Do we face, in architecture, a dictate of intrusive contemporaneity?
Do we live under a kind of tyranny of contemporary architecture?
Architectural concrete, shades of grey, and rigid conventions – these have become the key, the password whispered at the doors of what is considered ‘established’ architecture.
Is there a fear, perhaps, of quoting the past, of reinterpreting it on our own terms? Are we bound to modernize, to change – a kind of costume, a corset of correctness that looks with disgust at those who dare to glance backward? Is anything in architecture that hints at history automatically wrong?
Or perhaps it is sometimes worth looking back.
What would a church nave look like today? Is it possible to aesthetically reimagine a barrel vault or a rose window?
This is the experiment we undertook in Rudy.
The search for medieval echoes and shadows may, after all, be a fantastical play of form…
Perhaps if we were designing a significant project in a significant place, we might fear criticism from our colleagues, accusations of historicism. But here, at a crossroads, in a small village…
Here we can allow ourselves a little freedom from convention.
The village of Rudy has neither a market square nor a town hall, so we set out to design a gymnasium that would feel like a town hall.
In a sense, we wanted to create both: a market square and a town hall, right at the village crossroads, wrapped in a single building.
The main square, where the roads meet, seemed the perfect place for a culturally significant structure. And so, we equipped the sports hall with all the attributes of such a building.
We reimagined the portal, the rose window, the vault, the nave.
Our design choices are a contemporary attempt to define these timeless concepts and to echo the eclectic brick buildings that already populate the village.
Along the length of the main square, we stretched a brick façade inspired by Collegium Novum, giving it long steps and a rhythmic flow.
The density and mass of the brick are emphasized by the folds of the wall at the windows. The front sections of the roof rise steeply to conceal the actual, disproportionately flat roof over the hall – a result of local zoning regulations.
Gym hall in Rudy
Biuro Architekt Kaczmarczyk, architect Andrzej Kaczmarczyk, architect Sylwia Bartoszewska
Photos: Krzysztof Kachel