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.

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.

The studio was originally founded by Krzysztof Banaszewski, Małgorzata Kuciewicz, Jan Strumiłło and Jakub Szczęsny, who currently run their own architectural practices (the full story of the origins of the studio can be found here). The website summarizes the last decade of CENTRALA’s architecture and research practice led by Kuciewicz and De Iacobis.