A great place, with shopping attached
Just as shovels were ceremonially cracking the site of the (literally) Złote Tarasy, and the great and the good gathered for a splendid party (plus superb entertainment), even at the buffet tables there was a debate on whether this multiuse commercial property, sitting on a prestige 31,860 square-metre site, would enhance the country's architecturally challenged capital. While the city can boast some reputable new structures since the fall of communism, architects point to many more which are, politely, aesthetically disfunctional. Impressively bad, as one designer put it.
The €250 million project, which has been in the planning pipeline since the mid-1990s and is bordered by the central railway station, the bustling Aleja Jana Pawła II and ulica Złota and Emilii Platter thoroughfares, and of course the socialist-baroque Palace of Culture, has enthusiastic advocates who consider the structure is making a dramatic statement. It will certainly occupy the most significant of the remaining empty spaces at the heart of the capital, so what happens there is a statement for some time. But critical commentators range from those who suggest it is actually not dramatic enough to a view which questions that a structure conceived in gleaming Californian sunshine is the right thing for a Polish winter, or to stand in the shadow of the Soviet fraternal gift with which it has no apparent integration.
"As far as Złote Tarasy's appearance, in architectural language it's commercial chewing gum," said Henryk Drzewiecki, the chief architect of Warsaw until 1995. "It doesn't fit the context. It's huge. It's inward-looking. It doesn't have any connection to the city. Warsaw should be a specific city. This is not."
Even those who care about the impact of this, and recent arrivals on city's urban fabric, would have also been hard-pressed to attempt to restrain the impact of other criticised buildings, such as the former Reform Plaza (now called Blue City), he said. "At the time, there was no means to protect the city from such buildings," he said. He added that it was always his understanding that whatever was built on that site would address a specific function, rather than multiuse.
Either way, architectural projections for Złote Tarasy evoke a wide mix of responses. To some, architecture, like art itself, is too subjective a topic to really pose any valid objection. But others are plain enough about this new composition.
"Oh my God, it's terrible junk," said Piotr Szaroszyk, an architect at Szaroszyk & Rycerski Architekci. "I don't really understand how it is possible that people are buying such junk. Maybe they like it. I don't really know."
"The problems are very similar to Reform Plaza," he said. "There are shapes that do not fit to the location. They are crazy, let's say. It's a bit like a stadium, a bit like a skating rink." Szaroszyk also said that that the edifice belongs more in an American city. "American cities have some different kind of order than European cities," he said.
He is angered by what appeared to be an absence of co-ordination in taking the project from inception through to completion, as an exercise in urban and conceptual planning. "They have no idea how to organise this part of the city the way it connects to the other parts," he said. "It is quite separate. It doesn't fit to the surroundings. And, this it very subjective, of course: it's ugly. Nothing special in this architecture."
The Metropolitan, designed by the renowned English architect Norman Foster (who also restored the Reichstag) to fit an important and sensitive site on Plac Piłsudskiego, is identified as an example of a modernist structure which will be at home on a challenging site. In short, integrationist, in architectural terms.
"When you compare it to the Metropolitan, you understand everything," Szaroszyk said. "The Metropolitan is very modern, like science fiction, but it still fits to the theatre, fits to the park, fits to the hotels around it. And first of all, it has a good traditional shape for the city. It has abstract modern shape, but in the same way it has correct shape. It's a very clever design."
Złote Tarasy, which is located about two kilometres from the Old Town, is being developed through a joint venture between the Dutch banking giant ING and its real estate offshoot, already a leading property developer in the country, and Gmina Centrum, the richest of all the Warsaw boroughs, not least because of feasts such as this. It was formed in 1998 after almost three years of preliminary planning. And it has taken about four years until the ground was officially broken, amid legal proceedings and other customary delays in the real estate business.
Currently, Dutch developer Rodamco Europe owns half of Złote Tarasy, and ING Real Estate the other. The design was in the hands of Californian architects, The Jerde International Partnership International, which specialises in composing large retail and mixed-use projects. Its creation is to be a consumer's dream with a total built space of 191,839 square metres, divided into retail and entertainment areas, restaurants, office space, plus a capacious car park.
Jerde deflected criticism. "Złote Tarasy is intended to become a spatial and cultural connector," the firm said.
