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Chapter 6. Paris or Moscow?: Warsaw Architects and the Image of the Modern City in the 1950s
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105 cHaPter 6 parIs or moscoW? WarSaW arcHitectS and tHe iMaGe oF tHe Modern city in tHe 1950S David Crowley IN 1934, the arChiteCts Szymon Syrkus and Jan Chmielewski presented their plans for the future of Warsaw at a meeting of the Comité international pour la résolution des problèmes de l’architecture contemporaine (the International Committee to Resolve Problems of Modern Architecture), a key Modern Movement forum (and the elected executive body of CIAM, the Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne [International Congresses of Modern Architecture]). Their plan for “Warszawa funkcjonalna” (Functional Warsaw) extended, like an unfolded map, on a countrywide and even international scale (fig. 6.1).1 The city’s functions were to be distributed along an extensive strip with nodes indicating the sites for growth of future smaller centers. Based on the principle of modern communications, the plan emphasized the city’s location between East and West on the “great transcontinental line of communication” that linked Paris through Moscow to the Urals. Rather than conceive the city in terms of fixed elements, “Warszawa funkcjonalna” envisaged the dissolution of city and national boundaries in an extensive network of road, rail, and river routes and junctions. Warsaw was not simply projected as a European city: it was to become Europe itself. This was a heady statement of faith in international modernism (and, accordingly, was published in a series of pamphlets in German, English, and French, though not Russian). The peteri text3.indd 105 8/16/10 10:46 AM 106 david crowley figure 6.1. Illustrations for the “Functional Warsaw” scheme presented by Szymon Syrkus and his colleagues at the Comité International pour la résolution des problèmes de l’architecture comtemporaine , 1934. Source: Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art (London, 1937). peteri text3.indd 106 8/16/10 10:46 AM [35.173.178.60] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:36 GMT) paris or moscow? 107 authors of the scheme admitted that “our plan lies within the realm of utopia.” National and private interests stood in the way of the kind of fluid material and intellectual exchange among peoples that their vision demanded.2 After World War II, new ideological divisions made Syrkus and Chmielewski’s scheme seem even more utopian. Paris or the Urals had become more like polar opposites than points on a route. Their diagrams also now looked more like unpublished secret plans for a Red Army march on Western Europe or NATO designs on the Soviet Union. Paris or Moscow? Both exerted a gravitational pull on Polish architects in the postwar period. Architects went to both capitals during the 1950s in order to understand the different forms that the modern city might take. These tours had strong historical echoes. The conditions of partition had a centrifugal effect on Polish intellectual life, and since the mid-nineteenth century Polish architects had made journeys to Russia and France (and elsewhere in Europe) to boost their careers. An academic training in St. Petersburg or a spell working in the studio of a French architect was a way of acquiring expertise as well as professional and cultural capital. After the country regained its independence in 1918, Polish intellectual life was marked by a strong degree of Francophilia and Russophobia (though it should be noted that Polish modernists —in architecture and the fine arts—were well connected to the Soviet avant-garde through the course of the 1920s).3 After 1945, Paris began to lose its claim to be the center point in the sphere of Western modernity.4 Nevertheless , the city continued to hold a magnetic appeal for Polish architects.5 Ambitious and intellectually curious young professionals continued to be regular visitors to the French capital throughout the postwar period, albeit in small numbers (though probably exceeding their Eastern bloc colleagues). One such visitor was Oskar Hansen, who received a French government scholarship and invitation to work in the Paris studio of Pierre Jeanneret, a prominent modernist architect, in 1948. The contacts forged over the next two years allowed him to become the youngest representative of a band of prominent Polish architects—including Syrkus and Chmielewski—who forged strong professional relationships with their Western colleagues within the frame of CIAM from the late 1920s on.6 What—in retrospect—appears to have left the most powerful impression was not the training he received in Jeanneret’s studio or his meetings with the leading lights of the Modern Movement but life in the streets: “when...