Autoportret 18. Przestrzenie pustki

-- i feel better up here. on the future of architecture / jacek dominiczak
The author claims that in its revolutionary zest, contemporary architecture has lost its sense of direction and cut itself off its intellectual roots. It now needs to slow down and face 'humanist reflection.' The latter may be a reflection on emptiness as space paradoxically rich in meanings. The thing is that they should be sought in our minds.

-- the aesthetics of emptiness, or where is art going / roman lewandowski
Starting from the seemingly obvious observation that we now live in the land of excess, one which is filled to the brim with images and ideas, the author argues that this apparent multitude is in fact a façade for emptiness. How does it show if we are drowning in a sea of images, sounds and information?

-- amor vacui. a few observations on contemporary architecture / tomasz glowacki
Western architecture was dominated by horror vacui for several hundred years. Emptiness had negative connotations and every attempt was made to fill it up. Yet since the end of the 19" century voices of protest, at first shy and then stronger, gradually emerged. Today amor vacui is widely accepted and seems to be a much more ambitious project than just rejecting filled up space.

-- the desert of the rational. problems of the london mile / marcin galent
The City of London. Area: 1 square mile. Legal status: special area under the Queen's jurisdiction. Function:
European financial centre. Superior principle: economic viability. Statistics: 7 railway stations, 13 underground sta-tions, 54 bus lines, 250 pubs, 300 restaurants, 7000 inhabit-ants, 400,000 employees. Result: everybody is escaping from the City.

-- the weight of the empty square. gauforum in weimar / philippe schmidt
When visiting Weimar tourists come cross a large, football stadium sized square which is surrounded by a ditch and a fence, and most importantly - is not accessible to people.
Visitors can learn from their guidebooks that it was once the site of Adolf Hitler Plat and the gigantic Halle der Volksgemeinschaft, which now houses a modern shopping centre. Perhaps this 'spacious emptiness' is a good idea for a mediator between the past and present?

-- the living emptiness of space. the thermae in vals / barbara stec
If we were asked which place we associate with emptiness most readily, the majority of us would probably choose the mountains, with their majesty and overwhelming silence.
There emptiness is almost palpable. In his design for the thermae in the Alpine Vals Valley, Peter Zumthor aimed at setting boundaries for emptiness, enclosing it within walls, and at the same time at bringing out of it sounds, colours, scents and images - in a word, life. This, to him, is the sense of architecture.

-- "palace orbit". portraits. an anthology / jens fischer
An excursion to our western neighbours, to Leipzig. Since Germany reunited, the city's population has decreased by 60,000 inhabitants (due to the collapse of local industry and emigration), while unemployment has risen. Jens Fisher presents portraits of people living in the depopulated city.
How do they get on? What do they do in their free time?
What are their ideas to remain active?

-- blue non-dreams. three times solaris / lucja piekarska-duraj
A deafening roar of engines, a flash, acceleration which presses you into the seat. We open our eyes and see ourselves surrounded by the emptiness of the outer space. We are flying in a metal tube, separated from the unknown outside by several tens of metres of the familiar, earthly world. We are moving away from Earth but in fact we are reaching deeper and deeper into ourselves, looking for mirrors in which we could see our reflections. Autoportret takes us on an excursion to the world of Solaris by Stanislaw Lem.

-- seeing the invisible. road films by wim wenders / agnieszka szeffel
On films by Wim Wenders, philosopher of the cinema, who, despite the contemporary culture of excess, tells stories about deserted districts, dilapidated buildings, strange, forsaken places and their invisible inhabitants.'

-- „i won't write about the spaces of emptiness" [a townswoman's moaning protest] / monika zawadzka
A very personal journey into the memories and reflections of the author - townswoman and architect - who traces emptiness among town buildings.

-- a star in prague, or an autobiographical appendix to dialectics / emiliano ranocchi
'You enter through the main gate. You go ahead in darkness, you perceive the luminous silhouette of the palace in the nearly infinite distance. You know you are getting closer but your senses tell you something directly opposite. When you finally reach the building, you will not be able to assess how much time it has taken you' - Emiliano Ranocchi will take you to another dimension of reality. It is worth it.

-- completing emptiness. the granaries island in gdansk / agnieszka kula majkowska
Probably every city has its own Granaries Island: an ugly, dirty, forsaken and forgotten place, which everybody stays away from. Once it served certain purposes, now it draws nobody's attention. Agnieszka Kula Majkowska writes about the difficult art of restoring alienated areas to cities on the example of her own project.

-- places which do not exist. short-lived relationships of façades and billboards / jadwiga zimpel
Looking at the contemporary cities, the author concludes that their fastest changing elements are... billboards.
Fastened to façades, they enter into short-lived, passing relationships with them and are becoming a more and more important part of the image of the metropolis. How does it affect us? We do not even suspect how much.