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Kolorobloki

By All Works, architecture, modernism, photomontage

Emalite glass is a synthetic opaque and multicoloured glass that appeared in the 1950s. Inserted in aluminium frames, it is used to cover the facades of buildings with modular panels of any requested colour. Its simplicity of use as well as its modularity account for its popularity in the 60s and 70s in Western Europe and in the countries of the socialist bloc. However, emalite glass does not age well, and is often replaced by other covering material, not as colourful.

Kolorobloki comprises a series of photographs of emalite glass covered buildings. These photographs are composed in a modular way, i.e. using the modularity of the emalite glass panels as they are used as a construction material. Thus, although all the buildings are, in real life, different, their photographs have been manipulated so that their facades have all the same proportions and the same number of floors. Some buildings have been shortened, while others have been enlarged, by adding the required number of modular panels. The only unaltered motif in these photographs is the colour of the façade. From a certain perspective, emalite glass panels are one of the last heirs of the modernist tradition in architecture, where simplicity and functionality are cardinal values. Modularity, from this point of view, is one architectural feature best suited to building something functional and cheap, but also maybe elegant. Nevertheless, as far as emalite glass is concerned, given the poor quality of the materials used, one often faces a kind of degenerate modernism.

However, Kolorobloki is not a criticism of modernism in architecture, on the contrary. It is a project that uses the grammar of modernism to show its limitations, but with a great dose of sympathy for that architecture as well as for the buildings photographed

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Not Economically Viable

By All Works, anthropocene, architecture

Poland is littered with unfinished houses. Each of these houses stands for a tragedy but also an aesthetic experience. They stand for tragedies, because one can imagine the different reasons that have led to the abandonment of the house: death, loss of a job, loan refusal, all stories making the current owners «economically not viable», according to banking terminology. But they are also aesthetic experiences, because this architecture, most of the time lacking originality and ugly, mutilated by its empty windows, is in a way sublimed by the very exterior signs telling about these personal tragedies.

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The Afterlife of Buildings

By All Works, architecture

The Afterlife of Builings was an exhibition shown in the Polish Pavilion during the 11th International Architecture Biennale in Venice in 2008. This exhbition showed pictures of Nicolas Grospierre and Kobas Laksa, and was curated by Grzegorz Piatek and Jaroslaw Trybus. It was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation.

The Afterlife of Builings is an attempt at tackling the issue of durability of architecture in changing economic, social and aesthetic conditions. It features 6 tryptichs showing prominent buildings raised in Poland in the last 2 decades. They display, on the one hand, the way buildings currently looked like, through solemn photographs by Nicolas Grospierre. On the other hand, photomontages by Kobas Laksa showed the way the same buildings could look like in a not so distant future when the conditions having led to erect these buildings will have changed.

Furthermore, The Afterlife of Builings also changed the Polish Pavilion itself, which was, for the time of the exhibition, transformed into a hotel. This was done on accounts that the Venice Pavilions are most of the time empty, while the city, is on the contrary, most of the time overcrowded and lack places to sleep. The pavilion was thus used as an additional sleeping venue, and hence the exhibtion’s second title Hotel Polonia.

The Afterlife of Builings was shown in 2009 at the Zacheta National Gallery under the title Disco Zacheta. For the time of the show, Zacheta’s austere interiors were trasnfromed into a discotheque.

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Lithuanian Bus Stops

By All Works, architecture, modernism

Lithuanian roads have one, very typical, architectural feature: it is their countless bus shelters, with their clean, simple and multicoloured design. These bus stops are spread all over the country and were built in the 1960s and 1970s. There are approximately 30 different models of bus stops to be found in Lithuania. Built from prefabricated materials, they were then placed in the countryside, and painted in vivid colours.

