Postwar recomposition: Warsaw.

Abstract

The liberation of Warsaw from the yoke, in one hand, of Nazi´s occupation and in the other one, of the Soviet allied siege, in the year 1945, entailed a process of rapid recomposition of the city. The inheritance during years was fulminated in five years causing the social collapse by the urban disidentification of the inhabitants. After the catastrophic destruction of the emblematic monuments and buildings of its historic center, the situation was addressed through three methodologies: historical, renovating and innovative. Therefore, those urban processes that followed the lines that the memory had drawn for them were used to carry out an involutive and regressive interpretation, in the historical recomposition of fragments, monumental pieces and embers of the ruins, with references to the value of its memory, of its identity, reworking the same historicist discourse. Under the command of Reconstruction´s Office for Warsaw Capital, and forming a multidisciplinary team led by the conservative Jan Zachwatowicz, there were discussions on how to address the reconstruction and reconfiguration of the damaged urban center. To this end, the intervention showed a green ring around the old urban center, founding the basis for the implantation and integration of the projects bordering the area and its traces, many of them disconnected from the historicist, eclectic and fragmentary drawing of the compact prewar urban mesh. Supported by emblematic actions on patrimonial elements and infrastructures, a city was conceived behind the scenes during the Nazi domination, which was later diverted to the influence of a socialist political ideology whose future would mark the relationship between the city center and the perfipherical areas.