The bill announced by President Andrzej Duda to reconstruct the Saxon Palace was published on Wednesday. The project is expected to take 10 years and consume nearly 2.5 billion zlotys. A company set up for this purpose will be responsible for it.
new law and new company
photo. press materials / president.pl
The draft special law sent to the Sejm introduces special solutions for the planning and execution of the investment. The creators of the bill assume that the reconstruction of historic buildings will be carried out taking into account the needs of a modern and dynamically developing city. The proposed solutions will also serve the process of harmonizing local interests with the national interest. The State Treasury will be the investor in the reconstruction of the Saxon Palace, the Brühl Palace and the townhouses on Królewska Street. For this purpose, a special purpose company will be established to carry out the investment. At the same time, an eight-member Reconstruction Council - an advisory body composed of representatives of the Polish president, prime minister, minister of culture, minister of defense, general conservator of monuments and the mayor of Warsaw - is to be established at the Ministry of Culture, National Heritage and Sports.
surprising costs
photo: Wikimedia Commons
Most controversial were the costs to be generated by the operation of the company and the reconstruction itself. Previous estimates from 2019 put the cost at 600 million zlotys, and the entire complex, along with the accompanying palace buildings, was expected to cost 1.2 billion zlotys. Meanwhile, the spec bill entails a budget burden of about PLN 2,453,230,000. This amount is spread over a whole decade, and so already in 2021 the preparatory work will consume more than 20 million zlotys. For comparison, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, which is currently under construction, will cost taxpayers PLN 417 million, and the National Stadium, completed in 2012, closed at just under PLN 2 billion.
Where did this amount come from?
photo Polona
Unfortunately, the draft speculation does not provide an answer to what influenced such a high cost of the reconstruction of this complex. However, the total amount also includes the cost of handling the reconstruction council and other ministry costs related to the investment, but the construction itself will cost less. Meanwhile, as Gazeta Wyborcza calculates based on the document's provisions, the board's earnings at the new company will reach PLN 28,275 per month, not including bonuses and allowances. Interestingly, the speculative law exempts the Palace's reconstruction from current construction and conservation supervision laws.
who is the palace for?
photo: press materials
According to the intentions of the bill's authors, the newly constructed buildings are to be used for the needs of the Chancellery of the Senate and the Mazovian Provincial Office in Warsaw, as well as for other entities conducting cultural, educational or socially useful activities. The Senate is to occupy the Brühl Palace, the Provincial Office the rebuilt tenements, and culture will fill the palace spaces. The politicians' announcements included a museum for the destruction/reconstruction of Warsaw and a museum for Lech Kaczynski, who championed the reconstruction of the edifice. Allocation of the premises will be within the competence of the Minister of Culture.
What instead of reconstruction?
Prof. Marek Budzyński's concept
photo by Marek Budzyński / Here it was, here it stood
The problem of rebuilding the Saxon Palace and surrounding buildings has been present in the architectural debate since the end of the war. Zbigniew Karpiński, Marek Budzyński and FAAB, among others, had ideas for this place. A slightly different approach to the issue of commemorating this important place in the history and space of Warsaw was taken by designers from the JEMS office . In their concept from the late 1980s, they proposed playing with differences in the height of the site, walls of greenery and small architecture.
photo courtesy of JEMS Architekci
If the surface of the square were to be flattened, the park could be exposed on a single-story pedestal along with the Tomb, legibly enclosing it from the west. The pedestal could contain part of the preserved basement of the palace, used, for example, for exhibition purposes. Similar spatial assumptions function in the historical centers of European cities, such as the Concorde Square in Paris, where the Tuileries gardens form a kind of elevated platform on the site of an unbuilt palace.
JEMS Architects
photo courtesy of JEMS Architects
The architects also point out the very fabric that is to be rebuilt after more than seventy years. They point out that the majority of the complex consisted of two townhouses of Russian merchant Ivan Skwarcov that were not of great architectural value. Of value was primarily the colonnade co-designed by Idzikowski, the remains of which are today the only visible element of the building demolished by the occupiers. The ruin as such, however, has a much higher symbolic significance than the reconstructed building, and the breach in Warsaw's built environment bears the strongest testimony to its difficult history. Much more so than the reconstructed edifice.
