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Architecture and the image of the future in the People's Republic of Poland

2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 14; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13602360802705056

1466-4410

David Crowley,

Eastern European Communism and Reforms

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgement I am grateful to Carmen Popescu, Miles Glendinning and Vladimir Kulić for their comments and advice in preparing this essay for publication. Notes Marx, Capital, III (London, Lawrence & Wishart,1997), p. 820. Stefan Dybowski, Problemy rewolucji kulturnej w Polsce Ludowej (Warsaw, 1953). For a (still) good overview of the imposition of Socialist Realism in Poland see Wojciech Włodarczyk, Socrealizm. Sztuka Polska w latach 1950–1954 (Paris, Libella, 1986). Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism. Avant-garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trs., Carl Hanser (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1992), p.49. Andrzej Batista, Betonowe Dziedzictwo. Architektura w Polsce Czasów Komunizmu (Warsaw, PWN Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 2001), pp. 101–5. For a discussion of socmodernist architecture in Slovakia see Hertha Hernau, et al., Eastmodern. Architecture and Design of the 1960s and 1970s of Slovakia (Vienna / New York, Springer, 2007). See Maciej Krasiński, Maciej Gintowt, ‘Hala w Katowicach’, Projekt, 4 (April, 1972), pp. 44–50; Maciej Krasiński, Maciej Gintowt, ‘Hala Widowiskowo-Sportowa w Katowicach’, Architektura, 8-9 (1972), pp. 307–19. Tadeusz Barucki, ‘Środmiescie Katowic’, Projekt, 4 (April, 1970), pp. 2–8. ‘The realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases … Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature.’ Karl Marx, Capital, III, op. cit., p. 820. Irena Dworakowska, ‘O Parku Kultury Na Powiślu’, Architektura, II (1953), p. 278. A good example of this kind of discussion is Jerzy Szuszkiewicz, ‘Czy Rekreacja + Turystyka + Wczasy = Lecznictwo Uzdrowiskowej?’, Architektura (April, 1962), pp. 32–33. Elżbieta Węcławowicz-Bilska, ‘Mieszkać w uzdrowisku’, Czasopismo Techniczne (2007): online journal accessed August, 2008. Anne White, Destalinization and the House of Culture: Declining State Control over Leisure in the USSR, Poland and Hungary, 1953–89 (London, Routledge, 1990), p. 35. See also Simone Hain and Stephan Stroux, Die Salons der Sozialisten. Kulturhäuser in der DDR (Berlin, Ch. Links, 1996). Andrzej Bulanda, Jerzy Sołtan. Rozmowy o architekturze (Warsaw, Wydawnictwo Akademii Sztuk Pieknych, 1996), p. 50. For an analysis of her speech see Hilde Heynen, ‘The Jargon of Authenticity. Modernism and its (non)-political position’, in, Mart Kalm and Ingrid Ruudi, eds, Constructed Happiness. Domestic environment in the Cold War Era (Tallinn, Estonian Academy of Arts, 2005), pp.10–27. Helena Syrkus, ‘Art Belongs to the People’, in, J. Ockman, ed., Architecture Culture 1943–1968 (New York, Rizzoli, 1993), p.121. The 35th postulate of the Athens Charter advocated the ‘blossoming of diverse communal activities which forms the extension of leisure’ [p. 140] And the 37th postulate of the charter stated ‘Green surfaces which are intimately amalgamated with built volumes and inserted into the living districts will not have a unique function of beautifying the city. They will, above all, play a useful role and this will be to provide the grounds for collective institutions; crèches, pre and after-school groups, youth circles, centres for intellectual renewal or physical culture, lecture halls, running tracks or open-air fishing.’ (Le Groupe CIAM-France, La Charte D'Athènes, 1979 reprint), pp.142–43. Referring to Khrushchev's famous report to architects in December, 1954, Syrkus stated ‘it seems that since we accepted the theses proving that the direction adopted in 1949 was erroneous … we should not stick to the lost cause’: Syrkus in Ogólnopolski Narada Architektów (Warsaw, 1956), p. 485. Paid vacations came increasingly to be understood as a right of citizenship bound up with a modern standard of living and part of a new social contract. And the ‘right to the landscape’, ‘the right to nature’ were loudly claimed by the Left in the period. See, for instance, David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London, Reaktion, 