Urban Narratives in the Age of Revolutions: Early 20th century Ideas to Modernize Warsaw

Abstract

In January 1906, in the turbulent period of 1905–1907, the poet, artist, and socialactivist Antoni Lange published in the Warsaw weekly Świat an essay called“Marzenia warszawskie” (“The Warsaw Dreams”). A several page text, illustratedwith woodcuts by the painter Andrzej Zarzycki, included a spectacular vision of metropolitanWarsaw of the future: a capital city with many public buildings and moderninfrastructure, a genuine center of Polish national and cultural life. The present essayanalyzes unexamined ideas of Lange in terms of the history of architecture, andin a double political and social context. “The Warsaw Dreams” was deeply rooted inthe political reality of the former Kingdom of Poland, addressing the issue of liberalizationof the Russian rule during the 1905 revolution. Using the vocabulary of urbanplanning and making a list of changes in the city’s architecture, Lange articulateda vision of the future space of Warsaw as a Polish metropolis of modernity, administeredindependently of Russia. In his essays he proposed to extend the city limits andremove its fortifications as well as introduce local government with significant prerogativesas an instrument of Warsaw’s great transformation – its aestheticization and construction of public buildings, such as national government edifices, schools,and cultural centers. The authors argue that by describing public architecture of thefuture Warsaw as a “dream” full of copies of well-known European architectural monumentsfrom Venice, Prague, and Cracow, Lange created a comprehensive politicalproject of autonomy of the Kingdom of Poland in the Russian empire. “The WarsawDreams” originally combined together architecture and politics, urban space and theproblems of Polish modernization, and the discourses of nationalism and socialism.Lange’s visionary proposal from 1906 is of the most imaginative responses to thechallenges of the development of Warsaw at the turn of the 20th century in the contextof Polish political and social problems of those times.