ARCHITECTURE RENAISSANCE FOR POLAND

By Michael Webb - 3 July 2017

Resilience is the greatest asset of the Poles, who retained their pride and sense of nationhood during two centuries of foreign occupation. Twenty years of independence between the world wars were succeeded by the brutal onslaught of the Nazis and the Red Army, devastation and deportations, a massive shift of borders and population, and four decades as a Soviet satellite. The Poles fought back, in the Warsaw uprising and the Solidarity movement. Filmmakers and other artists exploited every loophole, and the catholic church strengthened public resistance to oppression. By 1989 the country was bankrupt but, in contrast to its former overlord, it quickly achieved a good measure of democracy, prosperity, and decentralization. In 2003 Poland joined the EU, and spent its subsidies wisely, on infrastructure and buildings of exceptional architectural quality. Form Follows Freedom: Architecture for Culture in Poland 2000+ is the title of a recent book that celebrates the best arts-related buildings to be constructed in Poland since 2000. A more accurate title might be “Form Follows Funding”, for many of the 26 featured buildings and several completed since were made possible by EU grants. Now that source has run dry, the momentum is likely to slow. High-profile projects by foreign architects, such as the Philharmonic Halls of Szczecin (Estudio Barozzi Veiga) and Toruń (Fernando Menis Architect), and the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw (Lahdelma & Mahlamäki Architects) have drawn the most attention. But a majority of the featured work is by small Polish firms, established since the collapse of communism, who are creating a distinctive architecture for the new Poland. As a sampling of this renaissance, I’ve selected four firms founded in the late 1990s, whose work I explored on a recent tour of Poland. Surprisingly, none of them is based in Warsaw, which has focused more on the restoration of historic monuments and constructing a...