Warsaw Post-War Reconstruction to Present

[Urbanista1]

"It is one of the most wonderful urban celebrations found anywhere in the world"

Anthony M. Tung, Preservation of the World's Great Cities

"She defies the storm" (Ancient Warsaw motto)

1.
This thread will start with the herculanean efforts of the BOS (Biuro Odbudowy Stolicy - Bureau for the Reconstruction of Capital) and the newly created Pracownie Konserwacji Zabytkow (Ateliers for the Conservation of Cultural Property) in the aftermath of World War II and its later incarnations and on reconstruction efforts during the communist era to liberation and to the present.

It is a testament and homage first of all to those architects, engineers, planners and everyday Varsovians who sacrifised the better part of their lives to rebuild Poland's capital, but will also recount tremendous efforts by Polonia and people from other countries around the world who assisted in the greatest urban reconstruction effort of the 20th century of this scale.

The results may be mixed and controversial, a reflection of the ideological, cultural and political ferment that existed in Europe and especially in then Soviet occupied Central and Eastern Europe between the survivors of the pre-war regime, communists, conservators of varying opinions on how to rebuild and Corbusian modernists. Not all that the BOS did was right viewed through the prism of the present-day, many surviving masterpieces of architecture were torn down under their direction post war for ideological reasons more than technical, no one knows for sure, and rebuilt in a "purer" earlier version or a socialist realist-inspired version and some were restored as modern buildings stripped of details, such was the thinking in those days. Far worse outcomes could have befallen Warsaw if those who advocated building an entirely new modern city had won the day. Atleast today we see before us an amalgam of many different architectural styles and urban design philosophies that manage to survive as a testament to Warsaw's turbulent and very rich history.

Anyone with knowledge and photos that document this period is welcome to contribute. Before and afters are welcome, but it would be great to see photos of actual construction and the methods they used.

Basic Facts (taken mainly from A. Ciborowski's Warsaw A City Destroyed and Rebuilt):

• In january 1945, the volume or rubble totalled 720 million cubic feet

• 98,000 mines and shells were removed from the ruins of the city and 1,000 buildings were cleared of mines by sappers, an additional several hundred thousand have been cleared since

• War losses amounted to 800,000 people killed and 85 percent of the city destroyed

Organizational Structure of the BOS (Capital Bureau of Reconstruction)



Anyone visiting Warsaw should check out this film at the Warsaw Uprising Museum that recreates the post-war ruins of Warsaw

By Monika Scislowska, The Associated Press

WARSAW, Poland - The plane slowly descends from white clouds and sweeps over a panorama of a city destroyed by the Nazis: the skeletons of bombed bridges jutting from a quiet river, the empty walls of burned-out houses, the Jewish ghetto totally flattened.

It is Warsaw in the spring of 1945, just after World War II.

The sea of rubble that Warsaw was reduced to during the war is vividly reconstructed in a 3D film that historians and computer graphics experts showed for the first time in Warsaw on Wednesday.

The goal of the film, which must be seen with special 3D glasses, is to bringing home to a young generation the scope of the wartime devastation of Poland's capital.

"Young people do not understand what it means that Warsaw was in ruins; they think it was just a few collapsed houses," Jan Oldakowski, the director of the Warsaw Uprising Museum, told reporters at a screening of the film "City of Ruins."

"Nor were we, at the museum, fully aware of what the city looked like," he said.

The 1939-45 destruction was the result of bombings carried out by Nazi Germany, which invaded Poland in 1939 and occupied it for six years, killing millions of people. Most of the damage resulted from the German army's revenge for the city's 1944 uprising against its brutal rule.

The uprising failed after 63 days of an uneven struggle, but as one of Europe's most dramatic acts of resistance to Nazi rule remains an important element of Polish national identity. The heroism shown by the insurgents — among them women and teenagers — is a source of deep pride to this day.

Oldakowski said it took 40 specialists two years to make the five-minute 3D aerial view sequence, a simulation of an imaginary flight of a British Liberator bomber over the city right after the war in 1945.

