15 - 30 September 2013

Laznia CAE, 5 Strajku Dokerow Street, Gdańsk Nowy Port

 

 

 

 

SAMPLES OF URBAN COLOURS

A decade of thermal insulation of Polish high-rise housing estates has transformed our landscape into a rather fanciful, but – interestingly enough – exceptionally consistent fashion. Throughout 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-colored confetti, and display vivid narratives: tower blocks are frequently 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 grayness, sadness and boredom of everyday life. However, it also serves a peculiar “aesthetic value” that stands for prestige, pride while enabling inhabitants to stand out from their neighbors in the opposing block of flats.

This decisive move away from “dullness” often takes on  the form of caricature and can have 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 that have been 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 dwellings. An interesting summary of these colouristic tendencies and choices is exemplified by Sławomir Elsner’s series entitled ‘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.

Colour once served a specific function.  For example, the colour layout of housing estates was often employed as a means of navigation around a typical vast high-rise.  However, Polish construction law does not regulate color-related matters. Additionally, the color choices of insulated and plastered blocks is usually the result of the aesthetic preferences of female inhabitants, chairpersons of housing cooperatives or even, as Springer notes, a random secretary. Add to this the fact that the blocks are renovated at various times and belong to different cooperatives and you have a recipe for disaster: layers of colored polystyrene foam inexorably covering architectural detail and any differentiating embellishments - a multi-colored, geometrical “Lego land”, with no aesthetic or functional coherence whatsoever.

In simplest terms, the renewal of a given area takes place top-down, officially or spontaneously. Such “wild” revitalization may be found in artistic urban quarters, in various guerrilla actions and/or the spontaneous anesthetization of a given place by its inhabitants. It is not only the case of decorating balconies, planting flowers, bushes, garages, door jambs and common spaces. More importantly, the aesthetic preferences of inhabitants are translated to official decisions on colorizing estates during the process of thermal insulation - complete freedom and randomness in the case of colorization of prefabricated mass housing has resulted in the degradation of the cultural and physical landscape. The end result is a total lack of coherence and harmony.

 

 

better, more efficient mechanism of decision making between inhabitants and architects/designers with regard to colorization needs to be put in place. This kind of collaborative consultation can include discussing the color palette for a given place while taking into account site specific design/architectural parameters. The afore mentioned collaborative decision making process is not a simple repainting of the plaster, but rather a systematic sharing based on mutual understanding and working with the local community.  In time, this may serve as model for revitalization within the broader social sphere.

 

It is important to keep in mind that “coloring” cities in Poland is difficult due to a variety of factors: climate determinants, pollution, lack of colour guidelines that would take into account meteorological changes, and historical aspects. A solution would be to offer inhabitants a codified colour palette book for a given area. This would help to harmonize not only housing estates, but entire cities in terms of colour.