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1

THE DECADE OF LUXURY. PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF POLAND AND THE HOTELS IN THE 1970'S (Dekada luksusu. PRL i hotele w latach 70.)

100%
Szczerski A.
Ikonotheka
|
2007
|
issue 20
161-162
EN
If judged by the People's Republic of Poland's (PRL) standards, the 1970's were a decade of luxury. After the hungry years of the post-war reconstruction and then the years of 'small-scale stability', luxury became the trademark and the passport to legitimacy for the new government. Hence, luxury assumed a strictly ideological dimension. New models of leisure culture, the rapidly developing tourism among them, were some of the signs of luxury. In the entire history of the PRL the 1970's were undoubtedly the highest point of architecture related to leisure and tourism, both with regard to numbers and with regard to quality. For instance, in this period 'Orbis', the state-owned tourist bureau, built twenty-three hotels, thus doubling its possessions in this respect. The Warsaw hotels Forum (1973) and Victoria (1976) stand out among new edifices constructed with a clearly propagandist aim in mind. They were built on the basis of the so-called 'investment import' by Swedish architects and mainly using methods of construction imported from Sweden. The other larger towns and tourist centres in attractive regions of Poland soon followed in Warsaw's footsteps. Several hotels were constructed in cooperation with partners from beyond the Iron Curtain; their construction was financed by international loans. Very few could afford this level of luxury, since prices there were astronomical; the 'democratisation' of luxury was only visible in health and holiday resorts constructed by state-owned enterprises. For instance, the state heavy industry plants built the 'Orle Gniazdo' holiday home in Szczyrk (1974), the tourist village in Porabka-Kozubnik (constructed from 1969 onward) or the health resort section of Ustron-Zawodzie designed to house seven thousand visitors (1971-75). A far more modest, but more accessible 'mass luxury' was provided on holidays organised by the Employee Holiday Fund. The level of luxury at particular hotels demonstrated the stratification of society and attested to the new strategy of the authorities. By manipulating the attributes of affluence, the authorities wanted to convey an impression of a dynamic development of the country. Hotels were used as a very specific simulacrum. Paradoxically, the attributes of capitalist consumption were perceived as the signs of progress. This demonstrates that the Communist regime was ready, to a large extent, to submit to the process of 'auto-colonisation' and create a hyper-realist picture of the West as a model for imitation in the country. Despite all those efforts, however, the hotels of that decade were only a modest version of the hotels aboard (the interiors of the Victoria Hotel in Warsaw being only an exception to the rule). They just attested to the provinciality of the People's Republic of Poland, where the 'Soc-Modernist', grotesque kitsch received accolades. In the 1970's, therefore, luxury constituted an element of control over the society, and hotels were the space where reality was 'carnivalised'.
2
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POLISH ARCHITECTS GRADUATING FROM THE ST. PETERSBURG ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS BETWEEN 1814 AND 1914

100%
Omilanowska M.
Biuletyn Historii Sztuki
|
2004
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vol. 66
|
issue 3-4
351-373
EN
Virtually all Poland's major architects born in the later half of the 19th century completed their studies beyond its pre-partition borders. The Galician architects thus studied mainly in Vienna, those from the former Duchy of Poznan in Berlin, while those born in the Russian Partition went to either the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts or the Institute of Civilian Engineers, both in St. Petersburg. The system of acquiring qualifications based on examination, introduced in schools for military engineering and academies from the late 18th century, remained largely arbitrary and one entered by people intending to make a career in governmental administration. In the wake of the second wave of repressive measures after the January Uprising (1863-4), the generation of architects born after ca. 1850 was essentially forced to study in Russian schools. Following on from the essentially late-Classical orientation of lectures in the early decades of the 19th century, a strong historicist leaning with an increasing bias for vernacular traditions and forms was introduced from the 1830s onwards. It may be concluded that the St. Petersburg Academy never became a modern school of higher learning; in spite of a new statute introduced in 1894, the Academy continued to represent one of the most conservative schools of architecture in Europe. As time passed, however, the programme did begin to resemble that of the Institute of Civil Engineers, where considerably greater emphasis was laid on acquiring qualifications for bureaucratic positions, and whose Polish graduates, no less than its Russian ones, subsequently worked as engineers and builders throughout the entire Empire, thus returning to home towns and regions far less typically. Prior to the 1860s around 25 students based in the imperial capital are recorded as originating from the Russian Partition, compared to around 65 Poles from Central Poland and the so-called eastern borderlands graduated from the St. Petersburg Academy between 1867 and 1918.
3

