The building of the Faculty of Radio and Television was designed by the Barcelona bureau BAAS arquitectura in cooperation with the Polish workshops Grupa 5 Architekci and Małeccy Biuro Projektowe. It is located in the center of Katowice, in a quiet side street densely built up with cheap apartment buildings from the interwar period, uninteresting and dilapidated. The site chosen by the University of Silesia was the only wasteland there, where at the same time there was a small ruin - the building of an electric lamp factory, which, according to the terms of the 2011 competition, could be demolished. However, BAAS arquitectura did not take advantage of this opportunity, unlike many competitors, but included this modest building in their building, making it part of the main facade and providing it with the function: it now houses the faculty library.
Both the factory building and the apartment buildings around it were built of the most typical material for Katowice - bricks. In the new building, it is also widely used, along with larch wood and concrete, and also for floor paving. But for most of the facades, hollow ceramic blocks have been chosen, which prevents the modern building from completely merging with the surroundings. Another unusual move for Silesia is a courtyard-patio for student communication. The total area of the building is 5 390 m2, the budget is 38.5 million zlotys.
Polityka magazine experts
noted that in the seven-year history of their award, this is already the third awarded building in Katowice, a city better known for its industrial history than for its architectural beauty. Previous laureates were the University of Silesia Library and the International Congress Center, but, unlike them, the Faculty of Radio and TV is not an iconic building, but an example of virtuoso work with context, which made even the neighboring houses battered by time and painted with plain graffiti play.
In parallel with the work of the jury, an Internet-based voting was carried out for the best of the five finalist buildings. According to its results, the Faculty of Radio and TV took second place with 15.1 percent of the vote, and the first was the Bałtyk Tower in Poznan designed by the MVRDV bureau, which received a whopping 64 percent. According to experts, Internet users have so highly rated the connection between an office building and public and cultural space, which is rare for Poland.
