the same time, some part of me thinks it might be too good to be true. In addition to the variety of forms and solutions, will there be room for a variety of social groups?
Jan Belina-Brzozowski: The buildings we designed, the standard proposed by the investor and the location in the center make it quite an expensive investment. Instead, the space around is designed very democratically, accessible to everyone from the level of services that are along the streets.
The challenge faced by the architects was to create a new part of the city on a post-industrial plot in its center
Photo: Krystian Dobosz © AWZ Deweloper
Wojciech Kotecki: It's more of a premium location and architecture, but it has a variety of offerings - both huge super-luxury, glass-walled apartments in "towers" and much smaller apartments within quarters. In this case, we designed things that don't appear every day in residential architecture, that is, very qualitative solutions both aesthetically and technically, materially. Architects often say that what they create are "our buildings," "our projects," but this picture is much broader. Buildings always belong to funders, investors, developers, and it is they who have a key influence on how this task that we respond to and solve is defined. There is a type of Polish investor who really lives in the city where he builds, and who does not want to make an investment, but to bring lasting value to the architecture, to this place of his. Anna Wydrzyńska (AWZ Deweloper) is such an investor. We were able to draw these buildings, but this is her vision and belief that such a solution makes sense. There are more and more people in Poland who look beyond profit, because the buildings they put up are their business cards. Zbigniew Jakubas (Mennica Developer), Paweł Malinowski (Profbud) or Sebastian Kulczyk (NOHO) are also worth mentioning here.
Thoughtful location of dominant high-rise buildings positively influences perception of new space
photo: © AWZ Deweloper
Ola Kloc: Investors are one side of this process, on the other side we have the legal situation, or rather the lack of proper guidelines, the consequence of which is, for example, that apartments are getting narrower and deeper. In this situation, how can architects create functional apartments that will be good living spaces, shape good residential architecture?
Wojciech Kotecki: The biggest problem is the market, the desire to provide the cheapest possible apartments so that people can afford them. Legal provisions, i.e. technical conditions and other such regulations, specifically their lower limits, set the standard for the cheapest apartments. In such an ultra-popular segment, everyone looks at every paragraph fifty times, seeing if it is possible to make an even smaller, tighter, darker apartment. If we stop moving in this entry level segment, the Nowy Port investment is certainly not one of these, it turns out that Polish regulations do not limit the imagination. You can make apartments with beautiful layouts. What is a limitation for us as architects is the perception of the client, with whom we have no contact at the stage of designing a residential building. On top of that, the developer doesn't know the client either, so we have to design apartments, solutions, aesthetics that fit into the broadest possible expectations of both those who buy a 37-meter apartment and those who buy a 400-meter apartment. Residential architecture in Poland is also, unfortunately, an investment - people buy apartments that they later want to be able to sell easily. This is a much bigger constraint than the regulations themselves.
Historic buildings are woven into new developments
Photo: Krystian Dobosz © AWZ Deweloper
Ola Kloc: Is there anything that could be changed in this "entry level" standard that would make even the cheapest apartments better?
Jan Belina-Brzozowski: The greatest potential is, and this is what we are trying to do, to make that two-room apartment of 40 square meters, which is the same in almost every development, in a place that has all these elements of diversity, urbanity, community. That's what makes one housing development a nice place to live, and another - in a different place - almost unbearable. We try with these elements and knowledge to shape the project in such a way that it just creates a good neighborhood, so that there are meeting places, good greenery, services and so on.
Wojciech Kotecki: I know that housing layouts are often criticized, but I believe that the basic hygienic and humanitarian standard is maintained in Poland. We are not, with few exceptions, entering a pathological level that is a threat to people's livelihoods.
In order to make housing more accessible, solutions need to be found not in architecture, but in financing, and I would like someone other than an architect to take care of this. Housing Plus was a pretty good direction as a search for an alternative, and I very much regret that it ended in failure. However, when it comes to looking for affordable solutions, first of all, garages. A garage is a huge financial and environmental cost - making apartments that may not have garages makes sense. It's absurd that people don't have the money for an apartment and have to buy a parking space, for which, of course, they pay little in theory, but pay the cost of making it in the cost of the apartment. You need to design the entire housing complex so that it is impossible to park in the wild and there is public transportation and bicycle access, and sell apartments 20 percent cheaper. The second thing concerns the standard of finishing. In the much wealthier Scandinavian countries, housing looks completely different, the floors are lower, the walls inside are unplastered, but made of prefabricated elements devoid of plaster. Installations are very often routed outside - the metal pipe goes between one ceiling and the other, and is done aesthetically. Here there is quite a lot of money to be saved. However, there appears a difference in the mentality of the people of Scandinavian and Slavic countries, where superficial elegance matters. Novelty à la Miasteczko Wilanów, which is associated with success, and the possibility of taking an elevator to the garage where a grazed car is parked, is still the dream of many. Different stories need to be told, maybe this dream will change. As an engineer I know how to make low-cost housing, as a humanist I believe that we will not be ready to rationalize construction costs for a long time yet.
The New Port housing development will enrich the Brda waterfront
vision: © BBGK Architects
Ola Kloc: Thank you for the interview.
interviewed: Ola Kloc
Illustrations courtesy of BBGK Architects and developer AWZ Developer
more: A&B 3/2025 - RESIDENCE,
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