ALMOST A MONUMENT - ALMOST A REMEMBRANCE (Prawie pomnik - prawie pamiec)

80%
Lesniakowska M.
Ikonotheka
|
2007
|
issue 20
147-159
EN
The article concerns the issue of contemporary monumental sculpture viewed as narration. Comparison is drawn between two monumental structures, both erected in Europe and both referring to the WW II: the Memorial to Warsaw Uprising (Warsaw, 1979, Andrzej Domanski, constructed for the 35th anniversary of the outbreak of the Uprising), and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas), also known as the Holocaust Memorial (Berlin, 2003-5, Peter Eisenman). The authoress presents these structures as illustrations to two different models of representing history. Those models, functioning with the sphere of the 'policy of remembrance', are viewed as two opposing historiographic schemes. She finds the monuments to be an expression of the discourse on monuments functioning as texts in the public space, related to Dominick LaCapra's theory of history as memory and Frank Ankersmit's Narrativism, and on this basis conducts an analysis of both structures as historiographic texts. The reading of the Warsaw monument, which was erected in the Communist period, demonstrates that its chief category is 'the memory of forgetting' and that it is a memorial to the 'other hero'. Its true subject / 'hero' turns out not to be the Warsaw Uprising at all. Instead, this monument is the demonstration of the propaganda of the People's Republic of Poland, the then 'manager of memory'. The idea of the pseudo-abstract form of this 'almost a monument' refers to the manner in which the memory of the Warsaw Uprising was viewed by the authorities: as an experience which can essentially be erased, removed from history or presented in an ideologically appropriate manner. The persuasive power of the monument was aimed at 'teaching' the viewer-recipient to perceive the appropriate historiographic vision. It is, therefore, the monument to the killers, not to the victims. Applying the method of 'inverted reading' of this memorial as a historical narrative, the authoress demonstrates that this 'almost a monument' has also a meaning which was not conceived by its creators. It can be, in fact, interpreted as the memorial to those who are absent and excluded, and hence as a disguised memorial to the victims. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is an antithesis to the Warsaw monument. Its main idea is also based on the 'management of memory', the ideologisation of the city space and the hermeneutics of a monument as a text, but understood from an entirely opposite point of view. There, the perception of the past is understood as 'remembering to remember' (Ankersmit).From the formal point of view, both monuments seemingly display similar features of style (minimalism, abstract art and geometry - radical representations of a symbolic form); yet the aesthetic narration of these two memorials brings about different results. Interpreted as two models of representing, interpreting and evaluating history (historiography), these memorials refer not to the past itself, but to the present day's manner of looking at the past.
4

Reinforced-Concrete Cathedrals of the Monumentalism. References to the Gothic in Polish Ecclesiastical Architecture of the 1930s

