The introduction presents a brief historical outline of the development of higher education in Poland, starting with the Krakow Academy, focusing on the recent history, and discussing the achievements of the 1970s in more detail. It was an important period for the architecture of universities, which, after a short time of socialist realism, began to draw from the experiences of modernism. The main topic of the study is the architecture created after 2004, after Poland joined the European Union. A rapid increase in investment in higher education infrastructure was observed at that time, by some referred to as a construction boom at Polish universities. Over the decade, a large part of the existing assets was modernized, and several dozen new investments were completed. The article describes the achievements of this period, focusing first on the analysis of the architecture of individual buildings, and then assessing the quality of recently completed campuses in terms of their design, composition and spatial form. Architectural achievements at Polish universities are compared with examples of academic buildings and campuses from Western Europe and with contemporary trends in the design of academic campuses.

 

The introduction presents a brief historical outline of the development of higher education in Poland, starting with the Krakow Academy, focusing on the recent history, and discussing the achievements of the 1970s in more detail. It was an important period for the architecture of universities, which, after a short time of socialist realism, began to draw from the experiences of modernism. The main topic of the study is the architecture created after 2004, after Poland joined the European Union. A rapid increase in investment in higher education infrastructure was observed at that time, by some referred to as a construction boom at Polish universities. Over the decade, a large part of the existing assets was modernized, and several dozen new investments were completed. The article describes the achievements of this period, focusing first on the analysis of the architecture of individual buildings, and then assessing the quality of recently completed campuses in terms of their design, composition and spatial form. Architectural achievements at Polish universities are compared with examples of academic buildings and campuses from Western Europe and with contemporary trends in the design of academic campuses.