I’ve just stumbled upon this show and while I find it extremely interesting as a whole the part on Warsaw Iis sadly a bit lacking.

The main problem is the picture of Warsaw as comprising of a tiny reconstructed old town surrounded by a monotnous sea of ‘huge, grey, ugly communist architecture’ (a sample of very professional architectural vecabulary by the way)

1. First of all it is simply factually incorrect. The old town and the Royal Route are neither the only not the biggest areas with pre-war architecture in Warsaw. For a short list you have:

– a large area of relatively luxurious late 19th – early 20th century tennement houses (most of downtown south of Jerozolimskie Avanue, left intact as Germans made it their living quarters during the occupation)

– an even larger area of largely neglcted late 19th – early 20th century tennement houses and vintage industrial architecture in Praga district, at the left bank of the river (this was already controlled by the Russians when Hitler’s order of levelling the city was carried out on the right bank)

Notice that both areas mentioned above – contrary to what is said on the show – attarct quite a lot of tourists, largely because significant part od city’s nightlife can be found there, as opposed to the Old Town which is goes to sleep pretty early

– distircts of Ochota, Mokotów and Żoliborz which were outer suburbs largely build up in the inter-war era and therefore contain a nice selection of early 20th century styles (think Bauhaus etc.). These were also left largely untouched by the planned destruction of the city center.

And even in the areas of the city center where the destruction was the biggest there were still individual buildings left standing which were later incorporated into post war city planning, adding to a peculiar mix of architecture typical for downtown Warsaw. Various bad things can be sad about the architecture of central areas of the city, but ‘uniform’ or ‘monotonous’ are not among them. There are of course large commieblock neighbourhoods further from the center, but these were largely build outside of pre-war city limits, on areas that in 1939 would be farmland or sparsely settled outer suburbs.

2. The other thing is that under this ‘huge grey ugly communist architecture’ you are mixing up two very distinct architectural styles, a) socialist realist (also known as socialist classical) style of high Stalinism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalinist_architecture

and b) le Corbusier influenced modernism, which replaced the former rapidly as a dominant architectural style after political changes of 1956.

This difference is essential for understanding the main issue here, that is why the communist decided to rebuild the Warsaw Old Town (and many others similar areas – you may not be aware of it, but the old towns of Poznań or Wrocław or Gdańsk are also to a large degree post war reconstructions).

It can be argued that those reconstructions were essentialy connected with the ideology of socialist realism – the architecture ‘national in form, socialist in essence’, in other words a certain mixture of local traditions and even some form of nationalism with universal communist ideology. An interesting example of a transition between a proper reconstruction and a socialist realist architecture in it’s pure (as exeplified in Warsaw by Palace of Culture or Constitution Square) is Mariensztat district, not far from the Old Town. To the untrained eye it may look like some kind of preserved or reconstructed historical district, while in fact it has nothing to do with what stood there before the war – it is a residential neighbourhood designed and build in late 40s in a human-scaled version of socialst classical style.

http://warszawa78.blox.pl/2007/05/A-moze-zajrzymy-na-Mariensztat.html

Does it really look ‘huge grey and ugly’?

Now what most people refer to ‘grey communist architecture’ is what came after 1956, that is the local version of le Cobusier influenced modernism. It was basically architectural mainstream back then everywhere in the World – and architects and city planners in communist countries embraced it as soon as political pressure to stick to socialist classical style was over. Under this ideology in architecture reconstruction of the past in any form was seen as an anathema, and the reconstruction of old town centres largely stopped. Notice that this is the same period (late 1950s-early 1960s) when the British demolished large parts of their historical city centers to give way for motorways and concrete tower blocks. It was a global current in thinking about architecture and city planning, not restricted in any way to the eastern block countries.

The above argument is neccesarily very short and simplified, but the point is: if you see a former eastern block city consisting of reconstructed old town and commieblock residential areas around it (Warsaw, as mentioned, not really being good example of) then you have to know that this parts were probalby bulit in different times (the reconstrution before 1956, the commieblocks in 1960s or later) and that the architects and planners which did this acted under vastly different ideologies. Some of those Corbusianist designers of 1960s commieblocks would likely oppose the earlier reconstruction (as creating ‘movie sets’, being ‘fake’ etc), had they have any say in it. It is a gross simplification to see all of post WW2 eastern block architecture as stemming from a single, uniform idea.

3. And the last, about corbusianist modernism being ‘huge, grey, ugly and communist’. There is a strong movement currently in Poland of vindication of this architecture, people are starting to see value in it, dscussing the ways to preserve better examples of it and the proper way of repairing or improving the not-so-good ones. Actually a person who consistently refers to all of post WW2 modernism as ‘huge, grey, ugly communist architecture’ as one of authors of this piece does, would (not just among the architecture buffs) be seen as a phillistine, to put it mildily.