Thursday, December 23, 2010  The Monument to Polish Television
The criteria we use to assess architecture can be slippery. That
shouldn't be elevated into a virtue; much as I love Ian Nairn,
the 'every kind of architecture produces good buildings and bad
buildings, the only important thing is quality' line that he
often peddled is as asinine as it is vaguely accurate. Without
theory, without stylistic and ethical infighting, new forms and
ideas wouldn't develop at all. Yet, there are some buildings for
which any apparatus of aesthetic analysis is just inadequate,
and where any notion of architectural 'quality' is irrelevant.
The subject of this post, the Telewizja Polska building in
Warsaw, recommended to me by Ms Agata Pyzik and designed by
Czeslaw Bielecki, is one such structure.  It appears in a fairly
typical Warsaw inner-suburban main road, a long and wide street
with blocks of offices and flats set back from the road line
itself. Most of them are in the unassuming manner you can see
above, prefabricate