Edwin Heathcote, in the Financial Times, described Jon Jerde as an architectural tough guy - more like a grizzled heavy from a film noir rather than Le Corbusier. "His mission is to use the huge resources of big corporations to reinvigorate city centres that have had their hearts wrenched out." Jerde himself coments: "It's been a bloody knuckle battle, but we can use the weaith of these corporations to make a great place with shopping attached."
That, however, is exactly from where the construction's prevailing criticism stems. The mostly rounded structure cuts itself off from the rest of the city. Patrons of offices and shops will be in a world unto themselves, architects and urban planners have said. The interior court with its glazed cupolas would find exposure to harsh northern European winters, instead of Pacific blue skies, a significant item in maintenance costs.
Ergene Houx, vice president of ING Real Estate, the developer of the project, has answers for its critics. "It has always been important for us not to build a self-contained project, but a project that should become a part of the city centre," he said. "But it should be a focal point within itself. This part of Warsaw is in need of more density."
Houx added that it is simply not true that Złote Tarasy will be cordoned off from the rest of the city. "This is a little based on misconception," he said. "This is an introvert and an extrovert structure. It does refer to the Palace of Culture."
He also countered any criticism of the aesthetics of the place and whether it deserved a seat in a major European capital's centre. What we have on paper has many facets," Houx said. "It is a balance between contextual and sculptural. But building around here, we could not be very contextual."
He pointed out that the three retail levels of the structure are contextual because their style and height dovetail with the lower surrounding buildings. On the other hand, the upper reaches of the buildings are more sculpted, Houx explained, taking on a shape of their own more or less regardless of the surroundings.
"It is not an easy project to develop," he said. "On the other hand, it is quite normal for buildings in capital city centres to be difficult."
Aware of the criticism of Złote Tarasy, Peter Wisłocki, resident director of Aukett Europe, said that opponents of the building must put the architecture into context. "You need to take into account that it's a commercial building when you're making an architectural critique because it's foolish to expect that Złote Tarasy should look like a major cultural monument," he said.
"Second," he continued, "the concept design was done by Jerde, which is an international leader in the field of retail design, but very much coming out of the Californian culture. And it's fair to say that the design is sophisticated and intelligent and not bad at all in many ways. But it hasn't evolved strongly as regards its place. It's taken a sort of Californian, North American model and attempted to somehow slightly force it into that particular area. And it doesn't look entirely at ease with the Palace of Culture."
Złote Tarasy and other contested peers gain more support from construction industry professionals who point to the severity of Warsaw's wartime fate and, in real terms, virtual destruction. A city of immense grandeur was virtually eliminated. In many ways, this mitigates some of the architectural experiments of recent years.
Nevertheless, there are other European cities, which suffered severe devastation and post war socialist planning, but have looked to an architectural renaissance rather different to that of Warsaw.
There is Berlin, with an historical experience similar to Warsaw, and its evolving Potsdamer Platz, which has put the city on the map for architects. After the reunification of Germany, Daimler-Benz (now DaimlerChrysler) and Sony, which built the Urban Entertainment Centre, invested nearly $3 billion in a construction project in the commercial district. At the time it was the largest investment in Berlin since the war.
And rather symbolically, the Foster-designed glass dome on the top of the Reichstag, Germany's parliament, is an example of good architecture that adds to the identity of a newly independent city. And a huge new railway station is appearing which draws on a good deal of inspiration in its design from the building which dates to the 1930's.
The comparable result is simple: "It's not so easy to find something like Reform Plaza in Berlin," Szaroszyk said. "This junk would not go there. If the investor decides to build this junk in Poland, he will build it."
"Berlin had the same chance as Poland to rebuild a city."
The Reform Plaza tower, another of Warsaw's eyesores, could learn an architectural lesson from New York's now fallen World Trade Centre towers, Wisłocki said.
"Reform Plaza is a big problem for Warsaw," he said. "You can say objectively it's bad. Even a tower building has got to have some sort of context to address, or at least some clear identity. Look at the World Trade Centre in New York. It's a good example. It was bland but clear, the seminal Art Deco skyscraper."
Once up, Złote Tarasy could even look next door for good architecture, Wisłocki said, to the Palace of Culture. "It's over-elaborate, but it has such a clear identity of its own," he said. "The Reform tower does not have that, because it's not simple; it's not memorable."
