Hits and kits of 2025
There are no more important topics in architecture and planning today than the climate crisis and housing. It is in these two fields that the real battle for the future of our habitable space is taking place, but there is also inspiring experimentation and innovation going on. Therefore, in pointing out the hits and kits of the past year, I limit myself to these two issues, although great and tragic buildings have been built, interesting and utterly boring exhibitions or books have been published, and with the Venice Biennale a separate subcategory could be created for this compilation, it is these two topics that I consider worthy of consideration.
HITS
Landscape architecture shows what reuse means. The award-winning "Storm" Action Park by Archigrest and topoScape studios, the Central Square in Warsaw designed by A-A Collective, or the European Bridge with viewing platform in Siekierki by MXL4 are just a few examples showing that what is most interesting in Polish space is happening in landscape architecture. Here we are not only keeping up with trends, but we are setting them ourselves. The aforementioned projects implement the assumptions of reuse, reduce interference with existing spaces and ecosystems, and use it to create a coherent and ideologically credible story about the city, landscape and their history, while still remaining functional, beautiful and resilient realizations of often large scale.
A return to sincerity and materiality in architecture. Not necessarily discernible yet in Poland, but definitely present at the Venice Biennale, exhibitions, and leading realizations. The new approach to reuse requires taming a new aesthetic, an architectural patchwork of structures composed of elements of different buildings. And this approach is followed both by those who study and describe architecture, for example, within the pavilions of Denmark, Bahrain, the Vatican or Spain, as well as by the architects of buildings such as Thoravej 29, Charleroi Palais des Expositions and Bicocca Superlab. In the age of digitization and artificial intelligence, when it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between fiction and reality, the real, haptic and bodily experience of architecture, materiality and being together is gaining importance.
Of the buildings nominated for the Mies van der Rohe Awards last year, one in ten was a residential building. The crisis in this area is forcing a search for both new forms of habitation, moving away from ownership or changing models of residential communities, and innovations in residential architecture itself. This also applies to Poland. For more and more often we can point to excellent realizations of municipal, communal, social or TBS housing. Among them it is worth mentioning the TBS in Warsaw's Falenica (design: OPA Architekci) or the one on Mariacka Street in Katowice (design: OVO Grąbczewscy Architekci). And although architecturally these buildings are not outstanding, they show a new trend in thinking about living space.
KITS
Architecture still doesn't understand what reuse is. While more and more interesting things are happening in the landscape, we will probably have to wait until the realization of the Museum of Architecture inWroclaw (good luck to the studio TŁO!) for truly conscious, sincere and innovative reuse in architecture. And although more and more interesting adaptations of post-factory buildings also appear outside the metropolises, such as the Żnin Sugar Factory (proj.: Bulak Projekt), we still do not perceive the existing architectural matter that is not a visually attractive brick factory from the 19th century as a resource. Investors and the architects designing for them have stood in an irrational race to demolish younger and younger buildings. In addition to the well-known examples of the Atrium, Curtis Plaza, Krakow's Plaza or the basically demolished Miastoprojekt, also a barely ten-year-old building at 4 Konstruktorska Street in Warsaw, we also have those yet to be planned - Warsaw's Intraco, PZU or PEKAO. Their disappearance is not related to construction risks or the impossibility of further operation, but to pure financial calculation on the part of investors. The environmental costs or the impoverishment of the historic landscape and its continuity - will be paid by all of us. Do architects and architects designing in place of demolished functional buildings plan their edifices for decades, years or just months?
AI slop in the service of Architectural Revolt. At a time when innovative architecture is credited with a return to materiality, those who sing the praises of a return to (often never historically existent) tradition are flooding the Internet with full force with alterations of buildings and "designs" created using the tools of so-called artificial intelligence to prove that things used to be better. Nicer. Buildings had cornices, and we all lived in palaces with hand-decorated gates. And while this has little to do with the truth, and the images created are often closer to Socialist Realism than to traditional 19th century architecture, the carbon footprint of these activities and the damage to architectural education is growing.
Inferior housing layouts are already appearing in every segment of the market. While public investors are slowly churning away with model housing developments, private developers are relentless in their efforts to squeeze out maximum PUM. And while thanks to the housing speculative law we have gained some really interesting mixed-use complexes, and mini-districts such as Towarowa 22 are being built with increasing frequency, within how apartments are designed in them, the outlook does not seem optimistic. It used to be that we spoke of non-functional pseudo-apartments, commercial units sold with the intention of residential or long-term rental, with dredged tracts and wagon-like rooms, as developments for the less affluent or average wallet. Today, cursory, uncluttered projections are also the so-called premium segment. Pillars growing out in the middle of the premises, odd angles, "studios" having 110 square meters of space with northern exposure are just a few of the features of the offerings brought to the market in 2025.
Kacper Kępiński
Read more: A&B 2/2026 - Education,
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