Wojciech Kosiński

The article illustrates six implemented designs of architectural and urban composition which were either designed by the author individually or in a team, against a backdrop of an analysis of the term “urban and architectural composition”. The very term and the creative implementation of architectural and urban composition as a synthesis of shaping space in a creative manner is one of the more important scientific, practical and didactic achievements of the Kraków school of urban design, based at the Faculty of Architecture of the Kraków University of Technology. The author of this essay, the opinions that it contains, as well as of the design concepts that it is based upon identifies himself as a member of this school. The examples that are listed in the article carefully illustrate the importance of the fact that the composition of buildings should be closely tied to and coordinated with the composition of the surrounding urban context and lead to a conscious improvement in the aesthetics of the city.

The topic that was given to the authors – that of the academic problem of playing with and the game of architecture, has been researched and analysed by the author with the aim of affirming the fascinating nature of this issue – one that is a worthy academic field. I t is the issue of the outstanding criterion of evaluating works of architecture. The essay has been composed into four chapters, each examining factors ranging from the more general, broad and theoretical, to the more detailed, specific and empirical. The chapters themselves are four distinct parts that, along with their conclusion, make up a complete and coherent work.

The hereby work represents an diagnostic & prognostic analysis, concerning a creation of cities - an actual, and a pointed towards the near future. A basis of the method constructed for research is an extraction of two most important types of conditions. The first of them is/are: a subject/subjects, and the other are: an object/objects. Subjective condition/s are human being/people, hence objective condition/s are projects/real implementations made in scales of: physical/spatial planning, urbanism and architecture. The research upon subjects remains in the sphere of humanist sciences as: philosophy, philosophy, social psychology, sociology, economy, etc. The research upon objects remains in the sphere sciences dealing with a physical space, e.g.: regional, urban and architectural - analysis, theory and design ‒ all of them including aesthetics as a philosophical bridge between theory and praxis. Logical overlapping and mutual penetrating of subjects and objects, reflect in a quality of a city as a place of humans. In the perspective view between: from one side the contemporary crisis in the planning and urban design, and from the second side inevitable growth of cities - hereby field of survey seems to be worth a care, widening and deepening.

The essay presents a fragment of the latest research that the Author has performed on the topic of the concept of beauty, viewed from the perspective of the cultural changes that took place throughout history, in relation to the spatial creations of cities. Urban aesthetics, so rarely taken into account in modern science, have been given due attention at the point at which theory meets practice. The territorial scope of the research extends from the Middle East and Egypt, through Europe, to the United States of America. The scope of history under analysis includes the time since the beginning of the construction of cities to the break of the XX century ‒ the time of the appearance of the first clear signs of the Modern Movement.