Radical Conservation and Vertical Dreams

A Conversation with Agata Wozniczka, architect and urban planner, presenting “The Appendix: The Geddessian Hyperscraper” exhibition in Liebling Haus’s Project Room, on the Geddes Plan, Radical Conservation, and Imagining the Vertical City

At first glance, the tower proposed in the Project Room at Liebling Haus seems deliberately absurd: a hyperscraper of 12,000 floors, stacked with gardens, civic spaces, markets, and shared infrastructure, rising far beyond any reasonable scale. But the exaggeration is the point. This speculative structure is not a feasible proposal for construction, but a thinking device — a way to expose the forces already reshaping Tel Aviv.

Behind the project stands Agata Wozniczka, an architect and researcher whose relationship with the White City began not through nostalgia, but through repeated observation. Returning to Tel Aviv over the years, she noticed how conservation, renovation, density, and climate pressures quietly rewrite the city’s spatial logic. Her work asks an uncomfortable but necessary question: what exactly are we protecting  when we say we are conserving the White City?

In this conversation, she reflects on the Geddes Plan as a living framework rather than a historic artifact, on air rights as a political design tool, and on why speculative design speculation, when done carefully, can reopen public debate rather than close it.

How did your background shape the way you approach cities today? I’m trained as an architect and urban planner. I studied in Wrocław (then Breslau) and Madrid, and completed internships in Copenhagen and Warsaw. Living in these very different cities made me acutely aware of how urban character emerges — not from individual buildings alone, but from the relationship between spatial structure, climate, social life, and everyday rituals.

Shortly after graduating, I co-founded BudCud with Mateusz Adamczyk, where we develop solicited projects and unsolicited proposals. Working on urban competitions pushes my thinking toward cities as systems rather than collections of objects. Alongside practice, I conduct research and am currently completing a PhD focused on contemporary public space and how climate pressure and political agendas reshape its typologies.

Speculative architecture sits somewhere between all these fields. For me, it’s a form of artistic expression that uses architectural tools — drawings, sections, models,  to test “what if” scenarios. Projects like the Geddesian hyperscraper are not solutions; they are invitations to debate.

“Speculative architecture is not about proposing answers - it’s about making dilemmas visible.”

What drew you specifically to the Geddes Plan and the White City? My interest grew gradually through repeated visits to Tel Aviv. During the Exercising Modernity study trip in 2019, organised by Pilecki Institute from Poland, I joined walks led by Sabrina Cegla and Sharon Golan from Liebling Haus. These experiences helped me connect the street-level reality of the city with its planning history.

Reading the Geddes Plan, I understood it not as a rigid blueprint but as a poetic, yet strategic framework. Geddes described a city structured through greenery, gradients between public and private life and an acute sensitivity to climate — breeze, shade and sun. What struck me was how contemporary his thinking felt, despite the plan dating back to 1925.

Modernist architects of Tel Aviv didn’t negate Geddes’ ideas neither; they recognized their intelligence. Walking through the White City with that lens suddenly made its spatial logic legible.

How did your perception shift over time? When I returned again in 2025, the changes were impossible to ignore. Renovation was everywhere, but often accompanied by homogenization. Extensions altered proportions, colors, and details. Block greenery, once integral to Geddes’ logic, had in some cases been reduced in favor of parking and hardened surfaces.

This pushed me to look beyond individual buildings. I became more concerned with what I call the “non-object” qualities of the city: courtyards, shade, porosity, microclimate and the everyday spatial rhythm of the blocks.

“What is most fragile in the White City is not the façade — it’s the systems that make daily life work.”

How did the research for the installation develop?Initially, I thought about preparing a project on local public spaces. But walking through beaches, parks, promenades and former Geddes gardens, some now turned into parking lots, made it clear that public life in Tel Aviv cannot be separated from planning logic. With major support from Sabrina Cegla as curator, I was able to update or actually flip the initial idea into the project that is now presented.

Our conversations and walks through the city were crucial. They pushed me toward interpreting the Geddes Plan as a contemporary question, not a historical one. Moreover, meetings with Geddes scholar Catherine Rochant and local planning authorities helped me understand how conservation actually functions today — what is protected, what is negotiable, and what quietly disappears.

A key moment came when Sabrina explained the air-rights mechanism and the possibility of transferring development rights outside the heritage area. Suddenly, conservation wasn’t only an ethical issue — it was a spatial and economic one. That insight triggered the idea of the hyperscraper as a speculative “pressure valve” for growth.

What does a radical conservation mean to you? Radical conservation refuses the comforting fiction that heritage can be protected by freezing it in time, while density, speculation and climate stress continue to operate elsewhere. It insists on working at the same scale as the threat.

Rather than endlessly negotiating extra floors and extensions within the White City, the hyperscraper concentrates development pressure into a single, legible structure. It’s intentionally extreme — not because I want it built in such a bombastic form, but because exaggeration clarifies the stakes.

“Conservation should not turn the White City into a museum of objects — it should keep it alive as an organism.”

The tower translates Geddes’ horizontal gradients into a vertical narrative: from civic spaces to productive landscapes to shared infrastructures. Public life is no longer a ground-floor introductory performance; it becomes a continuous ascent — an anti-lobby.

How did the exhibition design shape the idea?

The spatial design was essential to emphasize the speculative character of the proposal. A literal presentation would have either looked pompous or like a real-estate fantasy. Instead, I wanted to “lift the weight” and shift the visitor’s point of view — to create a slightly unreal, sky-like environment.

The hyperscraper is revealed in fragments: flat sections, elevations, recurring themes. The drawings are simplified, printed on cardboard, with sketched life added back in. This signals that the project is speculative, not executable. It leaves room for imagination and disagreement.

“The exhibition doesn’t ask visitors to believe in the tower — it asks them to think with it.”

What discourse does the project try to shift?Air rights are usually treated as technical compensation — their transfer lets a private asset be cashed elsewhere. The exhibition reframes them as a civic design question: who benefits from growth, and what exactly are we protecting?

At the same time, the hyperscraper challenges the sealed, generic image of the contemporary tower. It asks whether density can be porous, ecological and socially productive — not just profitable.

“If vertical growth is inevitable, it should be negotiated as a socio-ecological project, not a financial default.”

What should visitors take with them? First, an awareness that conservation is about spatial environments, not just buildings: courtyards, shade, greenery and everyday public life. Second, a shift in perspective. The hyperscraper is a provocation, designed to make existing forces visible by exaggerating them, allowing us to see their effects clearly. The hyperscraper is a provocation, designed to make existing forces visible by exaggerating them, allowing us to see their effects clearly.

The Project Room

The exhibition The Appendix:  A Geddessian Hyperscraper is the eleventh showing in the Liebling Haus Project Room, Initiated and curated by Arch. Sabrina Cegla.  The space invites creatives of all disciplines to take an active role in a critical investigation of the question, "What is the White City?" as part of alternative, collaborative and ongoing research that approaches the White City as a platform for contemporary discourse on conservation, urbanism, identity and culture in the city. The Project Room is the open end of the permanent exhibition in the Liebling Haus, telling the tale of the White City as a point of departure for a story in the making. It is an opportunity for the creative community to address current challenges the city is facing on a local and global scale and present different perspectives and alternative narratives. 

Curator: Arch. Sabrina Cegla

Assistant Curator: Amalia Arieli

Production and Setup: Aya Zeiger, Liav Levy

Text editing: Zipa Kempinsky, Stav Axenfeld

English translation: Sivan Raveh

Graphic Design: Neta Hadar Studio