Berenika Boberska
Artist
Poland


Submission: “High-rise Ruffles: Illegal structure for a balcony”

Exhibited at the Jyvaskyla Art Museum, 2005

This project starts with a story - about a woman who lives on the 18th floor of a high-rise in Poland. In one of the run-down socialist tower blocks, so ubiquitous throughout Eastern Europe. Most of them prefabricated with the same W-70 System – their facades indistinguishable from each other in cities from Berlin to Novosibirsk.

It is a love story, and such it is also about failure. But most of all it is about the unexpected delights which begin where design fails - to predict everything.

The ubiquitous high-rise was once idealistic and fast solution. Now the “vertical villages” are teetering on becoming the Eastern-European equivalent of vertical slums. Undesirable, expensive to demolish, still structurally sound, they have become containers of a new social class – those who failed to adapt or find a place in the new system. Before the fall of communism a typical housing block was occupied by people of all professions. Now a large proportion are on very low income, unemployed or elderly. The upwardly mobile are always condemned to movement, but it is those trapped in the poverty that develop any sense of place – even in such monotonous architecture.

When I was a child we lived on the 8th floor of such a high rise in Poland. The Facade was a single enormous surface studded with balconies and openings, with all sorts of weird things sticking out of it. Things people added on, quasi-legal structures, sheds, canopies, washing line contraptions: all designed to extend as far out as possible, to grab more space. There was almost a plant like desire to it, to grow outward, to open-up on sunny days, to catch the warm upward draft along the vertical cliff face.



On such a facade it is easy to overlook something strange. The story is about a woman who lives on the 18th floor of the high-rise. She is in love with a neighbor from the apartment two stories below hers. So she hangs a huge frilly dress to dry on her balcony, on an improvised washing-line. When that fails to attract his attention, she adds more material to it every day, stitching on more frills, more ruffles, more underpinnings and reinforcements until it grows and billows out well beyond the confines of her balcony, engulfing it like a huge ruffled bell jar. No longer a dress, it becomes more structural. It becomes a space. A funnel-like form growing out of the façade, opening-up. Her action is the starting point of my proposal. I have first constructed it in my room, filling it out completely. But my plan is to make it outside on the balcony of our old high-rise.

The installation is a prototype sketch for a Facade Flower, which will colonize the high-rise blocks in Poland. Like a weed it thrives in neglected spaces. The redundant empty volume of air next to the facade, in between the balconies. It's about the desire to spill outside the building envelope, to make a space for oneself, - beside the 18th floor. Outside the rigor of the plan. The structure becomes a form of resistance. An illegal space extension. A personal space. Something that wasn't predicted by the architect- but made by the action of the inhabitant.

The facade outcropping is an assembly of parts, of different ruffle types. Each frill was surface-cast from a plaster mold in a hand-made edition of 3d prints. The process implies a larger strategy and an edition of Facade Flowers. With print mistakes and variations. But it's not a unique object – the facade becomes a field of flowers.




"1988: Poland ranked last in Europe in housing: 284 dwellings / 1,000 persons"
“Polish housing in practice,” AllRefer.com, http://reference.allrefer.com/country-guide-study/poland/poland91.html (accessed May 15, 2006).