The Sprzeczna 4 apartment building in Warsaw, designed by local practice BBGK, is one of the first major prefabricated residential blocks built in Poland since the communist era.
Warsaw-based practice BBGK designed Sprzeczna 4 for Budizol ? a developer, constructor and producer of reinforced concrete prefabricated elements, which wanted to show the potential for building modular housing using precast concrete.

According to architecture studio, this is the first completely prefabricated multi-family residential housing block in Poland for over 30 years.
Estates constructed of prefabricated concrete slabs, built following the second world war, are a typical element of Polish cityscapes. However, time and cost pressures led to the quality of these buildings deteriorating and prefabrication being largely abandoned in favour of conventional building techniques.
Sprzeczna 4 was designed to show the potential of prefabrication for a wide range of projects and sites. The seven-storey house contains 57 flats that range in size from 28 to 75 square metres.
"The ordered prototype was supposed to enchant prefabrication in Poland," Wojciech Kotecki, partners at BBGK, told Dezeen.
"The building has been purposefully constructed on a plot seemingly not fitting the stereotype of prefabrication: small, irregular, within a tight 19th century frontage development."

Although the initial plan was to prefabricate only the reinforced-concrete elements, all of the build...