Centrala

Guided by the idea of the Amplifying Nature, CENTRALA – Małgorzata Kuciewicz & Simone De Iacobis create projects based on exploring the relationship between architecture and natural processes. For them, architecture is a flow, not merely a static form; and gravity, water circulation as well as atmospheric and astronomical phenomena are its building blocks. CENTRALA see architecture that combines the intimate, human scale with the scale of the planet as a means of tuning us into the rhythm of the world around us, strengthening our sense of connection with nature, opening us to experiencing its vanishing cycles, and direct attention to the relationship between micro-events and changes taking place on the Earth’s scale.

CENTRALA are winners of the competition FUTUWAWA. How Will We Live in Warsaw of the Future (2021). They presented their projects at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2018, 2023), London Design Biennale (2021), Lisbon Architecture Triennial (2022), Gwangju Biennale (2023). Since 2017, they regularly collaborate with the Kharkiv School of Architecture.

Interested in memory and materiality of architecture, CENTRALA stimulates public debate on the protection of the post-war architectural heritage. Learning from the legacy of Warsaw designers (such as Zofia and Oskar Hansen, Viola and Jacek Damięcki, or Alina Scholz), they restore forgotten architectural expertise: the grammar of the 1950s and 1960s Polish exhibition designs, the shared vocabulary of post-war modernism, or the use of hydrobotany in architecture.