‘Avant-garde of tomorrow?‘ which is an exhibition on young Polish architecture, will inaugurate the opening of the Centre for Architecture and Design in Łódź, Poland on October 7th. The exhibition gathers 14 of most promising Polish designers and puts focus on individual design process rather than the final product. They prefer to observe how all the participants achieve their goal and which path they take. Whether it’s a generative process or traditional way of form-finding, the exhibition aims to bring these processes closer to a wider audience. More information on the event after the break.
Together with the exhibition opening, Grupa Cukier will organize a Pecha Kucha night comprising 10 young polish offices in a series of short briefings on their projects and practices.
Nowadays, due to the enormous amount of information available, reaching from simple notes presented in the architecture web portals to highly sophisticated GIS maps, we are witnessing a devaluation of traditional research methods as well as aesthetic ways of expression.
Wherever the architecture is a business-like venture, the designers’ methods are very similar to the ones used in laboratory research in which every variable is measured and weighed with programs designed by the New Architect. The functional advantage of digital information and its availability compel even those architecture offices considered traditional to use advanced digital techniques when searching for a form or enriching the architectural project with an additional level of information. This happens because of the measurable nature of the final result, which can be easily verified in terms of client’s demands.
An architectural project provides a data base as a result of numerous simulations proving the architect’s decisions correct and efficient. It’s the way one can justify e.g. the postulated directions for an urban planning project by analyzing peoples’ relocation in a territory, or an aerodynamic shape of a skyscraper by studying the presence of northern winds.
While asking the title question about the avant-garde of tomorrow, we want to learn about the creation process of young Polish architects working in Poland and abroad. We find it interesting how the tools of parametric modelling are used in comparison to the more traditional design methods based on sensitivity and intuition. At the first sight, the buildings created by Polish architectural offices don’t differ much from the ones that can be seen in the foreign professional magazines. Is it so that all the steps in the design process are identical in every corner of the world? It’s worth pondering to what extent a local identity may influence the dehumanized process of finding form and its optimizing. Architectural objects may look the same but it seems to us doubtful that all the processes involved are identical.
The exhibition is thought to be a praise of the process itself as an equal part in the creation of architecture; it also attempts to introduce to the public the whole range of steps consistently reaching the final goal which one may consider ‘a good architecture’.
For more details on the exhibition, please visit their website here.
