Train stations
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"It's so ugly, until out of that ugliness it's pretty." - I have heard these words many times in reference to Polish architecture of the 1990s. Anna Cymer, author of the book "The Long Years of the 1990s: Architecture in Poland's Transformation Era," does not evaluate the legacy of the transformation era in terms of ugliness and beauty. Instead, she explains why buildings from that period look the way they do and not the way they do. And why, despite their (apparent) ugliness, they should be protected.
Solpol has no artistic, scientific or historical value, the Lower Silesian provincial conservator of monuments ruled, thus condemning one of the icons of Polish architecture of the transition period to destruction. It was July 2015. The postmodern department store designed by Wojciech Jarząbek lasted for several more years, abandoned and empty, until it finally succumbed to excavators. Architecture enthusiasts of the second half of the 20th century, who unsuccessfully tried to protect the building, could only nod their heads in resignation - this was not the first time they had witnessed similar situations. In the first decade of the century, monuments of domestic socmodernism, such as Warsaw's Supersam and Katowice's Brutal, did not find recognition in the eyes of the preservation administration. Now the time has come for their postmodern progenitors.
Anna Cymer "The Long Years of the 90s: Architecture in Poland's Transformation Era" Centrum Architektury, Warsaw 2024
© Centrum Architektury
Art historian Anna Cymer, author of the enthusiastically received "Architecture in Poland 1945-1989," has repeatedly defended Solpol in the media, raising the problem of protecting the youngest heritage of Polish architecture. Now she has taken on a task incomparably more difficult: she calls for the initiation of a broad social debate on the legacy of the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. The book "The Long Years of the 90s: Architecture in Poland's Times of Transformation," published by the Center for Architecture, is intended to encourage the discussion.
Solpol department store (demolished in 2022), Wroclaw - design: Wojciech Jarząbek
photo: Anna Cymer © Center for Architecture
icons and non-icons
Numbering more than four hundred and fifty pages, the volume catches the eye with its colorful cover depicting the Social Insurance Institution building in Jelenia Góra. It is symptomatic that this object was chosen, and not one of the postmodern icons of Jarząbek, Budzyński, Niemczyk or Kozłowski. The author shows not only the realizations about which the architectural press wrote extensively, but also objects "on a smaller scale", such as... car dealerships or gas stations. The barriers between "low" and "high" architecture are broken down, as are the boundaries between styles and eras. It is not without reason that the word "postmodernism" does not fall in the title of the book, and the 1990s are described as "long". Anna Cymer presents the development of Polish construction in the early capitalist era, the foundations of which were still laid at the end of the People's Republic of Poland, while the pioneering stage ends with Poland's entry into the structures of the European Union.
Solpol department store (demolished in 2022), Wroclaw - design: Wojciech Jarząbek
photo: Anna Cymer © Centrum Architektury
The layout of the book adopted by the author is clear and logical. After outlining the economic-economic-political background and providing a framework for Polish postmodernism, Cymer takes the reader on a journey in the footsteps of power architecture, housing, cultural buildings or churches. He puts him in front of the shiny mirrored facades of Social Security offices and between the columns of courthouses. He leads him through the mottled marble floors of shopping malls and the stylized streets of "new old towns." He does so with the skill of an experienced guide and archidectective, who is able to track down real pearls in completely unobvious places. Certainly, most readers will find familiar parts of the surrounding cities in the pages of "The Long 90s." I myself, at least several times during the reading, smiled broadly when Cymer recalled "my" objects, such as a cubicle parking lot hidden between the skyscrapers of Lodz's Manhattan or the Jantar department store in Gdansk's Wrzeszcz.
