let's rush to protect postmodern architecture....
Solpol continues. Over the years, the group of supporters of its demolition seems to be steadily melting. Who knows, maybe in some time it will live to see inclusion in the municipal register of monuments or even in the register. After all, the precedent for the legal protection of postmodern architecture was set in 2019, when the Orthodox church in Bialy Bor, dating from 1992-97, was entered in the register of monuments.
At the same time, the life of another building, which should be considered unique in the whole country, is being carried out before our eyes. The railway station in Czestochowa, for it is the one in question, was completed in 1996 to a design by Ryszard Frankowicz. Geometric, deconstructed forms harmonize with a strong color scheme based on a contrasting combination of red ironwork and reflective glass with a brown hue. Inside, a spacious lobby connects the station area with the retail and servicespaces, which today remain dead. Only their scale, colorful floors and a waterless fountain testify to their former glory.
The railway station in Częstochowa designed by Ryszard Frankowicz.
Photo: Błażej Ciarkowski
Impressing with its grandeur, the edifice, in the opinion of many, is out of step with modern times. The competition , decided in January this year, envisages replacing the postmodern Moloch with a new, definitely more economical and functional structure. However, couldn't the modernization plans include preservation, at least fragments of Frankovich's work "The current train station is non-functional and empty," the investor's representatives cut off any discussion.
Let's hurry to protect postmodernism. In a moment it may turn out that in the history of Polish architecture the 1990s are represented by a great white spot.
postmodernism on the periphery
Polish PoMo is not only those most spectacular buildings in Warsaw, Krakow or Wroclaw. It's also a number of buildings of local significance that are a legacy of the times of transformation.
The 1990s were a difficult period in Łódź's history marked by the decline of the textile industry. At the same time, it was a moment when the city was trying to redefine its identity and looking back to the past with nostalgia, characteristic of Polish postmodernism. At that time, the first section of the promenade on Piotrkowska Street, paved with the characteristic yellowand red concrete cubes, is created. The Saspol department store - the local equivalent of Solpol - is erected, where the source of inspiration, however, was not American postmodernism, but the tradition of the 19th-centurytenement house. Raised in the spirit of modernism, Łódź architects of the older generation long accused the authors, Iwona Gortel and Helena Kurmanowicz, of practicing "eclecticism."
Saspol in Lodz - a nostalgic look into the past.
photo: Błażej Ciarkowski
Today Lodz shamefully turns its back on the heritage of the 1990s, but could the situation be different in a city where the youngest monuments are... architecture of the Socialist Realist period! Particularly valuable examples of post-war modernism, which, according to the interpretation of the General Conservator of Monuments, is a "testimony of a bygone era," are at best included in the municipal register of monuments or on the list of contemporary cultural assets. Among the latter, we also find some interesting examples of postmodernism. Undoubtedly, both the Radogoszcz-Easthousing estate (Z. Lipski, A. Owczarek, J. Wujek) and the multi-family buildings on Zamenhofa Street (B. Kardaszewski) are exceptional examples of efforts to combine new postmodern tendencies with the realities of the socialist state (postocmodernism?). But why does the list, whose time caesura is 2004, almost completely omit the architecture of the 1990s?
