Sink or soar. A summary of the year 2022 in architecture (Part III)

The end of December—because that's when we finished preparing the January issue—is the best time for all kinds of summaries. And like every year, we ask practitioners and architecture critics to write what they consider a success and what they consider a failure in a given year. We do this in the convention of Sink or Soar. We give our Authors total freedom of expression and do not moderate this discussion. Rather, we are very curious about it.

Previous episodes of the series featured:

• Oskar Grąbczewski—architect, OvO Grąbczewscy Architekci studio

• Filip Springer—reporter and photographer

Hubert Wąsek in HITS AND KITS 2022 from A&B 01|2023 issue

SOAR

The hit of the past year is the release in January of a set of five CDs of music by Iannis Xenakis, „Electroacoustic Works.” It includes „Concret PH,” made famous by the pavilion at Expo 1958 in Brussels (which Xenakis was the author of), and other works created at the interface of architecture-music-mathematics. This is a great joy, because it does not extinguish the hope that architects are people with a wonderful imagination, whose creativity does not have to be tied to building at any cost. The need for such an outlook today, in times of reevaluation, probably does not need to be explained. This is an event from the beginning of the year, and the last days is a book published in Polish by another architect who creates outside architecture—the one from the small cube with rotating colorful parts.... In addition, this year we got two more books about "white cities"—both of which I recommend!

A hit is the cooperation of associations of architects: The annual Polish-German BDA-SARP Integration Award. It has been taking place for years, but taking part in this edition personally, I fully recognized how important these activities are for the environmental integration of young architects and female architects, and how much good can be achieved through such activities.

SINK

Incessantly for several years: greenwashing activities and the promotion of local (and not only) politicians to „green” investments. We cut down hundreds of large trees, getting lost in testimonies, but in the light of jupiters and drone cameras we plant a dozen new lichen (familiar from many cities photos of gentlemen in jackets with shovels), promoting ourselves on their background and on the background of large plastic banners with logos. If you manage to organize some kind of bench on top of that, you can already sell the whole thing as a „mini-park,” "pocket park" or another „enclave of greenery in our city.” Images for such games are unfortunately provided by architects. And all this while avoiding talking about real problems.

Hubert Wąsek—president of SARP Częstochowa Branch