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Polish project wins major architectural award

25.09.2020 09:30
The Radio and Television Department of the Silesian University in Katowice, southern Poland, is the winner of the 2020 Brick Award. The prize was launched in 2004 by Austria’s Wienerberger AG, the world’s largest producer of  bricks.
Photo: Radio Poland
Photo: Radio Poland Julian Horodyski

In addition to the Grand Prize, the project won in the “Sharing Public Spaces” category. Other categories are: “Feeling at Home”, “Living Together”, “Working Together”, and “Building Outside the Box”.

The Brick Award competition describes the Polish project on its website as “a haunting design and a pitch-perfect setting for film students.”

It writes that “behind dark brick screen, the faculty building [of the Radio and Television Department] opens up into new spaces, light when they need to be, shadowy and even a little dark, too, with the classrooms and studios surrounding the inner courtyard.

“The brick curtain is made of the same material as the surviving 19th century house, so the building has a consistency of texture. These bricks - burned in Europe's last coal-fuelled kilns - are nuanced with dark sintering and graduations of color used throughout the building. The architects show how a city center building can be innovative and, at the same time, a guardian and interpreter of the past.”

(mk/pk )