Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art

A decade of thermal insulation of Polish high-rise housing estates has transformed our landscape in a rather fanciful, but – interestingly enough – exceptionally consistent fashion. Throughout the whole of the country, blocks of flats take on pastel or fluorescent shades (often within the façade of a single building), they are sprinkled with geometrical figures or multi-coloured confetti, and they have had their share of the consequences of vivid narratives: tower blocks are often covered with rainbows, suns or animals.

“Pastelosis” – this is how Filip Springer calls the disease affecting Polish high-rise in his latest book Wanna z kolumnadą [‘Bathtub with a colonnade’]. In his “medical interviews” with authorities of housing cooperatives in high-rise estates, he diagnoses the scale of the existing “epidemic”. The conversations indicate that the inhabitants simply feel good when surrounded by colour: it is a remedy to the greyness, sadness and boredom, but also a peculiar “aesthetic value”, which stands for prestige, pride and enables to stand out from neighbours from the opposite block of flats.

This decided move away from “dullness” often takes on caricature forms and has nothing to do with any kind of visual logic of the surrounding area. It should be noted that this is not a problem affecting housing estates alone. It is not difficult to come across market squares renovated funfair-style, pudding-like frontages of tenement houses or a cacophony of colour and decorations on the walls of semi-detached or single-family houses. An interesting summary of these colouristic tendencies and choices is exemplified by Sławomir Elsner’s series Houses. Elsner created a visual record of the aestheticising efforts made by the inhabitants, who decorate their abodes with sweeps of pink, elements of yellow or geometrical effects.

Polish construction law does not regulate colour-related matters. The appearance of insulated and plastered blocks is usually the result of the aesthetic preferences of the inhabitants (mostly their female part), chairpersons of housing cooperatives or even, as Springer quotes, a random secretary. Add the fact that the blocks are renovated at various times and belong to different cooperatives, while the layer of polystyrene foam inexorably covers architectural detail and any differentiating embellishments, and we get a recipe for a multi-coloured, geometrical “Legoland”, with no aesthetic or functional coherence whatsoever. Colour, it should be noted, used to serve specific functions: the colour layout of housing estates was often employed as one of the means of navigation around the vast high-rise.

In simplest terms, the renewal of a given area may take place in two manners: top-down, officially or spontaneously. Such “wild” revitalisation may be found e.g. in artistic urban quarters or in various guerrilla actions and the spontaneous aesthetisation of a given place performed by its inhabitants. When looking at the vast majority of revitalised high-rise housing estates one may get the impression of a mix of the above-mentioned ways of action. It is not only the case of decorating balconies, planting flowers or bushes, painting garages and door jambs and organising grass-roots common spaces. The aesthetic preferences of inhabitants (or their stronger groups) are translated to official decisions on colourising estates during the process of thermal insulation, which often take no account of the architectural and urban context and pay no attention to matters of coherence and harmony. This proves that the full freedom and randomness in the case of such a complex and dominant urban structure as prefabricated mass housing causes a lasting degradation of landscape (both physical and cultural).

Can the inhabitants be blamed for that? Of course not. The block is their private, intimate space, space of identity, interaction and safety – they have an emotional relation with their home and attribute it with symbolic meanings. What can be blamed is the lack of aesthetic education, which should be held from a young age in order to sensitise to such matters as colour in architecture, urban design, everyday products as well as efficient mechanisms of co-decision of inhabitants about the colour of their place of residence, based on consultations with architects, a possible colour palette for the given place, observation and consideration. A process thus planned does not only boil down to repainting the plaster, but is based on work with the local community, which may serve as a revitalisation tool also in the social dimension.

One should not forget that “colouring” cities in Poland is simply difficult due to factors such as climate determinants, pollution, lack of colour guidelines that would take into account meteorological, tonal or historical aspects. A codified colour book for a given area would help harmonise not only housing estates but entire cities in terms of colour. This idea for a personal colour scheme obviously does not come down to one colour only. Colour systems propose dozens of shades and tones which are a point of departure to a sensible shaping of the urban tissue. Such solutions are successfully employed e.g. in Sweden or in such metropolises as London or Moscow, where a pre-designed colour map is one of the guidelines for land development conditions and revitalisation assumptions. This is assisted by technical colour systems such as NCS (Natural Colour System) or RAL, as well as research consisting in e.g. meticulously photographing places at different times of day, observing the colour of the sky, averaging colours as well as selecting additional and supplementary ones.

In recent years, we have observed an increased interest in urban public spaces. There are grass-roots initiatives aiming at introducing order to the aesthetic chaos and working out mechanisms of revitalisation. Apart from presenting high-rise façades covered with “colourful leprosy, greenish pimples, diagonal seborrhoea, pink abscesses and grey blackheads”, pospoliteruszenie.com has a section that invites to present ideas for façade renovation.s A thread entitled “Our ideas for the modernisation of communist blocks” has functioned on the Polish Skyscraper Forum since 2009, which also presents several dozen original ideas. On the other hand, “Filtrowa do usług” ['Filtrowa at your service'] is introducing order in the micro-scale of a single street, aiming to design a graphic concept for the Filtrowa street in Warsaw’s Ochota district as well as to adopt appropriate regulations concerning the aesthetics of shop windows.

Kamila Szejnoch’s project Falowiec Colour System realised as part of her residence at the Łaźnia Centre for Contemporary Art could also pilot such changes. The inhabitants are going to be involved in painting the “tin town” that appeared spontaneously next to the Falowiec high-rise in Gdańsk, which itself forms an unquestionable dominant feature in the landscape. The challenge is considerable. Will the artist’s collaboration with the inhabitants mean that when choosing the colours they will be guided by something more than personal preferences and habits? Will they identify with the revitalised places? Colour is communication and expression. What will the final aesthetic result be?

BIP

Municipal Institution of Culture