Landscapes of Leisure: Relaxing Polish Architecture
‘Landscapes of Leisure’ is one of the four exhibitions organised by the Adam Mickiewicz presented at the Polish Pavilion during EXPO 2020 Dubai. It explores an underestimated part of Poland’s architectural heritage. Even though architects have been searching for and creating ever better, more interesting, more comfortable and more original spaces for us to relax for hundreds of years, this field of architecture is still rarely addressed.
The Landscapes of Leisure exhibition at the Polish Pavilion during EXPO 2020 Dubai aims to introduce international audiences to 20th- and 21st-century Polish architectural designs created for the purpose of relaxation. Małgorzata Devosges-Cuber, Michał Duda and Adrian Krężlik, the curators of the Landscapes of Leisure, explain:
About one hundred years ago in Central Europe, leisure went from being a privilege of the wealthiest to slowly becoming a universal right. This political gesture of concession to hard-working labourers soon entered the canon of fundamental human rights – ‘man has the right to rest’ became law and was included in conventions and constitutions. Along with the popularisation of the idea of universal recreation, the infrastructure for it began to grow. Over the last hundred years, thousands of facilities have been built all over Poland (within its previous and current borders) to support this idea.
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A shelter above Morskie Oko, Tatra Mountains, photo: Bernard Bialorucki / Getty Images
From today's perspective, it may be hard to imagine a life without a long weekend or a nice holiday, but the right to taking time off is fairly new in our part of the world. In Poland, actually exactly one hundred years old – the Sejm of the Republic of Poland adopted the very first law on holidays for trade and industry workers in 1922. Meanwhile, the first international convention on people’s right to rest was adopted by the International Labour Organisation in 1936. Holidays did not become the general norm until after World War II.
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Health resort, Ustroń, 2020, photo: Robert Neumann / Forum
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The architecture of resorts, sanatoriums, holiday homes, mountain chalets, water stations and hotels exemplifies the extraordinary diversity of solutions created: from traditional to avant-garde and non-standard approaches to designing a relationship between man, architecture and nature.
Author
Curators of the ‘Landscapes of Leisure’ exhibition
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Entrance to a salt bath at the State Health Resort in Ciechocinek, 1932 - 1939, photo: Maria Berman / National Digital Archive (NAC) / audiovis.nac.gov.pl
From the very beginning of the development of leisure infrastructure, a significant part of it consisted of facilities that were there not only to help people relax but also to help them restore their health. Spas, sanatoriums and all of their accompanying facilities – whether created for accommodation, sport, or recreation – were an important subject of architectural research throughout the 20th century. They were a necessity as, at the beginning of the 20th century, working conditions in many industries were far from safe, and health and restorative treatments were in real demand. Considering the importance of these facilities, they needed to be designed and built – architects had the opportunity to introduce innovative forms of architecture.
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Entrance to the salt bath in Ciechocinek, photo: Jakub Certowicz
The healing qualities of salt baths were already known and used in Ciechocinek in the 1840s. That is when spa facilities were first built in the town but the heyday of Ciechocinek as a popular health resort came in the Interwar period. It was then, in the years 1931-1932, that the unusual, no longer extant, complex of a salt baths and thermal swimming pools was built. It was designed by Romuald Gutt, famous for his extraordinary talent in combining the most innovative modernist solutions with forms of classical architecture. It was no different in Ciechocinek, where he built a 100-metre-long swimming pool, accessed by a reinforced concrete entrance pavilion with a light, modern body supported by slender columns and equipped with a spectacular roof terrace.
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Abram Gurewicz's guest house, Otwock, 1918 - 1939, photo: National Digital Archive (NAC) / audiovis.nac.gov.pl
The modernist forms of the Wiktor Sanatorium in Żegiestów are both expressive and impressive. Built in 1934-1936 according to a design by Jan Bagieński and Zbigniew Wardzał, it is like a ship moving across a mountain slope. The huge mass, pierced with horizontal strips of windows, rounded at the corners, was complemented by an angular tower of a glazed staircase and a rotunda housing the restaurant room. The Wiktor Sanatorium in Żegiestów still performs its original function.
The Abram Gurewicz Sanatorium, immersed in the local building tradition, has managed to bring back this form. This large wooden building was erected between 1906 and 1925 in another health resort, Otwock, located on the outskirts of Warsaw. It represents a very popular building style in this region, called ‘Świdermajer’ due to its decorative character (Świder is the river flowing through the town). For years, the Abram Gurewicz Sanatorium was neglected and abandoned, which, especially in the case of wooden architecture, is usually deadly for a building. However, in 2014, an investor ready to save the unusual building was found. The renovation design the ornate wooden building was developed by the Grupa 5 Architekci office and today the building is once again home to a medical facility.
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The shelter over Morskie Oko, Tatra Mountains, 1925 - 1939, photo: Adam Jankowski / National Digital Archive (NAC) / audiovis.nac.gov.pl
Naturally, for recreational investments developers sought picturesque areas conducive to relaxation and recovery. Spaces that could accommodate tourists and host sporting activities were an added bonus. The Polish mountains have all these qualities. No wonder, then, that a particularly large number of recreational facilities were built there throughout the 20th century. One of the first of them was a mountain hostel over Morskie Oko, built in the years 1907-1908 and designed by Tadeusz Prauss. Not only was it built in one of the most breath-taking spots in the Tatra Mountains, but it was also one of the most interesting examples of the Zakopane style.
The funicular railway to the Kasprowy Wierch peak was key in making the Zakopane area tourist-friendly. It was built in the 1930s and its stations were designed Anna Kodelska and Aleksander Kodelski. The construction of the railway was a triumph of Polish engineering and also turned out to be an interesting example of architecture combining very local, traditional solutions with modern and innovative construction.
