Attempt to Continue the Modernist Trend Presented on the Example of Multi-Family Housing

Abstract

While trying to understand the current need for continuity of thoughts and ideas derived directly from the modernist trend with regard to multi-family housing, it is doubtlessly necessary that we need to make a synthetic assessment of the quality of Polish architecture over the last several decades. This period was characterized by an extremely diverse, multi-directional and multifaceted way of a building's creation. In the face of a generally noticeable regression, the past several years, recognized so far as indisputable paradigms of culture, brought an inconsistent mix of independently consecutive different tendencies and aesthetic needs. The specific state of permutation, peculiar intellectual vacuum created by rejection of the existing rules and shortage of new ones, must have led to anarchy in architecture manifesting in the omnipresent "all-ism". Against this background, it is difficult but possible, to find a clearly defined style, direction or the need to continue modernist thought on the example of modern housing. Dating back to the seventies of the twentieth century, we can observe activity of the generation of architects, where we can find the attempts to think about architecture on the basis of patterns of contemporary avant-garde world's architecture. So-called "modernism", which was in fashion at that time, resulted in frequent borrowings of formal and functional ideas, yet it brought a number of successful realizations of timeless architectural values, expressed in a clear idea and clearly defined form. The second half of the seventies was dominated by the omnipresent classification and prefabrication based on "the systems of industrialized buildings", which defined the character of the housing architecture. This gave rise to a gradual limitation of individual creativity for the benefit of use and reproduction of typical projects adapted to the needs of particular locations. The economic crisis of the 1980s, as a result of decline of the socialist economy, also resulted in the stagnation of construction activity. An example of the existence of any design process remained the urban design of large housing estates based on the consistently simplified and limited construction systems of multi-family buildings. Thus, monotony and repetition became a ubiquitous standard and the only aesthetic criterion that defined the architectural space of cities at that time. The political and economic transformations that took place after 1989 as well as a strong feeling of freedom, regained after years, triggered off revolutionary changes in thinking that resulted in a multitude of events taking place in architecture, and consequently in the diversity and variability of aesthetic tendencies. Therefore, it is difficult to believe that the buildings constructed at that time were a direct indicator of a post-modernism idea, which, locally, were a sort of specific alibi, resulting from the momentary, deep need to rebuild the times of modernism, unfairly reduced in our reality only down to the criticism and negation of a ubiquitous residential large-panel housing. Luckily, the end of the nineties brought a noticeable reassurance of these tendencies. Uncertainty and indecisiveness, and hence the multitude of ideas and stylistic themes that provoked safe passivity and aesthetic borrowings, have been replaced by escapism from "eclectic postmodernism" towards "neo-modernism" as a more sophisticated form of convention. As a consequence, there appeared objects with a balanced form, not giving in the need to draw directly from classical patterns and not succumbing to the intrusive and chaotic need to recover from the past. Despite the fact that the possibilities of a designer's creative expressions have become apparently expanded in new, modern economic realities, the designer's creation has at the same time been very limited. His freedom and free expression were additionally determined by the investor, whose opinion on the social and economic expectations, and thus on the architecture and purely aesthetic issues, has in many cases become superior. However, numerous examples of contemporary multi-family buildings, which are also the result of their own professional experience, offer prospects that the stage of total abandonment of the idea of modernism turned out to be apparent and was provoked by rather temporary emergence of various aesthetic tendencies, which are the result of views denying the architecture, commonly regarded as impersonal.