The first step is to recognise the problem. The next one is to do something about it.
"Who lets them do it?" Szaroszyk asked. "In some cases it should be asked, who let them build such junk?"
He explained that there is a fundamental dilemma - that politics and artistic appraisal rarely mix well in this country.
"Gmina officials cannot discuss aesthetical value; it's too subjective," Szaroszyk said. "If someone tells you that your design is ugly, the officials cannot talk about it. The only people who can talk about it are the architectural monument preservation authority. It can discuss aesthetical value."
The extraordinary absence of sophisticated design and planning systems is a primary explanation for the appearance of post-reform Warsaw. Another is the balkanised nature of the city's political structure and until recently the absence of a popularly elected governing mayor. And yet another is the nature of the political class of councillors, who unlike their foreign countrerparts with a long heritage of civic pride, are still learning the skills, such as planning competence. And there is as yet no overall master plan
The preservation authority, which just governs historical areas, has stepped in to thwart what it considered unacceptable intrusions, such as the twice-delayed Metropolitan, but are still not insistent enough, Szaroszyk said. Urban planners explained that when applying for planning and then building permits, city officials are more concerned with environmental and land rights issues than aesthetics.
Some hope that with a new city mayor things could change for the better. Lech Kaczyński recently appointed Jan Maciej Chmielewski as Warsaw's chief architect.
Szymon Wojciechowski, partner at APA Wojciechowski, has high hopes for the new man.
"Chmielewski wants to implement some steps to change, for example a committee through which important projects will be subject to some judging on aesthetics," he said. "He's just a short time in charge, and it's very unclear how he will do it. But this is his plan to prevent the creation of ugly buildings somehow. I don't know how."
Though Wojciechowski was stretched for ways to beautify the city's future buildings, he did present one suggestion, for a planning czar to rule on aesthetic issues. He would rather this arbiter of good taste be a single person rather than a group. "There's an old saying: the zebra is a horse designed by a committee," he said.
And maybe if there are any positive changes, the city's own architects will begin to put their hometown on a higher pedestal then they do now. "Warsaw is not nice at all," Szaroszyk said. "It's probably one of the ugliest cities around."
As the tall storeys have appeared one after the other on the city's skyline, a homily has appeared among the city's residents, that the old fraternal gift of 1955 doesn't look so bad after all. What will they be saying about the fin de siecle structures of Warsaw in fifty years' time?
The €250 million project, which has been in the planning pipeline since the mid-1990s and is bordered by the central railway station, the bustling Aleja Jana Pawła II and ulica Złota and Emilii Platter thoroughfares, and of course the socialist-baroque Palace of Culture, has enthusiastic advocates who consider the structure is making a dramatic statement. It will certainly occupy the most significant of the remaining empty spaces at the heart of the capital, so what happens there is a statement for some time. But critical commentators range from those who suggest it is actually not dramatic enough to a view which questions that a structure conceived in gleaming Californian sunshine is the right thing for a Polish winter, or to stand in the shadow of the Soviet fraternal gift with which it has no apparent integration.
"As far as Złote Tarasy's appearance, in architectural language it's commercial chewing gum," said Henryk Drzewiecki, the chief architect of Warsaw until 1995. "It doesn't fit the context. It's huge. It's inward-looking. It doesn't have any connection to the city. Warsaw should be a specific city. This is not."
Even those who care about the impact of this, and recent arrivals on city's urban fabric, would have also been hard-pressed to attempt to restrain the impact of other criticised buildings, such as the former Reform Plaza (now called Blue City), he said. "At the time, there was no means to protect the city from such buildings," he said. He added that it was always his understanding that whatever was built on that site would address a specific function, rather than multiuse.
Either way, architectural projections for Złote Tarasy evoke a wide mix of responses. To some, architecture, like art itself, is too subjective a topic to really pose any valid objection. But others are plain enough about this new composition.
"Oh my God, it's terrible junk," said Piotr Szaroszyk, an architect at Szaroszyk & Rycerski Architekci. "I don't really understand how it is possible that people are buying such junk. Maybe they like it. I don't really know."
"The problems are very similar to Reform Plaza," he said. "There are shapes that do not fit to the location. They are crazy, let's say. It's a bit like a stadium, a bit like a skating rink." Szaroszyk also said that that the edifice belongs more in an American city. "American cities have some different kind of order than European cities," he said.