1998). Szymon Syrkus, Rapport no 3 Cas D'Application Régions et Campagnes, in Logis et Loisirs, 5e Congrès CIAM Paris 1937 (1980 reprint), p. 48. Chris Rojek, Decentering Leisure (London, Sage, 1995), p. 187. Szeklys' comments were made in a round-table discussion recorded in Stolica (3rd February, 1955), p. 2. A mind-numbing flood of such data was published as annual statistical reports by the Ministry of Culture and Art. See Ministerstwo kultury i sztuki, Sprawozdanie z działalności za rok 1948, and subsequent years (Warsaw, 1949 onwards). See my essay ‘Thaw Modern. Design in Eastern Europe after 1956’, in, David Crowley and Jane Pavitt, eds, Cold War Modern. Design 1945–1970 (London, V&A Publishing, 2008), pp. 128–50. Interview by the author with Witold Cęckiewicz, Cracow, September, 2007. See also Małgorzata Włodarczyk, Architektura lat 60-tych w Krakowie (Cracow, WAM, 2006), pp. 87–92 and Witold Cęckiewicz, ‘Hotel “Cracovia” w Krakowie’, in Architektura (September, 1968) p. 344. Interview by the author with Witold Cęckiewicz, Cracow, September, 2007. See Eglė Rindzevičiūtė, Constructing Soviet Cultural Policy: Cybernetics and Governance in Lithuania after World War II (Linkoping, Linkoping University Press, 2008); S.E. Reid ‘The Khrushchev Kitchen: Domesticating the Scientific-Technological Revolution’, in Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 40, no. 2 (2005), pp. 289–316. Conrad Hilton, cited by Annabel Jane Wharton, Building the Cold War: Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 87. Slavoj Žižek, ‘When the Party Commits Suicide’, in New Left Review (November-December, 1999), p. 46. Slavoj Žižek, ‘Design as an Ideological State-Apparatus’, lecture presented at ERA05, the World Design Congress held in Copenhagen in 2005: see http://www.icograda.org (consulted November, 2006). Many of the hotels and other aspects of the tourist infrastructure were opened to coincide with the millennial celebrations in Poland in 1966, an event which was organised, in part, to stimulate Western tourism. See Henry Kamm, ‘In Proud Poland’, New York Times (6th March, 1966). See Alan Levy, ‘Medieval and Marxist, Cracow Hosts a Holiday Inn’, New York Times (26th November, 1976), pp. 1–2, 16. An associate of the Situationist International, Ivan Chtcheglov imagined a new ‘New Urbanism’ in terms of the ‘need to play’: ‘We have already pointed out the need of constructing situations as being one of the fundamental desires on which the next civilisation will be founded. This need for absolute creation has always been intimately associated with the need to play with architecture, time and space …’ See ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’ available at http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/1 - accessed September, 2008. See various essays in Max Risselada, Dirk van den Heuvel, eds, Team 10. In Search of a Utopia of the Present 1953–1981 (Rotterdam, NAi, 2006). Collaborators within the framework of an experimental studio at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Art, Jerzy Sołtan and the artist-architect Oskar Hansen were active participants in Team X meetings in the late 1950s. See Hansjakob Stehle, Independent Satellite. Society and Politics in Poland since 1945 (New York, Pall Mall Press, 1965), p.199. See Pawel Machcewicz, ‘Intellectuals and Mass Movements, Ideologies and Political Programs in Poland in 1956’, in, György Péteri, ed., Intellectual Life and the First Crisis of State Socialism in East Central Europe, 1953–1956 (Trondheim, PEECS, 2001). Leszek Kołakowski's ‘The Priest and the Jester’, in Twórczość (1959), reproduced in Toward a Marxist Humanism, trs., Jane Zielonko Peel (New York, Grove Press, 1969), p. 34. See Michał Woliński, ‘Sztuczna przestrzen. Wystawy i pawilony’, Piktogram, 11 (2008), pp. 118–152. Oskar Hansen, Towards Open Form (Frankfurt/ Warsaw, Foksal Gallery Foundation, 2005), p.136. E. Fromm, Marx's Concept of Man (London, Continuum, 2004), p. 82. Hansen has been well regarded, it should be noted, as a precursor of the kind of spatialised art practices in vogue in Poland in the 1960s, including happenings, performances and ‘dzieła-procesu’ (works of process). See Łukasz Ronduda, ‘Gry i Rozmowe Plastyczne, Działania I Współdziałania’, Piktogram, 05-06 (2006), pp. 14–125.