IDesign

* the change

* the feeling

Possible Strategic approaches to the Site Occupation

Programming:

The Happening-calendar outlines public/cultural events and celebrations in Warsaw.

The chart summarises the agricultural and performative sequences to show the activities taking place on the site throughout the year.

Programming:

Poland’s AGRO-calendar

Before globalization lives were much more simple and truly governed by the change of the season and the crops . Today it is taken for granted when at any time of the day, any day of the year one can go to the store to buy any desired item. Our ancestors had to grow, harvest and preserve all their food, in order to maintain healthy diet throughout the year.

“Polish food is the product of a harsh climate and a close relationship with the soil. Many of its distinctive flavours – for example, the sourness of pickled vegetables and marinated fish – developed through the practical need to make it through the winter.

The elementary ingredients of Poland’s cuisine are dictated by cereal crops such as rye, wheat, millet, barley and buckwheat. Rye bread is typical of this part of Europe. Pickled vegetables such as cucumbers, beetroot, cabbage (sauerkraut) and kohlrabi have become an essential part of Polish cooking.”

AGRO-calendar outlines the main products grown in Poland that are of importance for the economy of the country. This table shows the growths cycle, harvesting time, seasonal foods and rituals that celebrate those products.

Identifying geometric strategy

this series of maps outline space gradation of the site and flow patterns as well as introducing a sense of scale through establishment of a horizontally expressed grid. This grid maps the surface of the site, fragmenting it and functioning in two ways: spatial and temporal

Introduced grid alters the flow patterns on the site, that, in combination with physical/functional/aesthetic (agricultural) elements, may suggest completely new experiences. This grid may become a matrix for the program organization.

Forming New Relationships: [centrality Vs dispersal]

Manifesting and reviving the interest for the traditional agriculture in the eyes of urban public and reintroducing the sense of natural seasonal cycle that has been submerged into 24/7/365 City Lifestyle in the process of globalization.

Linkage Strategy

*Acknowledging and supporting the relationship between the Rural and Urban and their interdependency of one another: service/supply/demand/

*Bringing private to the public via metaphorical intervention, altering cultural geography of the place. The Site, being at the very centre of the city becomes a connective tissue

Spatial Connectivity Map:

The Urban City of Warsaw is spatially defined by rural agricultural lands and greenfields. Agriculture acts as a counterpoint to the built environment, and generally there is a dis-balance between the value of Rural and Urban habitats.

Palace of Culture and Science

Warsaw is a city whose skyline is dominated by the Stalinist-era Palace of Culture and where a heated debate is under way on how to turn the vast space around it into a genuine human-scale city centre, its argued that in its present shape this empty space is not a genuine city centre.

‘These vast spaces as were created around the Palace of Culture which stands in the middle, like a candle in a birthday tart…they don’t encourage people to stay longer. The people run through this space, there’s continuous traffic, they’re in movement; this is what’s contradicting with the idea of the city centre.’

Professor Lech Kłosiewicz of the School of Architecture at Warsaw’s University of Technology

‘…to fill up city fabric with more structures but not necessarily so high. These tall buildings do not contribute to the direct use by the citizens. They are mostly offices and banks. What serves people are large number of small spaces – cafes and small shops offering a variety of attractions, so the essence of the issue is that Warsaw during the reconstruction process lost its human scale.’

‘There’s no city centre in Warsaw at all. People have no place to go, to spend a whole day and meet with friends. There’re only lots of shopping malls but it’s not a social space.’

DRAW 5 - BUILDING

- building becomes an object itself, acquiring same quilities