Fine Arts Lecture Series – collective CENTRALA

Mnemonic Landscape

Under the research framework “The Living Matter of Architecture,”
CENTRALA explores the material biographies of Warsaw—a man-made
landscape formed from the rubble left in the wake of the city’s rapid
and violent destruction at the end of World War II. The visual traces of
ruin and violence, embedded within the terrain, function simultaneously
on archaeological and infrastructural levels. Architectural debris thus
becomes a palimpsest of hybrid transformations shaped by both human and
natural forces. In the lecture, CENTRALA will delve into projects
addressing the regulation and transformation of the Vistula River, the
emergence of ruderal landscapes composed of ruins and pioneering
species, and investigations into the rebuilding of Warsaw’s greenery as
an intentional act of restoring life and consciously designing favorable
urban microclimates.

Bio

CENTRALA is a Warsaw-based design and research studio, run by Małgorzata Kuciewicz and Simone De Iacobis, who 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.

CENTRALA have presented their projects at the Copenhagen Architecture
Biennial (2025), The Venice Architecture Biennale (2018, 2023), London
Design Biennale (2021), Lisbon Architecture Triennale (2022), Gwangju
Biennale (2023). They have maintained an ongoing partnership with the
Kharkiv School of Architecture since 2017.