SOUTHERN MURANOW

"New Muranow will be bounded by a great North-East Route (Trasa W-Z) from the south  and Okopowa street from the west. Nowomarszałkowska street, divided in the middle by another huge route (North-South, or Trasa N-S) will serve as its boundary from the east. The North-South Route will provide a great view over Muranów district, which stretches along 200 hectares" - wrote Felix Weber, the journalist of "Stolica" weekly, in 1949.

 

He added that the buildings will be raised on a rubble bank, 3-4 meters high. The article emphasised the symbolic act of building new estate in the same place, where just a few years earlier the Nazi occupants demolished Jewish tenement houses. "The new life will raise from the ruins. In order to commemorate the cruelty of German occupant and heroic resistance of few brave fighters, the Museum of Fight Against Fascism will be opened in renovated barracks from the era of king Stanisław August Poniatowski. The places of Warsaw martyrology - Pawiak prison, Museum and Monument of Ghetto Heroes will stay at the actual ground level, but the new Muranów estate itself will be raised at a rubble bank".

 

 

 

A housing estate standing on the hilly remains of the ghetto? Bohdan Lachert went with his idea even further. New Muranow, consisting of four inner estates, so-called "neighbour units", prepared to host ca. 50 thousand inhabitants and named by letters: A, B, C, D - the same way as their equivalents in Nowa Huta district next to Cracow, another huge post-war housing investment, was planned to be an architectural monument of destroyed and reborn district. The design of the new houses, as well as their substance, had to refer to its history. The architects decided to use bricks made of rubble, grinded and mixed with concrete. The main reason was economical: extremely high costs of potential removal. The effect may seem terrifying: Muranow was built not only at the place of former ghetto, but also from its remains.

 

 

The purity and flamboyance of the concept was accentuated even by the exterior of Muranow houses. There was no plaster at the facades, so they had a grey-reddish colour of grinded rubble, contrasting with light window frames. The banks and terraces among the houses were covered with special kinds of bushes and trees, prepared to grow even at shallow layers of soil covering the rubble. As for the rest, the whole area between the houses was meant to be filled  with green, according to the idea of garden-city. Level difference was an advantage while designing the parking space: they were situated at the lower level then communication paths for pedestrians. The rubble taken away from Muranow was also reused while building 10-th Anniversary Stadium at the right bank of Vistula river.

 

 

In the middle of the estate the architects planned to leave an empty strip of land, filled only with old Pawiak prison`s ruins and the only monumental building that survived the Ghetto and then Warsaw Uprising: St. Augustin church at Nowolipki street. This area was meant to be the germ of future district centre, with Museum of Fight Against Fascism,  kind of town hall, post office, shopping mall and the cultural complex: Youth House, Folk House, sculpture work-room, cinema and theatre. The approximate square footage per person of typical Muranow flat was quite modest - 10 meters. According to different types of flats, so-called bachelor flat had circa 13 meters, two-room flat - 30 meters, three-room - 40 meters and the biggest, four-room (rare to find) - 50 meters.

 

 

The designers wanted Muranow to differ from another four "M" Warsaw estates of that era (the other names are Mariensztat, Mirow, Młynow and MDM). The idea was to intersperse it with not only stairs, terraces  and bridges crossing the streets at lower level, but also fountains and other so-called "little architectural forms". The official reason was "the deep care of bringing the inhabitants from working class close to fine arts", in the reality such ideas resulted from the topographical feature: a hilly rubble. Numerous architects wanted to decorate the estate, the inner competition resulted in 24 projects (Lachert`s team won again). Some ideas were never put into practice, for example two round 11-floor housing towers, planned at the crossroads of today`s Solidarności and John Paul II Alleys finally turned into two lower, stubby buildings. Varsavianist Jarosław Zieliński calls them "soc-tenement houses" in his book "Socrealism in Warsaw". The towers were designed by Danuta Szafnicka under Lachert`s guidance. Their staircases contain a very interesting graphic element - Compass Rose, a symbol used at the map, a nautical chart or a paving to display the orientation of the cardinal directions. In November 2009, during Wola Art Festival, one of the staircases hosted the sculpture and installation by artist Jerzy Goliszewski who wanted to re-discover this motive, now forgotten and partly visible due to age and dirt.

 

 

As Angelika Lasiewicz-Sych states in her essay  (The Architecture of a City as a Constituent of Collective Memory, „Kultura Współczesna“ nr 4/2003), besides the preservation of the overall urban layout of the district, the new Muranów of the late 1940s, which continued to be developed in the 1950s and 1960s, embodied a complete reversal of the local tradition. What had been before the war an unique combination of tradition and private investment resulting in a building freedom now became a planned, rationally organised whole, subordinated to the common good and oriented toward meeting social rather than individual needs. This observation reflects the most important difference between the two strategies: the sense of property, of space appropriation. Once clearly individual, the district has become vaguely social.