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Cable car to Kasprowy Wierch in Kuźnice, 1949, Zakopane, photo: PAP
A real investment boom in the field of leisure construction took place in the second half of the 20th century, when dozens of holiday homes, sanatoriums, holiday and recreation spots were also built in the mountains. Many of the projects of the time went down in the history of Polish architecture not only as examples of post-war modernism, but also as original spatial concepts. Such as the impressive therapeutic and rehabilitation district of Ustroń-Zawodzie, a complex of a dozen or so characteristic holiday houses and pyramid-shaped hotels and a complex of sanatorium buildings, which the designers Henryk Buszko, Aleksander Franta and Tadeusz Szewczyk enclosed in austere, very modern modernist blocks. Around the same time, in the mid-1960s, across one of the Tatra slopes in Bukowina Tatrzańska, Leszek Filar, Przemysław Gawor and Jerzy Pilitowski designed the Harnaś resort house, whose geometric body is varied by a facade covered with a composition of deep loggias.
Leisure facilities are primarily intended to offer comfortable places for guests and boarders, and this is not incompatible with enclosing them in innovative, original blocks. Stefan Müller and Maria Müller created such a project in Szklarska Poreba between 1974 and 1981. Dom Wypoczynkowy Granit was closely harmonised with the shape of the terrain. The terraced shape of the building repeats the slope of the hillside, integrating appropriately with the surrounding landscape. The architects also incorporated green elements and wood into the shape, making the building almost 'invisible' in the mountain greenery.
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Meteorological observatory on Śnieżka, photo: Mieczysław Michalak / AW
However, Witold Lipiński and Waldemar Wawrzyniak were certainly not interested in invisibility when they designed the meteorological observatory on Śnieżka in the Karkonosze National Park in the 1960s. Here the architects built a futuristic structure on top of the mountain, consisting of three piled-up discs.
Not everyone and not always can afford to go on a holiday trip to a region far away from home, to the sea or to the mountains. With such people in mind, in 1975 the Design Office of ZSB Stolbud-Bydgoszcz developed a model of a small holiday home, which duplicated, manufactured from identical elements could be placed almost anywhere, in suburban forests, at rivers and lakes, in the mountains. For many years, the Brda cottages were a very popular place for families to relax, even though there was little space or comfort in their characteristic triangular shape.
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Brda houses, photograph from ‘Landscapes of Leisure’ exhibition produced by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, photo: Jakub Certowicz
A similar idea was replicated at the Paprocany Lake in the town of Tychy. In the years 1972-1974, a complex of weekend cottages, designed by Stanisław Niemczyk, was built in the forest surrounding the lake. Each house, shaped like a plus sign, was raised on a pole in order to occupy as little of the green area as possible. The houses could also be combined. Unfortunately, these ingenious houses were never actually produced – only prototypes were made and today it’s hard to find one still standing.
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Dom Turysty PTTK, Płock. Brda houses, photograph from ‘Landscapes of Leisure’ exhibition produced by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, photo: Jakub Certowicz
But you can also rest in a city, especially one as picturesque as Płock. It was here, at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, on the steep bank of the Vistula escarpment, next to the historic cathedral hiding the tombs of kings, that the PTTK Tourist House was built. Marek Leykam, the architect, gave it an avant-garde shape of an elongated hexagon supported on pillars. Nowadays, the building has been rebuilt to some extent, but it still serves as a hotel.
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A House in Potoczek, designed by Anna Zawadzka and Jan Dowgiałło; photograph from the ‘Landscapes of Leisure’ exhibition at the Polish Pavilion at EXPO 2020 Dubai, organised by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, photo: promotional materials
The 21st century has brought considerable changes in the way we rest. Spending our free time in holiday homes is not as popular anymore – nowadays, people tired of living in the hustle and bustle of the city are increasingly looking for solitude. Architects are meeting such needs, more and more often and willingly designing tiny, often one-person cottages, which are easy to put up in natural surroundings, and which offer isolation from all the inconveniences of civilisation.
Such is the House in Potoczek (designed by Anna Zawadzka and Jan Dowgiałło in 2015), Baba Yaga's House (designed by the team of Wojciech Gajewski, Łukasz Gniewek, Bartłomiej Popiela, also built in 2015 in Rzepiska), or the Hyttee House (Marlena Kilian and Marek Piojda, standing in Janowiec near Bard). The small, self-sufficient wooden chalets offer contact with nature and – more and more often desired – solitude.
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Hyttee House, designed by Marlena Kilian, developed by Marek Piojda, Janowiec, Góry Bardzkie, Sudety, 2019, photo: www.hyttee.pl
All of the leisure designs to date were conceived before the coronavirus pandemic. The pandemic has already had a major impact on the way we live and rest. It will surely become another challenge for architects to design places of rest in a post-pandemic reality.
The Landscapes of Leisure exhibition is on display from 16th to 31st March 2022 at the Polish Pavilion at EXPO 2020 in Dubai.
Host of the Polish Pavilion at EXPO 2020 in Dubai: Polish Investment and Trade Agency S.A.
Organiser of the Polish Pavilion on EXPO 2020 in Dubai: www.expo.gov.pl
Exhibition organiser: Adam Mickiewicz Institute
Co-organisation and production: Museum of Architecture in Wrocław
Curators: Michał Duda, Adrian Krężlik
Curatorial team: Małgorzata Devosges-Cuber, Joanna Majczyk, Dorota Pikulska, Barbara Szczepańska
Exhibition architecture: Dominika Janicka
Visual identification: Marian Misiak
Photography: Jakub Certowicz
Soundscape: Piotr Ceglarek, Jan Dybała, Zuzanna Waltoś (Katowice Sound Office)
Architectural mockups: Onimo
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