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architectural fantasies

The House which grows

By All Works, anthropocene, architectural fantasies, photomontage

However, these houses very often also continue to expand. After a few years of use, the need for additional space occurs, and the owners decide then to enlarge their homes. This enlargement is implemented in the same fashion as the original construction: the house is nearly-finished, but the façade remains bare. And this process may happen several times.

The House Which Growsis a photographic series which is inspired by this phenomenon, but also exaggerates it. The first image shows a nearly finished house, which, in the subsequent images, appears to be growing, with the addition of new wings, walls, and even turrets to the original building. Eventually, in the last image, the house has become a huge chaotic and shapeless construction. The series is open-ended: although six images were originally created, there is always the possibility of placing additional walls to the façade, so that the house can be, literally, ever-growing.

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K-Pool i Spółka

By All Works, architectural fantasies, modernism, photomontage

Rem Koolhas, in Delirious New York, ends his book by an imaginary tale about Russian avant-guarde architects, who escaped the Soviet Union to reach New York. The decision to escape the USSR was made in the 1930’s, and the means of transportation was a floating swimming pool, which, when all the architects were swimming synchronically, would move in the opposite direction. Thus, swimming towards Moscow, they only reached Manhattan in the mid-1970’s. Unfortunately for them, the Manhattan of the 70’s had little to do from what they had dreamed of at the onset of their journey.
It is this moving, wonderful and absurd endeavor that inspired me to create K-Pool. K-Pool stands for Koscisuko Pool, an open air swimming pool in Brooklyn, NY (built in 1958-60 by Morris Lapidus), whose intricate design and incredible shapes I used to re-create Rem Koolhas’ vision.

K-Pool i Spółka (which could be translated as “K-Pool and company”), juxtaposes this imaginary swimming pool with real achievements of Soviet Union architects, the very colleagues of those who decided to flee the USSR. While these were swimming, back home, they were erecting astonishing buildings. But also swimming pools, which now, for the majority of them, rest unused, as a final irony to this visual journey.

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W–70

By All Works, architectural fantasies, photomontage

The context of the W-70 project was the Concrete Legacy exhibition at the CCA in Warsaw in June 2007, which “focused on concrete block housing as one of the gravest consequences of Modernist architectural thought”, and its embodiment in Poland. The W-70 system was the most popular prefabricated multi-storey home system in Poland during the 1970s.

The firststep of the W-70 project consisted in photographying approximately 4000 pictures of different elements of this system, in order to be able to re-assemble them later according to one’s will. Using the photographed prefabricated modules as “raw material”, the second step of the W-70 project consisted in creating visual and spatial situations where the viewer could appreciate the concrete block houses from different perspectives (litterally and metaphotically).

I have indeed been fascinated for long years by concrete block houses and in this project I wanted to convey this fascination, either using some visual properties of perspective (as a reference to the tradition which lead to the Modernist school of architecture), or confronted the viewer with unusual architectural situation. In this way, I tried to achieve pieces that would amuse and intrigue the viewer, and maybe make him look at the modern block houses differently.

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Axonometry

By All Works, architectural fantasies, photomontage

Axonometry is a loose set of photographic works whose common denominator is the fact that they all represent reality as an axonometric view. This is an apparent paradox: one sees reality in perspective (and this is what the camera records), and axonometry is a technique representing reality in an abstract, geometric fashion, which by definition contradicts the fundamental rules of perspective. In other words, the expression “axonometric photography” is a contradiction in terms, since photography is always a representation through perspective.

This visual paradox has intrigued me for some time, and I have over the years created several axonometric photographs, most of the times visualisations of buildings (as axonometry is very often used in architectural designs), but also of objects. These images were ether parts of larger projects, or self-sufficient works. The quasi geometric aspect of these photographs, but also the need to build these images literally from scratch, has led me to represent imaginary buildings, legends of the modernist tradition.

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