Designing with the elements
What do light, water, wind and gravity have to do with architecture? In four exercise books based on an original workshop programme, architects from the Warsaw-based design group CENTRALA seek notations for ephemeral phenomena. They encourage people to go out into the field: to immerse themselves in the landscape and observe it carefully. Through a set of original tasks and a reconstruction of selected historical exercises (by Bruno Munari, Frei Otto, Mieczyslaw Twarowski, among others), they show how to turn collected observations into design tools. The results are dynamic models—original instruments for further experimentation.
The exercise books are the result of workshops organised as part of the permanent curriculum of the Kharkiv School of Architecture and within the project Modelling the City. The Dynamics of Diverse Space, co-financed by the City of Warsaw. They will be available free of charge at the end of December 2024 on the website of the Bęc Zmiana Foundation.
CENTRALA is a Warsaw-based design and research studio led by Małgorzata Kuciewicz and Simone De Iacobis. They create projects based on research into the relationship between architecture and natural processes. For them, architecture is a flow, not a static form, and gravity, water circulation, atmospheric or astronomical phenomena are its building blocks. They see architecture, which connects the intimate human scale with the scale of the planet, as a tool that helps us tune in to the rhythm of the surrounding world. They have presented their projects at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2018, 2023), London Design Biennale (2021), Lisbon Architecture Triennale (2022), Gwangju Biennale (2023), among others. Since 2017 they have been collaborating with the Kharkiv School of Architecture.
CENTRALA. Exercise Books: Light, Water, Wind, Gravity
Authors: Małgorzata Kuciewicz, Simone De Iacobis (CENTRALA) / Editor: Aleksandra Kędziorek / Graphic design: Zofka Kofta / Publisher: Bęc Zmiana Foundation. The project is co-financed by the City of Warsaw.
