Falowiec

As Falowiec is called a block of type that has been realized in Gdansk eight times. It is very elongated houses with wavy outline. The name is derived from fala, the Polish word for wave.

The buildings were constructed in the late 1960s and in the 1970s as part of a major building program to counteract the growing housing shortage in Poland. Seven of these buildings were built in the district of Gdańsk Przymorze and one in New Port ( Nowy Port ).

An architectural element is that all apartments will not enter the stairwell, but over arcades which also contain the kitchen window. The arcades were originally completely accessible, but were later equipped or bricked up for safety with additional doors. Each staircase has a lift, every second staircase has an additional larger freight elevator.

The longest Falowiec is in the satellite settlement Przymorze at the street ul Obrońców Wybrzeża. It was built from 1970 to 1973 after plans by Tadeusz Różański, Danuta Olędzka and Janusz Morek. He has eleven storeys has a height of about 30 meters and is composed of four segments, each with four wells each for about 110 apartments together. It was designed for 6,000 residents. The individual sections together form an angle of about 165 °. The entire floor plan is arcuate. The apartments are on average 40 square meters in size, opposite walls of the room are not always parallel, and the balconies are trapezoidal. The original façade of bare concrete was covered after 1989 with colored thermal insulation boards. The building is with a length of 850 meters by the Karl -Marx -Hof in Vienna ( 1,100 meters ) and the Corviale in Rome ( 980 meters ) as the third-longest residential building in Europe.