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Sustaining Hope

At his top floor loft studio professor Budzynski - short, bulky, leisury dressed man in his '60s - is showing more of his projects, designed in harmony with community needs and traditions, looking so different from dehumanized steel and glass towers, which do not fit any town from Auckland to Zurich, but are to be found in almost all of them. Here are the sketches of God's Providence Church, huge new basilica designed for nearby prestigious Wilanow part of Warsaw, obsessive idea of a head of Polish  Catholic Church, cardinal Glemp. Few years ago professor Budzynski won the architects' contest for this church. His project, inspired by pope's John Paul II "Fides and Ratio" encyclical, was a huge praying space covered with earth roof and glass made giant wings over it. "Too modern and obviously inspired by New Age philosophy" complained other bishops, on whom the cardinal was depending in collection of funds. After some time Budzynski's innovative environmental project was quietly exchanged for a traditional basilica with huge copula, remaining the one at St. Peter's in Rome, where cardinal Glemp now wants to have a symbolic grave of the late Polish pope.



There were more contests won and projects unfulfilled, but despite that Marek Budzynski has a smile of everlasting optimist. May be it was the reason he risked his time once more with provincial school redevelopment. "Zgierz's school caught my attention because it was not typical" he explains. No matter that it was build in a period when about a thousand of very similar schools were erected to commemorate the millennium of Polish state (or rather introduction of Christianity in 966 to pagan Poles), this one was individually designed. It had nice central entrance, three wings and a courtyard. The last modernization done in the '80s, unfortunately added one more wing and another entrance, reminding a prison gate, but all of that may be changed, including unfortunate idea of separated, not connected classes on the second floor.

Marek Budzynski and his pal, architect Zbigniew Badowski, paid few visits to Zgierz and talked to school teachers and local authorities. Their idea of school redesign is cover the courtyard with a roof, add second floor corridors, insulate a whole building and install a new heating and ventilation system in place of a current one, which works mostly for the air, using 250 tons of coal a year. Design has been consulted and developedby mixed team of  Norwegian Technical University from Trondheim, leaded by prof. Oyvind Aschenhoug, and Warsaw University of Technology.

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