House with art studio, Warsaw, Poland

As we began working on the project, our goal was not to build a house on a plot, but to convert the plot to a space one could call home, an area that would exist as a work-life space for its inhabitants. The chosen concept allowed also an efficient use of current situation - deep and surrounded by walls of nearby houses.

The design is an outcome of a search for an optimal position for individual functions, the cross sections are rather reactions for its spatial context. Overlaping these two contexts created a series of interiors with a consistent geometrical logic, but different proportions and heights, sometimes surprizing, due to beeing determined by an invisible factor.

Close neighbourhood consists of very differential, small residential buildings and outbuildings consisting of both single buildings and ones placed on plot borders and frontages. The architecture we created tries to be an obvious part of this context, but with a certain touch of sovereignty. Its supposed to be something like an abstract reflection of surrounding everyday, organizing it and adding some structure and value.

In this sense, the project can be taken as modern, because it differs in typology and organization from an average project in nowadays detached houses architecture, or as traditional, because it reflects nearby reality and old building tradition.

Site area: 565 m2;
Footprint: 260 m2;
Usable floor area: 202 m2;
Total area: 260 m2;
Volume: 942 m2

Design: 2005-2007
Construction: 2006-2009

Architects: Piotr Brzoza, Marcin Kwietowicz;
Associate architects: Grazyna Czarnota;
Collaboration: Dariusz Bober, Piotr Fortuna;

Structural engineering: Stefan Kowalski;

House with art studio, Warsaw, Poland by Piotr Brzoza in Poland won the WA Award Cycle 8. Please find below the WA Award poster for this project.