Siuda was born in 1983. In 2008 he graduated from Wrocław University of Science and Technology's Faculty of Architecture. Later on, he went on scholarship at Universitat Politècnica in Valencia, Spain, and worked as an intern in Spain, Japan, and the US. Although he is currently based in Poland, Siuda still cooperates with architects and designers from abroad. He perceives choosing co-workers for each project as one of the most important elements of his work. As the architect explained in an interview for Designalive.pl magazine:
The architectural studio I run is an attempt at combining an authorial studio with teamwork. The projects are very personal, yet they’re worked out in a group, because I see huge potential in cooperation. The exchange of thought and uniting various artistic personalities in one whole moves our work to new dimensions, multiplies the amount of generated solutions, and incessantly provokes new discussions, in effect making the process of arriving at an idea more surprising and creative.
The architect works in a way that is rather atypical today – his studio is full of traditional drawings, hand-made sketches, and models created in various scales. Such methods seem ‘old-fashioned’ in the fully computerized 21st century, but Siuda holds that constructing prototypes helps imagine the space, three-dimensionality of architecture and its materiality.
Siuda is not a typical architect designing houses or office buildings at the order of regular customers. His work is interdisciplinary, and dominated by visions dictated by humanistic reflections and sensitivity to social issues. In 2012, the project group BALON, established by Siuda, was awarded first prize in a competition for the best design for a school in Jacmel, Haiti. The contest was organized by the Poland-Haiti Charity, the Chamber of Polish Architects, and the Polish Chamber of Civil Engineers. Its objective was to provide humanitarian aid for a town destroyed by an earthquake. The project prepared by Siuda’s team was far beyond the usual body of the building and arrangement design layout plans which would appear in such circumstances. The actual design was created in accordance with the inhabitants’ needs, the conditions in which the new school was to function, and, lastly, climatical and economical situation in the region. In order to make sure the building meets the needs of its inhabitants, a cycle of workshops with teachers was organized. As the authors of the project wrote, having made their proposal fit for Haitian reality:
The materials gathered gave the team an understanding of how the standard of life, sanitary conditions, and the socio-economic situation differ from those we grew accustomed to in Europe
The construction of the school is set to be finished in 2016.
In 2012, Wrocław Contemporary Museum presented an untypical construction titled Devebere. Prior to this, the work has been exhibited in France and Italy, among others. Devebere is a pavilion made from plastic bottles, which Siuda designed together with a Spanish architect, Rodrigo García Gonzalez. ‘It is an attempt to reverse the tendency of getting rid of rubbish – an attempt at using it creatively, instead’, Siuda explained, pointing to the fact that recycling is no longer simply a trend – in the face of constant influx of more and more rubbish, it becomes a necessity. Devebere is an idea to solve a real problem, an experiment, but at the same time a creative game, breaking habits and fixed notions about utilization of various materials.
Another of Siuda’s unusual projects was created in cooperation with the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. In 2015, the architect prepared a project of the exhibition for the seventh edition of Warsaw Under Construction festival. The exposition, called Reconstruction Disputes and tackling the problem of various visions of the post-war reconstruction of Warsaw, was presented in the former building of the 9th Klementyna Hoffmanowa High School, which was slated for demolition. Designing the exhibition, Siuda did not limit his work to visions of the showcases, but also interfered with the building’s structure. The exhibits were located in many rooms; as the school was in a very bad technical state, various layers of the construction of walls, floors and ceilings became visible and served as a symbolic supplement to the exhibition’s content.
In 2015 Siuda was shortlisted for the Poles with Verve Poll, which aims at appreciating extraordinarily creative figures striving for innovation in their work. As the architect commented:
I would like to build several, a dozen, or rather several dozens of spaces for people: huge, small, pretty, ugly, temporary, permanent, ambitious, capricious, innovative, surprising, compromising, architectural, experimental, pragmatic, empty, full, as big as cities and small enough to put in one’s pocket.
These words illustrate Siuda’s broad, open, and stereotype-free thoughts on architecture.