0108 Reading Muranów. Memory of a Place/ Memory of an Architect

Commentary on the Postwar Work of Bohdan Lachert

Abstract

The text concentrates on the concept of South Muranów – a residential quarter / monument realised in the area of the Warsaw ghetto by the architect Bohdan Lachert. It attempts to show this work as an artistic myth created by the artist. An analysis of the architect's texts and a reconstruction of the circumstances in which the project was realised, as well as the details of Lachert's biography reveal new layers of this architectonic palimpsest. Clear references to the bold visions of Śródmieście (City Centre) by Maciej Nowicki and an adaptation for the purposes of residential quarter / place of memory experiments at transforming rubble, popular in the 1940s, provoke questions about the originality of the concept of Muranów, whose unquestionable value is the spatial composition stemming from pioneering experiments by Katarzyna Kobro, organic architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, and Nowicki'c new functionalism. The history of the quarter is at the same time a microcosm of the initial years of rebuilding Warsaw and of the socialist realist chaos after 1949, as well as a record of the search for artistic subjectivity of a Modernist architect in a new reality.