Sosnowski’s inter-war architecture students were a far more valued source. Walking over a glass floor, beneath which lies smashed masonry and columns recovered from the ruins, a series of then-and-now slides and pictures document Old Town’s annihilation and the subsequent forced exile of its habitants on September 2nd, 1944. Fortunately for us, Sosnowski’s archive was rescued from the Faculty of Polish Architecture – on the same day Bruno Korotyński’s Varsoviana collection was retrieved from a burning building. Hidden first in a fire station, and then in the upright coffins of monks in a Bernadine monastery, these were to form the basis of the rebuilding project. As early as March 1945, staff of the Historic Architecture Department began sifting through the rubble collecting objects of interest, and while whack job ideas were mooted to leave the city as a ruin or, even, transform it into a memorial lake, these never really gained momentum. Finally, in 1949, a six-year plan was approved to rebuild Old Town. Prior to the war this area of town was scruffy, rundown and regarded as a district for the sub-class. The reconstruction allowed architects the opportunity to remodel it to meet the criteria of a modern housing estate and ‘return’ it to the general population. Reading the detailed text boards, we learn this was not necessarily straightforward – three different projects were prepared by different departments, and there were political conditions that also needed to be satisfied. The communist government had planned only to reconstruct three sides of the square, leaving the east side empty as a symbolic gesture that would embody Poland’s new political direction. It is a credit to the architects, planners and workers that they were having none of that: under orders from the architect Jan Zachwatowicz, a crew of builders set about rebuilding the eastern side in the dead of night. Zachwatowicz’s gamble that the commies wouldn’t want to risk offending the public by dismantling it proved dead on. Visiting the Rynek, party leader Bołesław Bierut is alleged to have decreed, “we cannot knock down what the working class have already built.” But if that side was saved, the Royal Castle – emblematic of Polish independence – faced bigger problems. Approval for that was only rubber stamped in 1971, and even then the government refused to donate a single groszy to its reconstruction: what you see was completed in 1984 and entirely funded by the public. Seeing the photographs of the castle as an empty shell, its boundaries ringed by kiosks, one appreciates the sacrifice made by those who pushed hard for it to happen. And the Heritage Interpretation Center is nothing if it is not a heartfelt tribute to those architects who labored so dutifully. If the first section about Warsaw’s physical elimination is poignant, then the others do a fabulous job of sharing the optimism and alacrity that followed. Ending on just such a high note, the exhibition concludes in a cinema where three projector screens show Old Town coming full circle and back to life: the black and white images of 60s, 70s and 80s Warsaw are – at times – hilarious, and backed by a seriously groovy soundtrack that you’ll be humming long after.
“ I t is nothing if it is not a
heartfelt tribute to those architects who labored so dutifully”
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