Poles Among Wallpaper Magazine's Rising Stars
Wallpaper, a prestigious magazine of architecture, design, and fashion, has revealed its list of the world’s most promising architects – the Architects Directory 2015. KameleonLab from Wrocław is among the twenty studios chosen from around the world.
The London-based Wallpaper publishes their list annually, each time presenting a selection of architectural studios from around the world. Their choice is based on the innovation, originality, and novelty of each studio's projects. The magazine's editors call them ‘rising-star breakthrough practices’. The newest edition of the Architects Directory published on June 11, 2015 included studios from the United States, Portugal, South Korea, Germany, Denmark, Argentina, Canada, and one from Poland – KameleonLab, started in 2007 in Wrocław by Rafał Specylak and Kuba Wożniczka. Today, the studio designs single-family houses, interiors, and public buildings from their offices near Wrocław and in Warsaw.
The editors of Wallpaper pointed out that Wożniczka and Specylak consider all their projects individually, as they adapt to both their customers' needs and each project's surrounding conditions as much as possible. In keeping with its name, the lab makes each of their projects unique by adapting them to the given context. KameleonLab's architects admit to having been inspired by Peter Zumthor’s work, as well as by Japanese studios that have few team members but nonetheless create original and interesting building.
Kuba Wożniczka and Rafał Specylak are known for their simple, unassuming single-family houses, which, despite strict, restrained, almost minimalistic forms, meet the needs of their owners perfectly and stand out as interesting architectural forms: for example, their Black Cube House, a redesigned and rebuilt mundane brick house from the 70s, or the wooden Tetris House, broken into several smaller forms so as to fit on a narrow, tree-dotted lot. KameleonLab built a raw, concrete house near Warsaw – the customer wanted a reliable, energy-efficient building that would not require a lot of care and maintenance; for a more traditional client they constructed a red-brick house with wooden ornaments.
Yet another Polish accent is visible in Architects Directory 2015 – Aureliusz Kowalczyk, an architecture graduate of Warsaw University of Technology, is a co-founder of the Hayakawa/Kowalczyk studio. Emiko Hayakawa and Aurelius Kowalczyk are the authors of a minimalist grey-brick house which was built in 2014 in Józefow, near Warsaw. This building and its irregular form were awarded in the Life in Architecture Awards (Zycie w architekturze), as well as in the Polish edition of the prestigious Brick Award.
Other Polish studios have made the Wallpaper Architects Directory list in recent years, including Lodz-based MOOMOO Architects, BXB Studio from Krakow and Bartosz Haduch’s NArchitekTURA.
Translated by Paweł Trzaskowski, 15 June 2015.
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