Dom i Miasto

Abstrakt

The paper is a chapter from an MA thesis entitled The Town Play. Czesław Bielecki's Theory of Town. The House and Town Working Group (1980-81), written under the supervision of Prof. Tadeusz S. Jaroszewski and defended at the Institute of the History of Art at Warsaw University in 1995.

The work seeks to describe how the thinking about town has changed. The changes were initiated at the end of the 1970s and are part of modernist developments. Czesław Bielecki's texts, devoted to architecture and town planning, played – according to the author – a key role in the formation of a new theory of town, a paradigm alternative to the modernist one. His texts are the point of interest of this work, likewise the House and Town Group cofounded by Bielecki in the years 1980-81, the group has been presented in this paper within the context of the then socio-political situation. I reconstruct here the events that took place between August 1980 and December 1981 and discuss the theoretical enunciations of the House and Town Group: the study Catechism of House and Town in Questions and Answers – the Ways to Solve the Housing Question, prepared by House and Town for the All-Polish Conference of Architects in Gdańsk in November 1980; the programme of House and Town presented during the Extraordinary General Assembly of the Delegates of the Association of Polish Architects in Wrocław in January 1981; and the Chart of House and Town, presented along with the exhibition “Warsaw, a reconstruction of the city” during the 14th International Congress of the Union of Architects (UIA) in Warsaw in June 1981. I compare the latter document with the Warsaw Declaration of UIA. To illustrate the assumptions of the House and Town Group I present also a project submitted to a competition. The competition was to award the best design for the development of the housing estate Złotno in Łódź and was prepared by the House and Town Group in 1981.

There were many texts written by Bielecki before 1995, that is to the time when the present work had been completed. We should mention here three: Continuity in Architecture, “Architecture,” 1978, no 3-4; The Style of the Polish Architecture of the Second Half of the 20th Century, “Szkice,” 1986, no 4 and Arithmetic for Architects (a part of the then uncompleted book Gra w miasto [The Town Play]), “Res Publica,” 1990, no 3, and “Arche,” 1988, no 1. In 1996 Bielecki's opus magnum entitled Gra w miasto (The Town Play), Warsaw, The Accessible House Foundation, 1996, was published.