He is angered by what appeared to be an absence of co-ordination in taking the project from inception through to completion, as an exercise in urban and conceptual planning. "They have no idea how to organise this part of the city the way it connects to the other parts," he said. "It is quite separate. It doesn't fit to the surroundings. And, this it very subjective, of course: it's ugly. Nothing special in this architecture."
The Metropolitan, designed by the renowned English architect Norman Foster (who also restored the Reichstag) to fit an important and sensitive site on Plac Piłsudskiego, is identified as an example of a modernist structure which will be at home on a challenging site. In short, integrationist, in architectural terms.
"When you compare it to the Metropolitan, you understand everything," Szaroszyk said. "The Metropolitan is very modern, like science fiction, but it still fits to the theatre, fits to the park, fits to the hotels around it. And first of all, it has a good traditional shape for the city. It has abstract modern shape, but in the same way it has correct shape. It's a very clever design."
Złote Tarasy, which is located about two kilometres from the Old Town, is being developed through a joint venture between the Dutch banking giant ING and its real estate offshoot, already a leading property developer in the country, and Gmina Centrum, the richest of all the Warsaw boroughs, not least because of feasts such as this. It was formed in 1998 after almost three years of preliminary planning. And it has taken about four years until the ground was officially broken, amid legal proceedings and other customary delays in the real estate business.
Currently, Dutch developer Rodamco Europe owns half of Złote Tarasy, and ING Real Estate the other. The design was in the hands of Californian architects, The Jerde International Partnership International, which specialises in composing large retail and mixed-use projects. Its creation is to be a consumer's dream with a total built space of 191,839 square metres, divided into retail and entertainment areas, restaurants, office space, plus a capacious car park.
Jerde deflected criticism. "Złote Tarasy is intended to become a spatial and cultural connector," the firm said.
Edwin Heathcote, in the Financial Times, described Jon Jerde as an architectural tough guy - more like a grizzled heavy from a film noir rather than Le Corbusier. "His mission is to use the huge resources of big corporations to reinvigorate city centres that have had their hearts wrenched out." Jerde himself coments: "It's been a bloody knuckle battle, but we can use the weaith of these corporations to make a great place with shopping attached."
That, however, is exactly from where the construction's prevailing criticism stems. The mostly rounded structure cuts itself off from the rest of the city. Patrons of offices and shops will be in a world unto themselves, architects and urban planners have said. The interior court with its glazed cupolas would find exposure to harsh northern European winters, instead of Pacific blue skies, a significant item in maintenance costs.
Ergene Houx, vice president of ING Real Estate, the developer of the project, has answers for its critics. "It has always been important for us not to build a self-contained project, but a project that should become a part of the city centre," he said. "But it should be a focal point within itself. This part of Warsaw is in need of more density."
Houx added that it is simply not true that Złote Tarasy will be cordoned off from the rest of the city. "This is a little based on misconception," he said. "This is an introvert and an extrovert structure. It does refer to the Palace of Culture."
He also countered any criticism of the aesthetics of the place and whether it deserved a seat in a major European capital's centre. What we have on paper has many facets," Houx said. "It is a balance between contextual and sculptural. But building around here, we could not be very contextual."
He pointed out that the three retail levels of the structure are contextual because their style and height dovetail with the lower surrounding buildings. On the other hand, the upper reaches of the buildings are more sculpted, Houx explained, taking on a shape of their own more or less regardless of the surroundings.
"It is not an easy project to develop," he said. "On the other hand, it is quite normal for buildings in capital city centres to be difficult."
Aware of the criticism of Złote Tarasy, Peter Wisłocki, resident director of Aukett Europe, said that opponents of the building must put the architecture into context. "You need to take into account that it's a commercial building when you're making an architectural critique because it's foolish to expect that Złote Tarasy should look like a major cultural monument," he said.
"Second," he continued, "the concept design was done by Jerde, which is an international leader in the field of retail design, but very much coming out of the Californian culture. And it's fair to say that the design is sophisticated and intelligent and not bad at all in many ways. But it hasn't evolved strongly as regards its place. It's taken a sort of Californian, North American model and attempted to somehow slightly force it into that particular area. And it doesn't look entirely at ease with the Palace of Culture."
