Architecture as Politics

Postmodern Architecture and Political Change – Poland and Beyond, 2020

The act of rebuilding Warsaw’s Old Town after the Second World War was an attempt to ensure the continuity of the communist Polish state with the traditions and history of its predecessors, as well as what Adrian Forty calls ‘countericonoclasm…remaking something in order to forget what its absence signified.’ However, contrary to the claims of the city architect in the early 1960s that ‘the Old Town now looks as it used to long ago’, it is clear that the rebuilt Old Town was no pure facsimile of the pre-war city - the ideology of the Polish United Workers’ Party had a significant impact on the architectural profile of the ‘new’ Old Town. In contemporary Poland, the dominant discourse suggests that links between ideology and the built environment were severed after the fall of the Polish People’s Republic in 1989. However, ideology continues to impact the ‘nexus’ of social relations between Warsaw’s reconstructed buildings and those who use, design and think about them. The Old Town still occupies a contested, uncertain position in the political imagination of post-communist, late capitalist Poland

In 1990, a newsreel which registered the emergence of new types of services after the end of socialism in Poland, showed an intervention of a security contractor in the neighborhood of Przyczółek Grochowski, a housing estate in Warsaw built in 1974 which, as the lector authoritatively states, “was first harmed by the architects”. Their names were not mentioned in the movie, but for those interested in Polish post-war architecture, this was not necessary: Przyczółek Grochowski was designed between 1963 and 1969 by Oskar Hansen, the Polish member of the Team 10, and his wife Zofia. The estate was a part of their visionary Linear Continuous System (LCS): an overarching design for the complete urbanization of Poland in four large stripes stretching throughout the whole territory of the country, from south to north. The design of Przyczółek, a block of flats for 6600 inhabitants, stretching 1.5 km, aimed at an egalitarian space for living and at paving the way to the visionary project of the LCS. When built within the restrictions of state-socialist construction industry, much of the vitality of its original vision was lost, leading to the incomprehension of architects' intensions among the inhabitants of Warsaw. After the end of socialism it became a paradigmatic example of the dilapidated postsocialist city characterized by socio-spatial segregation and fragmentation, surrounded by recently constructed gated apartment houses and nicknamed “Pekin” (Beijing) with regard to the poor condition and inhabitant density. This paper analyses the design process, construction, and use of the estate by its inhabitants, as well as of the shifts in social composition and ownership structures of Przyczółek in the last 40 years. Such account is necessary to speculate about the possibilities and challenges for the preservation of this building which did not fulfill its promise of a renewed everyday.

2011

Glass houses. Visions and practices of social modernization after 1918. Edt. Joanna Kordjak, 2018

A dwelling is is far more than four walls and a roof, and architecture is always political. But cooperative residential architecture has particularly many political meanings. Analysing interwar cooperative movements, including the housing estates built by the Warsaw Housing Cooperative (Warszawska Spółdzielnia Mieszkaniowa, WSM), we need to bear in mind various contexts imparting political significance to it: young statehood, housing shortages, modernist architec- ture and the Athens Charter, emancipation movements, and, initially at least, a wave of postwar optimism. (translation of polish text: Marcin Wawrzyńczak)

2015

Following the political breakthrough of 1989 architects were faced with completely new challenges. After the lethargy of the 1980s Polish architecture experienced a real turn. A remarkable transformation was taking place along with the general cultural, social, political and economic changes. The opening to the trends in Western culture, the establishment of numerous private architectural studios, the appearance of development companies or foreign investors, coupled with new technological possibilities resulted in the change of Polish urban landscape. As a result, Polish municipal authorities had to review their way of thinking about their cities. The paper aims at analysing the changes stimulated by the “turn” which took place in Polish architecture in the 1990s. It presents some observations on the transformation and the emerging challenges and problems of Łódź urban space.

Poland in the European Union – perspectives of membership, 2017

Relations between power and architecture have been known since ancient times. In the 20th century they were best expressed in totalitarian systems. This caused peculiar reluctance towards this form of ideological message in contemporary democracies. It is, however, impossible to escape from ideological meanings of architecture and the currently executed history-based politics of democratic states must find ways to use architecture for political purposes in order to be more effective. Since 2004 there has been a certain problem with the history-based politics itself in Poland (which de facto only recently has been executed in conscious and systemic manner by the state), as it seems that it still remains at the level of selection of ideas to be promoted through it. Deeper reflection on history-based politics, i.e. the form of promoting certain ideas, particularly by architecture and spatial forms, still remains a subject of thoughts and discussions. It often happens that museums which are significant for history-based politics are situated in objects which are incompatible with the ideas that they are to promote or their location is peripheral (not to say: random) and it doesn't take into consideration either the matter of mobility of visitors or accessibility of the place for locals and foreigners. This phenomenon (of some shallowness of Polish history-based politics, divesting it of an architectural and spatial advantage, which is important for presented ideas) deserves some deeper thoughts embraced in this paper.

