Wednesday, 06.05.2026
16.00-17.00 LECTURE
How to make ambitious reading cool
Participant: Agnieszka Rasmus, Fundacja Centrum Architektury, Warsaw
→ Artget Gallery, CCB, Republic Square 5/1
Fundacja Centrum Architektury is a small, independent, and ambitious publisher of architecture books and promoter of architecture, active since 2011. Its activities are aimed at both professionals and non-professionals interested in architecture, urbanism, heritage, and related fields. Its portfolio of activities includes walks, lectures, debates, and artistic-educational events that combine performative arts and architecture, such as music installations, performative readings, podcasts, and BAZARCH—an architecture book fair with accompanying events, organised since 2013. www.centrumarchitektury.org
I would like to share my rather unique experience and knowledge as an independent publisher of specialist architectural books aimed at a general audience—as general as possible. In my lecture, I will try to show how we popularise architectural history and theory through publications, as well as accompanying artistic and educational events.
The non-governmental organisation, established 14 years ago and led for several years by Grzegorz Piątek, Agnieszka Rasmus, and Aleksandra Stępnikowska, has aimed to build bridges between the world of high-quality academic and research-based publishing and readers outside the academic and professional fields. We began with the discovery that (almost) none of the classic canon of architectural theory (Le Corbusier, Loos, etc.) had ever been translated into Polish. As an independent organisation with no funding, we had to figure out how to sell enough books to sustain our activities, while also wanting to do things differently from a typical academic or institutional publisher. We still struggle with fundraising, but at least we know how to have fun—and how to convince audiences that reading ambitious books can be sexy.
How is it done? I will present some examples of our events: architectural walks with our authors, lecture marathons, live architectural comic book readings (actor + musician), drone films celebrating book launches, sound installations accompanying book sales in our small underground warehouse, “music-architectural teatime” with live music, performative talks, sound walks, and organising what is probably the only architectural book fair in Europe.