Złote Tarasy and other contested peers gain more support from construction industry professionals who point to the severity of Warsaw's wartime fate and, in real terms, virtual destruction. A city of immense grandeur was virtually eliminated. In many ways, this mitigates some of the architectural experiments of recent years.
Nevertheless, there are other European cities, which suffered severe devastation and post war socialist planning, but have looked to an architectural renaissance rather different to that of Warsaw.
There is Berlin, with an historical experience similar to Warsaw, and its evolving Potsdamer Platz, which has put the city on the map for architects. After the reunification of Germany, Daimler-Benz (now DaimlerChrysler) and Sony, which built the Urban Entertainment Centre, invested nearly $3 billion in a construction project in the commercial district. At the time it was the largest investment in Berlin since the war.
And rather symbolically, the Foster-designed glass dome on the top of the Reichstag, Germany's parliament, is an example of good architecture that adds to the identity of a newly independent city. And a huge new railway station is appearing which draws on a good deal of inspiration in its design from the building which dates to the 1930's.
The comparable result is simple: "It's not so easy to find something like Reform Plaza in Berlin," Szaroszyk said. "This junk would not go there. If the investor decides to build this junk in Poland, he will build it."
"Berlin had the same chance as Poland to rebuild a city."
The Reform Plaza tower, another of Warsaw's eyesores, could learn an architectural lesson from New York's now fallen World Trade Centre towers, Wisłocki said.
"Reform Plaza is a big problem for Warsaw," he said. "You can say objectively it's bad. Even a tower building has got to have some sort of context to address, or at least some clear identity. Look at the World Trade Centre in New York. It's a good example. It was bland but clear, the seminal Art Deco skyscraper."
Once up, Złote Tarasy could even look next door for good architecture, Wisłocki said, to the Palace of Culture. "It's over-elaborate, but it has such a clear identity of its own," he said. "The Reform tower does not have that, because it's not simple; it's not memorable."
The first step is to recognise the problem. The next one is to do something about it.
"Who lets them do it?" Szaroszyk asked. "In some cases it should be asked, who let them build such junk?"
He explained that there is a fundamental dilemma - that politics and artistic appraisal rarely mix well in this country.
"Gmina officials cannot discuss aesthetical value; it's too subjective," Szaroszyk said. "If someone tells you that your design is ugly, the officials cannot talk about it. The only people who can talk about it are the architectural monument preservation authority. It can discuss aesthetical value."
The extraordinary absence of sophisticated design and planning systems is a primary explanation for the appearance of post-reform Warsaw. Another is the balkanised nature of the city's political structure and until recently the absence of a popularly elected governing mayor. And yet another is the nature of the political class of councillors, who unlike their foreign countrerparts with a long heritage of civic pride, are still learning the skills, such as planning competence. And there is as yet no overall master plan
The preservation authority, which just governs historical areas, has stepped in to thwart what it considered unacceptable intrusions, such as the twice-delayed Metropolitan, but are still not insistent enough, Szaroszyk said. Urban planners explained that when applying for planning and then building permits, city officials are more concerned with environmental and land rights issues than aesthetics.
Some hope that with a new city mayor things could change for the better. Lech Kaczyński recently appointed Jan Maciej Chmielewski as Warsaw's chief architect.
Szymon Wojciechowski, partner at APA Wojciechowski, has high hopes for the new man.
"Chmielewski wants to implement some steps to change, for example a committee through which important projects will be subject to some judging on aesthetics," he said. "He's just a short time in charge, and it's very unclear how he will do it. But this is his plan to prevent the creation of ugly buildings somehow. I don't know how."
Though Wojciechowski was stretched for ways to beautify the city's future buildings, he did present one suggestion, for a planning czar to rule on aesthetic issues. He would rather this arbiter of good taste be a single person rather than a group. "There's an old saying: the zebra is a horse designed by a committee," he said.
And maybe if there are any positive changes, the city's own architects will begin to put their hometown on a higher pedestal then they do now. "Warsaw is not nice at all," Szaroszyk said. "It's probably one of the ugliest cities around."
As the tall storeys have appeared one after the other on the city's skyline, a homily has appeared among the city's residents, that the old fraternal gift of 1955 doesn't look so bad after all. What will they be saying about the fin de siecle structures of Warsaw in fifty years' time?
