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Nasza Przeszłość

Vol. 94 (2000): Our Past

Articles

The Church of St Joseph the Spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary at the Warsaw Circle

  • Artur Lis
DOI: https://doi.org/10.52204/np.2000.94.353-392  [Google Scholar]
Published: 2000-12-30

Abstract

St Joseph’s at Koło in Warsaw is a parish church. Its plans were completed in 1938. The overall project was devised by Feliks Michalski, architect; the task of executing it fell to Father Jan Sitnik, the first parish priest of Koło, at an extremely hard time in the history of the Polish nation. Neither the Second World War nor the post-war Stalinist era was a good time for anything like church-building. Consequently, the construction work could only be completed in 1963, when the church was consecrated by Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński. The architecture of St Joseph's represents the semi-modernist style of the 1930s, characterised by the coexistence of modem international stylistic forms of the 1920s and of classic architectural detail. It also features a number of literal quotations from projects submitted for the competition to build the Memorial Church of Divine Providence in Warsaw. Their presence indicates how great the impact of that initiative was on contemporary architects. In all, the project of St Joseph's demonstrates that in the late 1930s even architects of the older generation, like Feliks Michalski, had given in to the gradual aesthetic shift from historism to a calm modernism.St Joseph's is situated at Koło, a part of Warsaw chosen for the construction of workers' housing estates. The houses were designed by the leading representatives of Polish avantgarde architecture, Helena and Szymon Syrkus. The church, with its restrained modernist appearance, matched well the sober architecture of the area, and at the same time retained a discrete, tone-setting position. That subtle harmony was destroyed by the postwar construction. In 1949 the unobtrusive modernist conception, which had gone well with St Joseph's architecture, was dumped in favour of a new set of principles representing socrealist development. While creating a new, 'aggressive' urban landscape, the socrealist planners were determined to belittle both the significance of the church and the achievements of prewar council-housing construction. This is another proof of the thesis that 1939 was but a minor date in the history of Polish architecture: it marked a halt in construction activity rather than a watershed. A sea change did not come until 1949, although church architecture continued, even after that date, to look back to the traditions of the interwar Polish Republic.

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