Enriched Poles colonize German villages near Szczecin, because poverty there, so cheaper land than on the Polish side. The U.S. vice president goes to support the democracy-strangling Russian vassal against the disgusting democratic Europe, and the American president threatens to attack the Vatican. Gen Z representatives write on their social media profiles that they will "single-handedly raise a dog" as orphanages burst at the seams. Black-clad curators in Warsaw institutions address each other as "curatorial person" and don't even raise an eyebrow.
A person who knows how to command a computer to write, shoot or paint something, while properly formulating commands, bankrupts the one who can write, shoot or paint himself. Because the computer is faster and better, and before the next digital revolution, it is clear, there is no escape. French students are fiercely learning the speech of the Lachs to try to get a job in... Poland. And on top of that, Polish (and not only) architects, just think, completely seriously decry that there should be less construction or none at all, meaning nothing, nil and zero. What has happened!
It's interesting with these architects: in these strange times they don't seem to agree on anything, at least if one tried to put them as one tribe. One can't easily say that "Polish architects are such and such." They are too different to be called one species. Rather, they are a biotope: a highly diverse assemblage of species linked by environment and common relationships. At first glance, they have little in common, although they all need money, for example, but even to get it they have very different ideas. Some earn money by servicing those who build something. They find plots of land for them, plan investments, advise them, open the doors of officials, and on top of that they also design, although everyone knows that this is just an addition, more tedious than pleasant, to making real money.
Others, after a few or even a few decades of making a living from designing, quit this losing practice in favor of being clients or supervisors of their former colleagues. They become those who build or carry out breakneck construction processes as developers or project managers. Still others design for pleasure as they run businesses on the side that are supposed to provide them with money. They run their own coffee shops and video blogs, make theatrical sets and collectible furniture, set up agritourism resorts or flip bachelor pads. For many, the hobby or side-business turns out to be more lucrative than their day jobs.
Many of them already design only for themselves, which comes with a conflict of interest, after all, the hardest thing is to be your own client. Many find a foothold in even uninteresting-paying but steady activities, like teaching. A few make a great, not bad, or good enough income from design alone, so they don't complain. On top of that, they are not necessarily the owners of the studios, because those, in order to keep their employees, especially the more experienced ones, have to pay them in the first place, content with what is left after paying people, taxes and - as it is nicely called - fixed costs. Besides, those who don't complain about lack of money often complain about lack of time. And then, finally, there are the oddballs and renegades, what meet in university corridors and industry discussions, asking subversive questions picked up from various Springers or Swiss Calvinists. "Why build when the world is burning and sinking?" they say. "If to build at all, how?". "How about recycling not only the buildings, but also the materials from which they are made?"
And just think, it' s been a mere thirty-five years since the days when an architect and an architect were, simply put, people from drawing lots of lines on drawing boards and cullmans, and then supervising builders. And that they worked from eight to sixteen o'clock, although, in truth, no small part of them had to earn extra money after hours by knitting little projects on a board spread out in the corner of a cooperative apartment in a block of flats. They all wanted to belong to SARP, because it gave them the opportunity to participate in the lottery in the form of admission to a week's vacation at a resort or an open-air drawing workshop at the other end of the country.
Everyone had rapidographs, eccentrics, rulers, exemplars and grafions. And a hunger for the world: for living and designing TAM, abroad in the West, somewhere in Asia or Africa, or at least going on foreign vacations, if only to Yugoslavia. The world was ordered and binary, even if one subscribed to the party. There were the land of glorious dreams and the land of socialist dreams. Germany, meaning West Germany, was rich, as if it had won the war, and we were poor, because we had basically lost it, falling into the paws of the bear from the East. The reality was scarce, gray and absurd, but predictable and somehow (albeit twistedly) arranged, like stories from Stanislaw Bareja films.
Today, many Polish architects, especially those who are more mature and want to make money by designing, are united by a gradual decline in enthusiasm and belief in the mission instilled in their studies to make the world a better place. It welds fatalism and an increasing, equally gradual only in the other direction, awareness of the importance of money and its primacy over any beliefs. Unless it's the Roman pecunia non olet and Philip Johnson's famous quote about the henpecked nature of the architect. They are collectively distrustful of the future they will have to face, whether they catch on to the AI revolution or it throws them out of the saddle. Many, moreover, seem to believe that this ejection, this historical-technological necessity, will force them to finally say goodbye to their tiresome addiction to design and reinvent themselves. On top of that, a dull, long-lasting fatigue integrates them all. The dumping of rates, the arrogance and ignorance of most clients, the bureaucracy, the politicization of the public sector and the scabrous legal culture. Not to mention the ambiguity of professional status, as an architect can count on respect especially as a character in a TV series. Fortunately, they are also united by something positive: the hope that they and others will be delighted by the sight of their own completed project. That, for a moment, they experience a high of causality, fulfillment and a sense that all those efforts made some sense after all. Only that often, when the architect finally comes to stand in front of the finished building, he is too busy or tired to feel anything
Therefore, let's not be surprised that more and more architects are asking themselves questions about the meaning of building. Let's also not be surprised that they are followed by others, this time about the meaning of design itself, and finally the most obvious one falls, and of the existential kind: "Actually, why the hell keep doing it?".
Jakub SZCZĘSNY
more: A&B 5/2026 - Ecology,
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