Affordable single-family housing. From the traditions of the Warsaw School of Architecture
Authors: Trebacz Piotr 
Published: September 2019

The hundredth anniversary of Poland regaining its independence (as well as the 100th anniversary of the Faculty of Architecture of the Warsaw University of Technology) is an opportunity to reflect on the achievements of Warsaw’s architects. Designing a home which would be affordable to the Polish city citizens was an important for the Warsaw architects in the 20th century. The initial assumptions took into consideration the changing design requirements set before the architects (e.g. social, economic, or ecological). Thus the ideas and the creative designs that matched the current needs of the citizens of Warsaw, including the initiatives guaranteeing the availability of cheap, proprietary houses, are worth a closer look. In different periods of the 20th century, the idea of an affordable home found support in the urban planning: either in the form of a house in a garden city or a garden district, or by the support of economic, and at the same time ecological, construction. The architectural ideas were accompanied by the desire to ensure contemporary living standards, current aesthetic trends or the more popular stylistic trends. The modernist avant-garde of the “Warsaw school”, its eminent theorists, practicing academics and students had a huge impact on the architecture of the capital as well as the whole Poland. The architecture and urban planning of Żoliborz in the 1930s is an excellent example. The works of young enthusiasts of the European modernism were preceded by the “Blok” magazine and the Praesens group (1926) connected with the CIAM. In the post-war period, practically the only choice for residents of Warsaw was a flat in a prefabricated residential block. The cooperative and private middle-class houses began to appear at the end of the 20th century. The single-family houses, representing the modest means of their investors, were represented and popularized by the Warsaw magazine “Murator” and its nationwide competitions “Affordable Houses”. The suburban landscape of today’s Warsaw is dominated by catalogue projects of different quality while the outskirts of the city comprise mostly very intensive residential developments commissioned by developers. They are mostly based on the “wild” urban planning, without any social program. The Warsaw’s 1930s modernist style is continued today and is associated with good, logical and safe architecture, especially when compared with the hard to define the mass of the contemporary single-family houses. We long for the prestige and position of the avant-garde architecture which prevailed in the pre-war Warsaw. Neomodernism returns in the contemporary projects of the governmental program “Apartment Plus” and “Home Plus” (2018) which aims to create up to a thousand cheap, small, prefabricated houses. From hundreds of the competition submissions, the houses designed by the architects and students from our Faculty were selected to be built. The overview of the past century’s achievements of the Polish architects confirmed the thesis and initial assumptions. The results of the exploration have been used in design practice: i.a. in the affordable home competition project, which was highly regarded both by the public and the jury (first prize).