Queering the Code
I am an architect, architecture historian and critic, and an exhibition curator. I studied architecture at the Faculty of Architecture, Cracow University of Technology, with scholarships at Copenhagen School of Design and Technology, Hogeschool van Amsterdam and École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville.
I am deputy director of the National Institute of Architecture and Urban Planning in Warsaw, where I previously headed the Department of Exhibitions and External Projects. Before that I worked in NGOs, the Institute of Architecture Foundation and the Przestrzeń-Ludzie-Miasto association, and in the architectural offices Podczaszy Pracownia Architektury and PIG Architekci.
I wrote the book Ruch tektoniczny and co-authored Anthropocene: Towards Regenerating Architecture. Exhibitions I have curated include "Anthropocene", "Humanist Modernity: Maciej and Stanisława Nowicki", shown in Warsaw, New York and Raleigh, "Ściana wschodnia", "Poliperyferia: Spaces of Negotiation", "Do zamieszkania!: Projects by Helena and Szymon Syrkus". I contribute regularly to "Autoportret. A quarterly on good space" and "Architektura&Biznes", and I have taught design classes on inclusive housing at the Faculty of Architecture, VUT Brno.
My practice sits between architectural and artistic methods, with research, exhibition making and writing feeding each other. Most recently I ran "Mile widzianx (Warmly Welcomed): Queering the City", four open expert meetings across Poland on architecture, law and queer visibility, published as open-access recordings and summaries. Queering the Code grows directly out of that work.
Adaptive reuse has become one of architecture's central sustainability strategies, read mostly through material and carbon. This project runs two lines of research in parallel. The first treats queer use as a strategy for reuse: reprogramming space built for other purposes was a survival practice long before it was a strategy, and it works on program and meaning. The second reads the building regulations themselves, where a norm written for one assumed body and family decides who a space is for.
Both lines come out of "Mile widzianx (Warmly Welcomed): Queering the City", a series of four open expert meetings held across Poland, bringing together architecture, law, urban studies and cultural criticism to ask how queer perspectives change the way we read and make space. A different city and different voices each time gave me a clear direction for what comes next.
That direction is queering architectural norms, and building tools from a queer register that work inside architecture itself, carrying queer methods into architectural criticism and practice.
In Poland the binding regulation is titled "Warunki techniczne", the technical conditions buildings must meet; the project renames its method "Queerunki". The work moves in three steps. It reads a regulation for the body, the family and the use it silently assumes. It hacks existing buildings within the current code, using the openings the law already leaves. And it drafts the counter-clause, rewriting the norm itself.
The outcome takes the media I work in best: a publication, print or online, and a public debate, with an exhibition as an alternative way of presenting the research. Together they gather these tools, test them against real regulation, and make them usable for practitioners and critics. The aim is a shared vocabulary for questioning the standard user, the standard family and the standard building that our codes still assume.