TY - JOUR AU - Arciszewska, Barbara AU - Górzyński, Makary PY - 2018/09/19 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - Urban Narratives in the Age of Revolutions: Early 20th century Ideas to Modernize Warsaw JF - Artium Quaestiones JA - 10.14746/aq VL - IS - 26 SE - ROZPRAWY DO - 10.14746/aq.2015.26.6 UR - https://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/aq/article/view/14590 SP - 101-147 AB - <p>In January 1906, in the turbulent period of 1905–1907, the poet, artist, and social</p><p>activist Antoni Lange published in the Warsaw weekly Świat an essay called</p><p>“Marzenia warszawskie” (“The Warsaw Dreams”). A several page text, illustrated</p><p>with woodcuts by the painter Andrzej Zarzycki, included a spectacular vision of metropolitan</p><p>Warsaw of the future: a capital city with many public buildings and modern</p><p>infrastructure, a genuine center of Polish national and cultural life. The present essay</p><p>analyzes unexamined ideas of Lange in terms of the history of architecture, and</p><p>in a double political and social context. “The Warsaw Dreams” was deeply rooted in</p><p>the political reality of the former Kingdom of Poland, addressing the issue of liberalization</p><p>of the Russian rule during the 1905 revolution. Using the vocabulary of urban</p><p>planning and making a list of changes in the city’s architecture, Lange articulated</p><p>a vision of the future space of Warsaw as a Polish metropolis of modernity, administered</p><p>independently of Russia. In his essays he proposed to extend the city limits and</p><p>remove its fortifications as well as introduce local government with significant prerogatives</p><p>as an instrument of Warsaw’s great transformation – its aestheticization </p><p>and construction of public buildings, such as national government edifices, schools,</p><p>and cultural centers. The authors argue that by describing public architecture of the</p><p>future Warsaw as a “dream” full of copies of well-known European architectural monuments</p><p>from Venice, Prague, and Cracow, Lange created a comprehensive political</p><p>project of autonomy of the Kingdom of Poland in the Russian empire. “The Warsaw</p><p>Dreams” originally combined together architecture and politics, urban space and the</p><p>problems of Polish modernization, and the discourses of nationalism and socialism.</p><p>Lange’s visionary proposal from 1906 is of the most imaginative responses to the</p><p>challenges of the development of Warsaw at the turn of the 20<span>th </span>century in the context</p><p>of Polish political and social problems of those times.</p> ER -