Sady Żoliborskie Housing Estate, Warsaw

The site was an orchard, and Skibniewska's first decision was to keep as many of the fruit trees as the building programme would allow — a refusal of the clearance-and-grid method then standard in Polish estate planning. She grouped twenty-four low blocks into three neighbourhood units of seven or eight, each enclosing a planted courtyard, and set them so that no block stands in another's light. Behind the plain facades the flats sit on a concrete skeleton with no internal load-bearing walls, so tenants could move partitions; one eleven-storey block is topped by a terrace serving as an open clubroom, and its ground floor holds double-height glazed studios with gardens, built for artists. The first block, on Krasińskiego, was voted Mister Warszawy in 1961. Construction ran from 1959 to 1964. The later colonies of the same estate were built to standardised state catalogue types, and the difference between the two halves is still legible from the street.