PGE Górnictwo i Energetyka Konwencjonalna S.A. in Bełchatów, photo: www.archdaily.com
Set up in 2008, Archdaily is the best known internet portal devoted to architecture. Each month it gets up to 70 million visits. The creators of Archdaily underscore that their mission consists of not only presenting the best designs and realisations but also in educating visitors to the website. Archdaily is known to publish images of newly raised and long-awaited structures within days of their completion. The editors boast that they address an audience of …6 billion – this is, in fact, the number of people predicted to live in cities by 2054. And it is this future community that ought to have good resources and examples for creating future urban landscapes.
One of Archdaily’s initiatives, the Building of the Year competition, encompasses 14 different categories (among them family houses, sports venues, cultural venues, renovations, and interiors). Over a period of three weeks, the internet public is invited to submit their candidates. The jury then selects the five best structures out of the submitted proposals to be then voted on once more by the internet public in a poll.
The interior of an office which functions as a …garage space, design: Ultra Architects / Marcin Kościuch and Tomasz Osięgłowski, photo: © Jeremi Buczkowski
Poles have already had their successes in the Building of the Year competition. In 2012, the Małopolska Garden of the Arts in Kraków, designed by Krzysztof Ingarden & Jacek Ewý won in the cultural venue category. The same year, the Centre for Scientific information and the Academic Library in Katowice was named Building of the Year in the Museums and Libraries category. It is authored by Dariusz Herman, Piotr Śmierzewski and Wojciech Subalski, from the HS99 studio.
Two more buildings stand a chance of winning the title this year, as they made it through through the jury’s selective choice and are up for votes.
One candidate is the office building for the PGE Górnictwo i Energetyka Konwencjonalna S.A. (PGE Mining and Conventional Energetics Enterprise) in the south-western town of Bełchatów. The headquarters and working space were designed by Adam Białobrzeski and Adam Figurski from the Warsaw-based FAAB Architektura studio.