BIORAMA is a building and at the same time an ecological idea that wants to rethink the way we look at the city. In Łódź, at the junction of the H. Dąbrowski Park and the green areas of the allotment gardens on Łomżyńska Street, a cubic, symmetrical, multi-axial, openwork cube has been designed to be the stage for vegetation and the life of the pulsating terraces. The name is not a second-hand metaphor. In the words of the author, architect Darek Witasiak: BIORAMA simply means ‘frame for plants’. In its final version, the building will reach 25 metres in height and seven storeys, and its evening rhythm is to cut legibly against the sky before eventually dissolving into the green structure.
The ‘frame’ of the title is a rhomboidal steel structure made of corten, which wraps around the facades and organises the composition into pulsating, geometric bars. The same material returns in the multi-format pots, the channels crowning the edges of the terraces and the soffits of the balconies. Here, the truss nodes are not only structural supports – the design emphasises them as suspension points for the pots, manifesting the symbolic intertwining of architecture and nature. Up to the fourth storey, the frame profiles have a square cross-section; above that, they become circular. This subtle change in scale and shape produces the intended ‘transformation’ effect, dynamising the silhouette and breaking up the perceptual continuity between the building heights. The floor-to-ceiling windows and glass balustrades, in turn, are intended to dissolve the boundary between the interior and the greenery. Stainless steel nets have been stretched between the rhombus fields – on which climbing plants will grow luxuriantly.
Greenery as construction and experience
At BIORAMA, greenery is not a fig leaf for ‘failed sites’. The architect cleans the visualisations of plants precisely to show that the idea will defend itself with bare architecture. The greenery returns where it enhances the quality of life: in the punctuated pots on the terraces, in the continuous ‘gutter’ pots on the balconies facing the courtyards, in the grids filling the rhomboidal fields of the structure in the form of climbing plants, in the green surfaces of the common terraces above the top floor, in the larger tree pots and even in the plants suspended in the nodes of the horizontal trusses above the roof. Such an arrangement is intended to create a multidimensional living environment in which the rhythm of the frame is the backdrop and the vegetation is the living actor. The higher up, the more the architecture is supposed to fade away and turn into a green structure.
The use of rainwater
Rainwater is as important here as steel and glass. The roof terraces – green and tile-finished – balconies and the ceiling layers above the garages work as viable retention stores that, with their cross-sectional shape, slow down the run-off and collect the resource for the plants. Excess water goes into a reservoir in the underground, protecting the plant from overflow and allowing water to be recovered for irrigation. The pots have their own systems for excess drainage and retention, and supply is via drip lines from the communal plant. This arrangement is complementary: it saves water, promotes plant growth, improves the thermal insulation of the surface and reduces the building’s impact on the ecosystem. At BIORAMA, water management is not an add-on – it is the strategic core of the project.
Terraces, balconies and roof gardens create a consciously composed “in-between” zone – they soften the boundaries between private life and community, building a soft sequence of spaces. BIORAMA fuses these worlds into a collage: corten, glass and vegetation in dialogue with the nearby urban park. With fully glazed walls from floor to ceiling and transparent balustrades, the perspective of the interiors melts with the green horizon.
The visuals of the project were put together in two views: “without greenery”, to reveal the pure sauce of the architecture, and “with greenery” – as a promise of an effect that matures over time, depending on both vegetation and the developer’s decision on the choice of target plants. The whole can be seen well below.
design: Marciniak & Witasiak(https://marciniak-witasiak.pl)
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