Pawiak prison
Tragic events in the history of nations and societies cause even not so much a building that no longer exists, but its very name, to become a national symbol. Such an example became Pawiak, a prison destroyed in August 1944 between Dzielna, Pawia and Prison Streets in Warsaw, built between 1830-1835 according to a design by Henryk Marconi. During World War II it was the largest political prison in the lands of occupied Poland. It is estimated that in 1939-1944 about one hundred thousand people were imprisoned and tortured there, of whom 37,000 were murdered and 60,000 deported to concentration camps. After the war, the remains of the prison were incorporated into a museum and memorial complex with an austere, minimalist expression, designed under the direction of architect Romuald Gutt by Mieczyslaw Moldawa and Alina Scholtz. One of the symbols was an elm tree, to which the families of prisoners attached plaques with the names of murdered prisoners. It became such an important symbol that when it withered in 2004, a bronze cast of it was made and placed in place of the dead tree. The absence and emptiness of this building, which has become a lasting, grim symbol of the occupation drama, is so strong that a wave of protests was sparked by a recent proposal to erect a new building at the site, which would house a museum of the martyrdom of the Polish people.
Warsaw, Pawiak, museum-memorial site with bronze-cast elm tree
warsaw ghetto
Tragic events cause not only destroyed buildings to become symbols, but also huge sections of cities. Such was the fate of the Warsaw ghetto after the 1943 uprising. This annihilation was total, as not only the entire buildings were annihilated, but also the entire Jewish population living in inhumane conditions. The criminal annihilation of such a large section of the city along with its population became one of the symbols of the Holocaust. Despite the fact that on the ruins of the ghetto were erected buildings of Muranów, with a slightly different grid of streets, the tragic spirit of this area of Warsaw has not been erased from the collective memory, including that of younger generations who did not experience the tragic trauma of war.
Warsaw, a sea of ghetto rubble
architecture of the 1960s
In Poland, demolished buildings from the 1960s have also risen to symbolic status in recent years. The most spectacular examples are Warsaw's Supersam at Unii Lubelskiej Square, opened in 1962, built to a design by architects Jerzy Hryniewiecki, Maciej Krasinski and Ewa Krasińska, with a unique roof structure designed by Wacław Zalewski, Stanisław Kuś and Andrzej Żórawski, and demolished despite numerous protests in 2006. The second such building was the Katowice railroad station completed in 1972 in the convention of Brutalist Modernism, designed by the "Tigers" (Wacław Kłyszewski, Jerzy Mokrzyński and Eugeniusz Wierzbicki), with a unique structure consisting of a structure of reinforced concrete cups. The last cup of the station was demolished in 2011, and a shopping mall was erected in its place, into which dummy cups were incorporated. This demolition also occurred despite numerous protests from the architectural community and art historians. The demolition of these unique buildings has become a symbol of the predation of capital during the transition period.
Warsaw, non-existent Supersam at Unii Lubelskiej Square
World Trade Center
The symbolism of some buildings changes and takes on new meaning in the 21st century, in a global reality, in a single day, the most drastic example being the fate of New York's Twin Towers. On September 11, 2001, in just a few hours (between 8:46 a.m. and 10:28 a.m., that is, from the time the first plane hit until the second tower collapsed) the buildings dramatically changed their symbolism. Completed in 1973 to the design of architect Minoru Yamasaki, the twin WTC towers, more than 400 meters high, became a permanent part of the New York skyline and a symbol of Manhattan for a couple of decades. It is an incredible coincidence that the size and scale of the tragedy in such a short period of time completely changed the buildings' impressive archiectural and urban significance, giving them a completely different worldwide symbolism. In a short period of time, this symbolism became so enduring and iconic that the new WTC tower, designed by architects Daniel Libeskind and David Childs, was erected a little farther away, in a different style, and the site of the collapsed towers is perpetuated by a void.
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New York, with the WTC towers
Royal Castle in Warsaw
It also happens that the absence of demolished buildings, even after a relatively long period of time, is so socially acute that pressure builds up for their reconstruction, even though by objective criteria they were not outstanding works of architecture. Nevertheless, political manipulation is very often superimposed on spontaneous public sentiment, using these symbols for its own purposes. Such actions can be attributed to the authorities in Poland during the Gierek era, where the reconstruction of the Royal Castle in Warsaw was part of the propaganda patriotic unity of society. The decision to rebuild the castle, which had been blown up by the Germans in September 1944, was made in 1971, shortly after the new team of Edward Gierek took power, and the reconstruction, designed by architect Jan Boguslawski, was completed in 1984.
Warsaw, ruins of the Royal Castle in 1941
Christ the Savior Cathedral
A similar mechanism took place in Moscow where the Cathedral Cathedral of Christ the Savior was rebuilt between 1990 and 1996. Erected between 1839 and 1883 to a design by Konstantin Thon as a votive offering for victory over Napoleonic troops, it was blown up in 1931 on Stalin's orders. The temple was to make way for a monument to the Palace of the Radium with a statue of Lenin crowning it. The decision to rebuild undoubtedly also had political overtones, emphasizing Russia's gradual regaining of power after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Moscow, the rebuilt Cathedral of Christ the Savior
Berlin Royal Castle
The Royal Castle (Berliner Stadtschloss) in the center of Berlin is also currently under reconstruction. Here the situation is even more interesting, because on the site of the demolished ruins of the castle in the 1970s the Palace of the Republic was erected by the East German authorities as a symbol of overcoming the Kaiser tradition of Germany. After reunification, this grand edifice was demolished in 2010 despite much discussion. The controversial decision to rebuild the castle, made by the Bundestag in 2007, also has a symbolic dimension, erasing the difficult period of the post-war division of Germany and the shameful period of the former GDR's communist dictatorship.
Berlin, Royal Castle in the Interwar Period
The fragmentary transformations of physical buildings into intangible symbols mentioned above turn out to be a fairly common phenomenon, regardless of the countries and traditions of the societies living in them. This phenomenon clearly indicates that architecture is an active element in the history of civilization, far beyond the mere art of building. Even today, in a global and secularizing society, relatively young and modern architecture like New York's WTC is transformed in a single day through tragic destruction from a commercial building to a global symbol of a complicating and conflict-ridden world.
This attempt to trace the fate and paradoxes of architecture that no longer exists or has been resuscitated again shows how important its functioning in society is and how it transcends aesthetic and utilitarian dimensions, and its immanent physical features, sometimes becoming almost transcendent immaterial civilizational symbols.