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The Embassy

By All Works, architecture, documentary, modernism

The Embassy project is a semi-fictional semi-documentary series of photographs of an embassy of an Eastern European country of the former COMECON. The photographs were indeed all taken in a real Eastern European unused embassy, however it has been chosen to modify slightly some of them, in order to produce confusion in the viewer’s mind as to wether what he is watching is true or not. The viewer is thus invited in a slightly Kafkaesque journey through empty offices which become more and more claustrophobic and unreal. In a reference to the Cold War diplomatic habits of manipulation, as well as to the former soviet bloc’s use of photomontage, these photographs are seeminlgly documentary, ergo objective, whereas in reality the viewer will never know if what he sees is true or not, truthful or manipulated.

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Hotel Europejski

By All Works, architecture, documentary

The Europejski Hotel is one of Warsaw’s Palace hotels. Built in the 1870s, and left almost untouched by the war, it was nationalised by the communist regime and remained then one of the most prestigious hotels belonging to the Tourism State Company, Orbis. It was only in 2005 that the former owners of the hotel, the Potocki family, were given it back. The hotel currently awaits renovation, since the verdict reprivatising the hotel stated that it could not be used as a hotel until 2008. However, before handing back the hotel to the Potockis, the Orbis Corporation took away all of the furniture and interior decoration it could possibly take. The hotel is thus at the moment an empty shell, with all of its rooms unused.

The Hotel Europejski project is a systematic inventory of the hotel rooms. All of the photographs were framed and shot likewise. In this way, one may easily notice that there are only three variables in the very sober decoration of the rooms: the carpet, the general arrangement of the walls, and the ceiling height. And yet it seems there are countless possible combinations, since although it is difficult to distinguish one room from the other, they are in fact all different.

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Milk Bars

By All Works, architecture, documentary

The «milk bars» are a network of low cost restaurants, spread all over Poland. Created at the end of the 1950s, under socialist Poland, and belonging then to the State Cooperative Spolem, milk bars were largely privatised after 1989, but remain partly state financed today. In this way, milk bars continue to be places where people with little money (students, old age pensioners, but also homeless people) may eat well, at a low cost. Their name comes from the fact that no alcohol is sold at milk bars, and originally, no meat either. Since the beginning of the 2000s, milk bars have received heavy competition from western style fast-food restaurants, and consequently they have started to disappear, one after the other.

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Paper Planes

By All Works, architecture, conceptual photography, photomontage

The exhibition’s starting point was the Polish Aviation in Cracow, designed in 2010 by the Berlin architect Justus Pysall, in partnership with ARUP. Paper Planes was inspired by this building, and is an interpretation of it, its origin, its function and its form. The work was initiated with the acknowledgment that a) the building was designed as if it was made as an origami, a paper cut-out from a square area, and b) that the end result is a shape that looks at the same time like a gigantic aircraft propeller or a flying wing, both shapes associated with the idea of flight. Grospierre’s process in this exhibition was two-fold. First, it consisted of photographing all the actual building’s surfaces (concrete walls, rooftop, windows and floors) to “recreate” the original square out of which the building was cut-out. It is thus the reverse track that led to the actual building: going from the real material and photographing it to produce the original square that was used to create the museum’s design. Second, using the obtained square as an imaginary piece of paper, printing this square on photographic paper and creating real paper planes out of it. The end result of the work consisted of 2 sets of photographs and photographic objects:

1) photographs of the museum, showing its transformation from an architectural design into the original square

2) 5 different paper airplanes, all made out of the double-sided photograph which represents the flattened out building.

In addition, viewers were invited to create their own paper plane, made from the flattened out building printed on regular-sized sheets of paper. Throughout the show, which lasted from March to July 2011 at the Phase 2 exhibition space in the ARUP Headquarters in London, more than 800 miniature paper planes were created.

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The Oval Offices

By All Works, architecture, collections, documentary

The Oval Offices is a photographic enquiry into the life-size replicas of the office of the President of the United States, the Oval Office. There are over 25 replicas of the Oval Office and the number keeps on growing. Each replica is different: some try to recreate the space of a specific president, while the others are more the embodiment of an idea, than the exact representation of the actual room.

In addition to the images, Grospierre has embarked into an in-depth study of the archaeology of the Oval Office, ranging fro the history of the room, to the symbolics of the oval, and the contemporary use of the room by Hollywood, and whose ultimate goal is to understand the reason for such a proliferation of replicas.

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