2nd place (reserve project) in the competition for a curatorial project of the exhibition in the Polish Pavilion at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice in 2025.
Team
Archigrest
topoScape
Diana Lelonek
Introduction
From Gdansk to Warsaw to Wrocław, a wave of demolitions is sweeping through Poland’s cities. Office buildings, cinemas, hotels, built just two decades ago, lie in rubble. In their place, newer, taller and more modern buildings are rising almost immedia- tely. After three decades of free market development in Poland, it is easy to regard this phenomenon as a ‘natural’ stage of economic growth... and to overlook how environmental growth is being stifled as a consequence.
Construction and demolition waste today accounts for 40% of all waste produced on earth. Forecasts indicate that by 2025 its weight will reach a ceiling of 2.2 billion tonnes per year. In the European Union alone, almost one million tonnes of it is already produced every year. Every two years, therefore, there is as much construction and demolition waste as there was rubble in the cities of central and eastern Europe after six years of the Second World War. However, it is impossible to realise the scale of the problem by walking through modern cities.
Despite the development of recycling tech- nologies, the majority of construction and demolition waste in Europe still ends up in the environment. This is particularly true of excavated soil, i.e. soil from excavation and foundation work, which ac- counts for 30% of all waste from the construction sector. The excavated material, together with small fragments of concrete, glass, plastic and other pla- stics, is deposited in a landfill, where it contaminates soils and stunts the growth of the natural ecosystem for decades. As a result, waste disappears from our sight - uninvited to the celebration of economic growth taking place in glass skyscrapers and paved streets.
Confronting uninvited guests can easily trigger negative emotions and lead to escalation. Therefore, instead of judging or shaming, the exhibition ‘Uninvited Guests’ in the Polish Pavilion at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale aims to break the first ice: to present the public with the dumps created by contemporary construction and, above all, the organisms that are actively transforming dead dumps into living ecosystems.
At the centre of the exhibition will be a large- -scale installation inspired by the environment of the Warsaw Uprising Mound - probably the most famous rubble dump in Poland. It is the result of a collaboration between the Archigrest and topoScape studios responsible for the recently completed revitalisation of the mound with artist Diana Lelonek and a group of scientists from the Warsaw University of Life Sciences. The installation will show the process of soil formation on the landfill, and the process of a new ecosystem growing on it. The protagonists of this process are not humans, but mainly microorganisms and invasive species vegetation, as well as the elements: water and wind.
The exhibition ‘Uninvited Guests’ will present a strategy of minimal interventions that architects(s) can use to initiate the formation of soils in places devastated by human activity and to support the growth of the multi-species form of ‘intelligence’ that is the environment. In this way, the exhibition will talk about architecture in a post-growth world, i.e. post-growth architecture: a world which can benefit more than just a select few of the homo sapiens species.
The publication accompanying the exhibition will address the topic of demolition and construction waste dumps in a broader geographical context. At the same time, it will develop the topic of rammed soil technology in an urban context, pointing to the environmental and economic potential of producing building materials from soil left over from the foundations of buildings.