A well-designed multi-family building is an aesthetic, optimized architectural concept, incorporating simple, cost-effective construction solutions and practical functional layouts. These enable the efficient execution of the project while allowing for the achievement of a higher UFA (usable floor area in relation to net or gross area). Building based on a good design will increase profits without raising the sale price.
Larger PUM equals greater profit from your investment!, Investors Manual/Developer Zone, Archonpl. Accessed August 11, 2025.
White plastered facades, anthracite details, repetitive rhythms, wastelands. Kuba Rodziewicz walks through the new estates of Warsaw's Ursus and Poznań's Łacina to achieve perfect calm and harmony. Generic residential architecture and its landscape do not bring surprises, new stimuli, they don't astonish. They resemble a temporary set design that could stand anywhere or nowhere. In its neutrality, appeal to everyone or at least not interfere. The goals and interests are well-known. Rodziewicz attempts to capture new housing estates in photographs that are so neutral, cold and emotionless that they resemble generated renders. However, the purpose of visualisations is to sell dreams, whereas Kuba's photos document boredom exactly as it is.
Is the facade of the corner building by Brneńska street in Poznań an intentional reference to the architecture of Adolf Loos, who was born in Brno? The Looshaus or the Goldmann & Salatsch department store, was built in Vienna in 1910 and, foreshadowing modernist asceticism, was named the House without Eyebrows (Haus ohne Augenbrauen). Today's neomodernist blocks have also shaved their eyebrows. Rafał Ziemiński got lost in the universe of parcel lockers which are eyebrowless too.
Standardization and optimization of building processes allow investors to increase profits, while residents believe that minimalism and simplicity are synonymous with status. The philosophy of minimalism led to the belief that, on an optimised housing estate, not only decorations but even apartments are unnecessary. Łacina in Poznań turns out not to be Vienna.
The artist has one ambition: to master the material in a way that makes his work independent of the value of the raw material. But our architects don’t know this ambition. For them, a square metre of granite façade is more valuable than if it were concrete.
Adolf Loos, Building Materials, 1898 Ornament and Crime, Penguin Books, London, 1997
When the blocks shave off their eyebrows, their interiors dress up. Home staging is superficial and does not generate significant costs, but the profits can be substantial. A disguised apartment is not meant for living in, and anyway, few people can afford it. Olga Truszkowska works with imitation criticized by Loos and creates a column from floor panels.
Jolanta Wołocznik, in her stone sculptures, has no ambition to tame the material. She accepts the imperfection of the raw material: irregularities, gaps, cracks. Shyly, she arranges intimate, home scenarios inside. Cozy micro-apartments, little rooms, bedrooms, and their inhabitants nestle into the humbly carved stone niches.
Is a square meter of granite wall really worth more than the one made of concrete?
Anyway, Jan Domicz has counted that every eighth apartment in this block is a hotel.
Photos by Bartek Zalewski.