It reconstructs the trajectory that RAF bombers took when bringing arms and supplies to the insurgency. The uprising began on Aug. 1, 1944, and the release of the film is timed to mark the 66th anniversary.

Starting Sunday, the film will be shown to visitors at the museum, which documents the uprising and is a major draw for tourists and students from across the country. Last year, it had some 500,000 visitors.

Michal Gryn, from the Platige Image studio which made the film, said the team was not aware at first of the challenge before them in the form of the masses of documentary material they had to go through.

"It was a unique project to build a 3D model of authentic city ruins and make five minutes of film from it," Gryn said. "I don't think that anyone in the world has done this."

His team took a helicopter flight over contemporary Warsaw to film base material. They filled it in with detail from some 2,000 historic pictures, films and paintings — some from private archives — to recreate Warsaw as it was after the war.

The result is a computer simulation that shows collapsed bridges along the Vistula River, whole districts of roofless, burned-out houses and the Warsaw Ghetto as a flat sea of rubble.

A solemn musical score enhances the sense of death and menace.

An inscription that closes the film says that before the war some 1.3 million people lived in Warsaw, some 900,000 at the start of the uprising and just 1,000 amid the ruins in 1945.

Before the war, some 10 per cent of the city's population was Jewish.

Most experts consider up to 40% of pre-war Warsaw to have been rebuilt in some form or another, including a meticulous reconstruction of the Gothic and Renaissance Old Town. Today it is a bustling city of some 1.7 million (agglomeration of approximately 4 million), an administrative and business centre with many high-rise buildings.

Rare 3D film shows Warsaw devastated after WWII

[rychlik]

I'll try my best to help where I can. I will be in Warsaw in late May and will take lots of pics.

http://mikerychlik.ifp3.com/

[Tiaren]

This might be an awesome thread! I'm thrilled for information!

[Iluminat]

Old Town after reconstruction:

[rychlik]

The best reconstruction in Europe.

[Urbanista1]

Thank you for visiting Tiaren, rychlik and Illuminat, for being the first visitors you win an all expense paid trip to Warsaw, well, a virtual trip to the following related threads (in Polish only sorry):

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=214856
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=492950
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=108168
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=1054533
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=208264

I will be posting much more later

[rychlik]

I wish they would rebuild this:

[rychlik]

Before n after:





Mixed feelings on this one:

[rychlik]

The Praga district across the river which survived the war:

[rychlik]

[rychlik]

image hosted on flickr


Very nice renovation.

[rychlik]

del

[Urbanista1]

2.

Anticipating Hitler's ultimate plans, the reconstruction of Warsaw started before the war and during its destruction. Planners and architects in Warsaw risked their lives when they began surveying the city during the war and covertly making plans for its recontruction. Upon cessation of hostilities the planning and even working drawings were ready to commence the immense effort that faced them. A covert Studio for Architecture and Town Planning was located in the Cooperative Building Enterprise to study postwar needs. One of the pioneers of Polish modern architecture, Szymon Syrkus was its director until his deportation to Auschwitz. The Planning Department worked clandestinely with a secret commission of town planning experts to study the redevelopment of Warsaw's circulation routes.

The greatest feat is attributed to the members and faculty of the Warsaw Technical University's architecture department. Of especial note were the efforts of Professor Jan Zachwatowicz who obtained a special pass to enter the deserted and devastated city as fighting raged on between Nazi German forces and brave Warsaw Uprising insurgents. During several such trips his team recovered the massive documentation of Warsaw's historic structures hidden in the architectural department. The documentation (drawings and photographs) of Warsaw's heritage began at the turn of the century and picked up apace immediately after the Russian Tsarist occupation ended in 1919. Although by command of the German occupying force the university had been reduced to a secondary school for training in building trades, as an act of defiance, faculty and students developed studies on Warsaw's reconstruction all through the war and occupation and continued the documentation of the city's landmarks. After the war, the next generation of Polish planners and architects was ready to get to work.