80%
Burno F.
Ikonotheka
|
2005
|
issue 18
87-104
EN
The search for new methods of creating monumental expression is one of the most interesting phenomena in the architecture of the 1930s.The aim of this article is to demonstrate the presence of references to the Gothic tradition in the Polish ecclesiastical architecture of that period. The competitions for the project of the Temple of Divine Providence in Warsaw, which took place in the years 1929 and 1931, have a special importance for the further development of Polish ecclesiastical architecture of the 1930s, including the trend discussed here. Bohdan Pniewski, the winner of the second competition, did not use direct quotations from the Gothic: pointed arches, tracery or pinnacles, or even the skeleton construction of the shafts and ribs; instead, he tried to indicate the character of the Gothic architecture, for instance by stressing the spire-like slenderness of the silhouette by means of lizenes, which divided the façades into narrow, often concave segments. Only the huge stained-glass rosettes were a direct borrowing from the Gothic repertoire of forms. The forms façade proposed in his project for the Temple of Providence and the 1933 project for the Sea Basilica in Gdynia were readily imitated in Polish ecclesiastical architecture of the 1930s. e.g. in the 1932 project by Bronislaw Colonna Walewski of the Church of Christ the King in the Warsaw district of Targówek (never carried out). Analogies to Pniewski's competition project can also be found in the 1934 project by Franciszek Maczynski of the Church of St. Kazimierz the Prince in Cracow, which unfortunately was carried out only partially. To the reinforced-concrete cathedrals of Bohdan Pniewski referred the projects of the Lvov church of the Missionaries of St Vincent a Paulo by Waclaw Rembiszewski and associates, and by Tadeusz Teodorowiczow-Todorowski (completed only in part by 1939) as well as the Czestochowa church of St Anthony (1936-1939 and 1947-1956) by Zygmunt Gawlik. The Waclaw Lisowski's 1935 project of the new front façade of the Church of the Transfiguration in Lódz, Andrzej Boni's (Church of Mary's Purest Heart in Warsaw 1934-1941) and Wawrzyniec Dayczak (church in Lvov-Sygniówka) are mentioned as well.
5

'BEHIND THE IRON GATE': SURPLUS OF MEMORY, PLACE OF MEMORY, AND FORGETTING IN A CONTEMPORARY CITY (Za Zelazna Brama. Nadmiar pamieci, miejsce pamieci i zapominanie we wspolczesnym miescie)

80%
Switek G.
Ikonotheka
|
2007
|
issue 20
117-146
EN
'Behind the Iron Gate' is the name of the massive-scale housing estate in the centre of Warsaw, consisting of 19 apartment blocks, 16 storeys each, designed by a team of Polish architects (Jan Furman, Jerzy Czyz, Jerzy Józefowicz, Andrzej Skopinski) between 1966-1970. This realisation has been interpreted as one of the far-reaching consequences of the Athens Charter which commited CIAM to a single type of urban housing, described as high, widely-spaced apartment blocks wherever the necessity of housing high density of population exists. In the 1970s, the Behind the Iron Gate housing estate was considered a symbol of Polish socialist prosperity. The principles of so-called modern rationalism - that is, 'Siedlungen' responding to the drastic housing shortage, and 'Existenzminimum' understood as the apartment for the minimal existence - became subject to a political propaganda which affected the post-war urbanism in Poland as the country behind the Iron Curtain. Since 1989, the Behind the Iron Gate area is one of the most active construction sites in the city, attracting foreign investments, and gradually shaped as a 'Warsaw Manhattan'. Former green zones and playgrounds now host parking lots, bank and insurance company buildings, business centers, and exclusive hotels. At the same time, the Behind the Iron Gate housing estate is a rather neglected part of the city; the pre-fabricated apartment blocks are often referred to as 'architecture on pension', 'slums' or even 'pathological substandards'. 'A Surplus of Memory' is the title of memoirs by Yitzhak 'Antek' Zuckerman, a member of the Jewish Fighting Organization Command, who took part in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The Behind the Iron Gate housing estate was designed upon the field of ruins of the so-called 'small ghetto' liquidated in August 1942. On today's map of Warsaw, there are only few ruins in this highly built-up area that constitute the Jewish Route of Memory: a part of the ghetto wall, a gate, fragments of the original pavement and rails, and some pre-war 'memory places', such as the sites of non existing houses: of Isaac Bashevis Singer at Krochmalna street and of Icchok Lejbusz Perec at Ceglana (now Pereca street). Designed as a narrative walk along the contemporary streets and squares of the Behind the Iron Gate area, the paper examines the specificity of urban memory and questions the notion itself. Paul Ricoeur's description of the threefold, interpretative nature of the historiographical operation (as demonstrated in his 'Memory, History, Forgetting') is referred to the concrete urban site with its ambiguous character. Acknowledging the reciprocity of writing history and collecting memories, as well as the difference between the ontological question and the 'hauntological' description, the paper discusses the possibilities of historiographical and commemorative tasks of architecture. The Behind the Iron Gate area with its contemporary in-fills, socialist blocks and ruins, where architecture is not turned into a timeless monument or a museum-district, serves as an example of both the space of memory and the space of forgetting.
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