Mazowsze Studia Regionalne, 2018

The aim of the paper is to analyze the substance of Polish postwar modernist architecture, their meanings at the moment of their creation, and the way this architecture is understood today. The change in the reception of the legacy of modern constructions erected in the times of the Polish People's Republic is juxtaposed with theories of value of historic monuments and the theory of postmemory.

Architektúra & urbanizmus, 2024

This paper traces the continuities between the post-war Polish husband-and-wife architect duo of Oskar and Zofia Hansen, and their predecessors from the interwar avant-garde, the husband-and-wife artist duo of painter Władysław Strzemiński and sculptor Katarzyna Kobro. It argues that the Hansens’ Open Form (1958) approach extended the essentialism of Strzemiński and Kobro’s theory of Unism (1924) to advance a modern architecture. This paper analyzes the design for a memorial at Auschwitz-Birkenau that the Hansens worked on as part of a team for an international competition, called the Road (1958), as the crystallization of Unism’s influence on the theory of the Open Form.

2020

A report by Ksenia Litvinenko on the conference "Postmodern Architecture and Political Change – Poland and Beyond", organized by Błażej Brzostek, Florian Urban, and Annika Wienert

2021

The Warsaw architectural community was the largest such group within the territory of the Second Polish Republic, a fact influenced by Warsaw's role of as the capital, the number of investments undertaken during the interwar period when the capital was being rebuilt, and the presence of Warsaw Polytechnic Institute to educate new academic staff. During the occupation, this large community did not cease its professional activity. The article reviews professional activities undertaken by architects between 1939 and 1944 — i.e., from the outbreak of the Second World War until the Warsaw Uprising. This subject has not been dealt with comprehensively until now. The author looks at both institutionalized works, prepared under the auspices of the City Board as part of the clandestine activities of the Architecture Department at the Warsaw University of Technology, as well as individual architectural projects. From the perspective of the history of Warsaw's urban design, the work of...

2017

15 This is not to suggest that palimpsest is most useful figure for thinking about Warsaw (an unruly, living, un-designed 'object' categorically different from any representation of itself). A critique of Andreas Huyssen's proposition of city-as-palimpsest is offered by Ella Chmielewska, who posits that in relation to Warsaw specifically it is difficult to speak of "palimpsest" conditiont as the mnemonic apparatus is often 'unworkable'. See: Ella Chmielewska, "Material errata: Warsaw neons and socialist modernity",

Periodica Polytechnica Architecture

The aim of this paper is to clarify and exemplify the difference between modern, socialist realism and late modern in architecture. In the general pre-theoretical use of these terms, this distinction is often blurred; a unified expression, socialist realism, is used for all the aforementioned terms. This paper will examine a possible answer for this phenomenon by using examples from different areas of eastern-Central Europe, especially from Hungarian architecture.The paper first focuses on the façadism of socialist realism in the architecture of eastern-Central Europe. Following this, it shows that the architectural tendencies of classical modernism did not disappear in this period; they were just not explicitly manifest in case of public buildings for example. Finally, the paper argues that after this socialist realist gap, architectural theory and planning tendencies of the interwar period returned and continued, especially the work of Le Corbusier.

Art and Politics in the Modern Period, 2019

The paper describes the case of an architectural style, which was worked out and made a political career during the last decades of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s existence (ca. 1760–1795), and was later, after the Napoleonic wars, recognized as the sole appropriate style of the new state (1815–1830). The restructuring of urban centres after 1815 entailed the need for an architectural style that could easily adapt to many functions. The aesthetic order and clarity of neoclassicism found its best expression in edifices built during the period of restructuring, which created order in spatially chaotic towns in the Kingdom of Poland. Examples are drawn from the cities and towns of Warsaw, Kalisz, Radom and Lublin, which underwent such restructuring after 1815.

...The “sketches for a history” I have gathered in the present volume speak of the architectural practice under communism, in Romania. ... They are far from being “the history” whose lack I felt with such professional frustration, but they do outline a number of strongly argued ideas for that “history”: their aim is to sketch a meaningful geometry of architectural development under communism. The meaning comes from the focus on the way the profession was practised and not on forms; hence, the proposed segmentation into periods and the corresponding criteria, as well as the connections with pre-war, post-1989 and free-world architecture.