These studies along with the documentation retrieved by Professor Zachwatowicz were all hidden in the ancient stone coffins of dead monks in the monastery of Piortkow and after the war formed the sine qua non basis for Warsaw's meticulous reconstruction along with detailed paintings of Warsaw by Bernardo Bellotto.

Reconstruction begins:

• On january 13, 1945 the Polish government in Soviet occupied Poland decides in the temporary capital of Lublin to rebuild Warsaw

• The legal basis for systematic town planning and reconstruction was the Polish Government Decree of October 1945 that made all city land municipal property, only buildings belonged to previous owners. This gave planners total freedom to arrange and plan the city's land uses and infrastructurebut was also tantamount to expropriation

• The organization in charge was the Biuro Odbudowy Stolicy or Warsaw Reconstruction Office (later replaced by Warszawska Dyrekcja Odbudowy - Warsaw Reconstruction Management Office) who oversaw the clearing of rubble, the creation of a masterplan, design of reconstructed historic buildings and the prioritization and sequencing of reconstruction. BOS was located at 33-35 Chocimska Street, one of the few intact buildings in the centre of Warsaw

• A draft masterplan was ready by the end of 1945 and all salvageable components of historic buildings were inventoried and warehoused

• The first areas to be rebuilt were Nowy Świat and Krakowske Przedmieście followed by Łazienki Park while houses in districts of Mokotów, Żoliborz and Koło that were only burned but not destroyed were repaired

The Team



The Tool



The Help





The Inspiration and Documentation - As nearly 85% of the archival collections including construction drawings of the National Library were burned, paintings (Belottos Canaletto's for their precise details and scale), post cards, pictures and accurate records of important monuments done by students (wish I could find these) of the Warsaw Polytechnic at the behest of Professor Oskar Sosnowski in the 1930's were the basis of reconstruction.

Precision Instruments

In response to the difficult task of making the reconstructed historic city look authentic and to give it that aura of "handmadeness", the Polish state created the Pracownie Konserwacji Zabytkow (Ateliers for the Conservation of Cultural Property) in 1945. The work of this group refined the efforts of the entire reconstruction team to give historic Warsaw that recognizeable verissimillitude to its pre-war original condition. Established in 1945 as a unit of the Ministry of Culture and Arts, the PKZ employed 8,000 people in branch offices in 25 cities, with a proportionately large contingent in Warsaw. These units employed old postcards, the memories of Varsovians, original plans and sketches to recreate the all-important details that to this day distinguish Warsaw's reconstruction. Specialized ateliers were created in: old wood-building construction, historical methods of fabricating bricks, ceramics, terra-cotta, conservation and restoration of frescoes, murals, sculpture and painting preservation, restoration of historic furniture, clocks etc, re-creation of historic textiles, replication of historic and stained glass, historical fabrication methods of ferrous metals; and many other specialized traditional skills were revived.

[rychlik]

You guys have to see this artistic and symbolic art. Excerpt from the artist:

We decided to show how the ruins of Warsaw after 2WW would look like if it was possible to form a cube out of them. 74 milion square meters capacity of destroyed buildings would form a 500m high cube. Marcin Kobylecki and Krzysztof Noworyta created the idea of such unusual visualisation. Bartek Kik created a series of fake photos from selected well known cities with such cube. The series of photos is a part of promotional campaign to commemorate anniversary of Warsaw Uprising, organized by Warsaw Rising Museum.

[rychlik]

Powerful and creative art.

[Urbanista1]

wow, where do you find this stuff, amazing visualization.

[Urbanista1]

3.

Life Returns to the City (Sorry pics are quite grainy)

[Urbanista1]

4.

Reconstruction of the Historic Heart of the City Begins Before and After

[rychlik]

These pics are amazing in the sense they reveal so much. I have never seen them before online. Are these the scans from the book? Let me know when I can pick it up.

[Urbanista1]

These are indeed scans from a few different books. I will include some other archival photos I collected online over the years, but I need to get them into order before I post them, I will do a few batches over the next couple of weeks.