Jak zbudowano nową Warszawę ENGLISH VERSION

HOW NEW WARSAW WAS BUILT

Although the destruction of Warsaw was a major tragedy, immediately after the war the milieu of architects also saw it as a great opportunity. Both radical modernists and the communist authorities wanted to create a new city since they perceived old pre-war Warsaw as a backward place where only a handful of inhabitants could enjoy decent living conditions. On 14 February 1945, the Office for Rebuilding the Capital (ORC) was officially launched – a central institution tasked with lifting the city out of ruin. The Office was led by Roman Piotrowski, a pre-war Warsaw architect linked to the Praesens group, with his deputy Józef Sigalin, an eminence grise of the institution. The latter came from a family of Warsaw industrialists of Jewish origin. He had spent the war in the Soviet Union, returning to Warsaw in 1945 with the rank of a major of the Polish Army. At its peak, the ORC had approximately 1,500 staff members and was heterogenous in terms of ideological beliefs. An important faction was ‘monument guys’ from the Monument Reconstruction Department, pushing for the restoration of the historical fabric of the city. It was thanks to such people as Prof. Jan Zachwatowicz, Piotr Biegański and Stanisław Żaryn that we can now enjoy the Royal Route and the Old Town.

The communists supported the reconstruction of the latter as they sought to win legitimacy in the eyes of ordinary Poles. That is why the ORC employed people like Stanisław Jankowski (nom de guerre Agaton), to take one example, a former adjutant of Gen. Bór-Komorowski. The true victim of the ‘construction of a new city’ was sections of Warsaw from the second half of the 19th and the early 20th century as the architecture of those times was commonly considered of little value, which may sound shocking today as eclectic or art nouveau tenement houses are much appreciated. Back then, the ‘bourgeois’ buildings were being torn down massively. Yet the full reconstruction of the capital city in the spirit of Modernism on a vast scale was never completed as already in 1949 Socialist realism was imposed as the official style in Poland. It lasted five long years.

The ORC was dissolved in 1951 although its leaders played a vital role in the future reconstruction of both Warsaw and the country. Prof. Zachwatowicz must have been proud when UNESCO entered the Old Town of Warsaw on its world heritage list in 1980. It was the first time that the complete reconstruction was so recognised. Also distinguished were documents of the Office for Rebuilding the Capital – a unique record of the scale of the city’s destruction during the Second World War. In 2011, the ORC files together with 44 archival documents from other countries were entered into the Memory of the World Register kept by UNESCO. Today, all we can do is hold debates concerning that particular chapter in the history of architecture.

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