The three hundred years that have passed since the birth of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) make the author attempt to answer how his utopian views influenced art of Mokotów dedicated to him, one of the earlier landscape gardens from the late 18 th century preserved in Warsaw in a vestigial form.
The article takes a close look at one female cell in Mokotów Prison in Warsaw, where from September 1949 to early 1950, five women were held together: Sabina Stalińska, Halina Zakrzewska, Tonia Lechtman, Ewa Piwińska, and Vera Szot. Stalińska and Zakrzewska both belonged to the Home Army. Lechtman and Piwińska were both committed and active Communists. Szot was arrested for her participation in the Ukra¬inian Insurgent Army. They spent their early months of interrogation in fearful anticipa¬tion of the coming days. Their interpretation of the situation as well as their allegiance to postwar Poland differed. The varied composition of the cell appeared to be an addi¬tional burden, as if confinement in an extremely overcrowded space was not punishment enough. Yet, the existing sources show that, despite the women’s ideological differences, the cell that they shared became an emotionally and intellectually open space, where at least some of the women attempted to understand each other. Their ideological commit¬ments and Communism were the most neutral topics of their discussions. These talks became their framework of self-exploration, which led to the close relationships that some of them continued years after the release.
As early as in 1939, the villa complex of the Off leers’ Housing and Residential Co-operative “Dom”, designed circa 1925 around the Mokotów Fort in Warsaw, formed a small modern housing estate built up with single-family houses representing various architectural traditions, embedded in the topography of the esplanade of the fort, connected by a bus line with the Old Town, provided with municipal infrastructure, a police station, a newsstand and two shops. The history of almost 80 years of construction of the housing complex near the Mokotów Fort presented in this article shows both the process of shaping the foundations of its urban design and architecture in years 1931-1939, architectural and urban developments of the estate in the 1950s and the 1960s, and finally, successive stages of the increasing degradation of its historic fabric which began at the end of the 1960s, thus demonstrating clearly that the growing dynamics and radicalism of its transformation requires conservators to take effective cure of this residential complex. The scope of such care would make it possible to retain the architectural values of various types of single-family houses preserved within its boundaries that are characteristic of several separated pre-war and postwar style formations, and to retain the historic urban complex of the housing estate and its villa & garden nature and climate, which results undoubtedly from its unique location within Warsaw. This article constitutes the first attempt made in the context of the Resolution of the Council of the Warsaw Capital City in 2009 on the commencement of preparing the local spatial development plan for the Wyględów district to present in an orderly manner our overall knowledge of the history of construction and post-war development of the co-operative housing complex near the Mokotów Fort, with special regard to its architecture and urban design, and to provide a detailed diagnosis of the state of preservation of the estate and to use it as a basis for determining effective rules of conservator’s protection that would also suit the specific architectural and urban values and location of the estate.
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