Jantar department store, Gdansk
Photo: Anna Cymer © Centrum Architektury
architecture and business
The transition period was a special time for Polish architecture. On the one hand, the policy of the architectural thick line ordered designers to dissociate themselves from the construction of an era that was said to be rightfully gone. On the other hand, they had to find their way in the unfamiliar realities of the market game. Tracing the careers of distinguished creators, we find in their portfolios concepts created for Art-B affaires, tin boxes of supermarkets, bars of the McDonald "s chain or the aforementioned gas stations and parking lots. Some of them smooth out their resumes years later, removing embarrassing (in their opinion) projects, while others, there are many more, openly talk about what they did in the years when the free market was born on the Vistula.
Multilevel parking lot, Manhattan housing development, Lodz - designed by Jakub Wujek, Zdzislaw Lipski, Agnieszka Szustkiewicz, Dominika Krogulska
photo: Anna Cymer © Centrum Architektury
Cymer tries to paint a picture of the times when the foundations of capitalism were being forged, and big businesses had their beginnings on field beds or in tin "jaws." He writes openly about the lack of architectural culture and foreign investors who did not come to cultivate it, but to make money as quickly as possible. He recalls statements by designers conceding with some amazement (and perhaps disappointment) that "a multiplex is not a library, theater or museum" and "there is no room for materials shocking with stateliness."
Curtis Plaza office building, Warsaw - proj.: Geokart Projekt
Photo: Anna Cymer © Centrum Architektury
architecture of optimism
Although the long 1990s represent a closed stage of history, they still evoke strong emotions. Anna Cymer describes the period of transformation matter-of-factly, without falling into popular spiritualistic sentimentalism. She does not describe Charlotte Hornets jackets, Takt tapes and VHS rentals. Nor does he focus his attention on closing factories, unemployment and flourishing petty crime. This rare ability to rise above one's own sympathies and prejudices is commendable.
Curtis Plaza office building, Warsaw - proj.: Geokart Projekt
Photo: Anna Cymer © Centrum Architektury
One can sense between the lines the positive emotions that accompanied the author as she traveled around Poland, visiting one building after another and then describing them. This cheerful mood harmoniously matches the theme of the book. For the architecture of the times of transformation was, as Anna Cymer emphasizes, "the architecture of optimism." Colorful, shiny new buildings heralded the arrival of the West (which we were catching up with) or a "second Japan" (which we were to become).
time by modernization
As the reader reads, the author's optimistic mood comes through. I'm glad this book was written," I thought, putting down the volume. And I 'm glad that Anna Cymer managed to describe and capture in photographs the already somewhat faded glitter of architecture of the 1990s. I hope that the debate she writes about in the conclusion will change the common perception of architecture of the 1990s. at least as much as Filip Springer's "Badly Born" influenced the discussion of the legacy of socmodernism.
Hotel Sobieski, Warsaw - designed by Wolfgang Triessnig, Alois Aichholzer, Maciej Nowicki, Giovanni Piccottini, Tadeusz A. Żera
Photo: Anna Cymer © Center for Architecture
"The Long 90s" was published a few months after the demolition of the Wroclaw Solpol. Fortunately, the author immortalized the icon of domestic postmodernism, just as she managed to capture several other buildings that have recently changed or are about to change their form. She photographed, among other things, the candy-colored exterior of Warsaw's Sobieski Hotel (it's one of those buildings of which it can be said that it was "so ugly that it's pretty"), which after the facade renovation resembles a gray, banal block. She documented the unique railroad station in Częstochowa, which is in danger of being demolished and will most likely soon be replaced by a simple, minimalist "box."
Main railway station, Częstochowa - design: Ryszard Frankowicz.
Photo: Anna Cymer © Centrum Architektury
In many cases, the author mentions the real threat of demolition of the described buildings(Jantar in Gdansk, Warsaw's Curtis Plaza). But before another architectural trace of the Polish transformation disappears, we can grab Anna Cymer's book and head out into the countryside. It's worth looking for local traces of the 1990s- golden railings in a shopping mall, a ZUS building clad in reflective glass, a colorful school building that looks like it was built from building blocks, or blocks of flats pretending to be townhouses. We must hurry, however, before the graphite-white leviathan of neomodernist blandness devours its next victims.
