Event date:
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Meetings with Architecture // Jože Plečnik // Adolf Szyszko-Bohusz // Juliusz Żórawski / March 28, 2025
We warmly invite you to a special edition of the event in the series MEETINGS with Architecture. Our guests, architects Grzegorz Rytel and Dariusz Błaszczyk, renowned researchers in the history of art and architecture, will take us through space and time to the royal cities of Kraków, Prague, and Warsaw in the first half of the 20th century— a period of flourishing diverse trends and ideas in modern architecture.
The heroes of their lectures will be creators with distinctive personalities, leading architects, builders, and mentors of that time: Jože Plečnik (Ljubljana, Prague), Adolf Szyszko-Bohusz (Kraków, Warsaw), and Juliusz Żórawski (Warsaw).
Meetings with Architecture - Archi Lectures | March 28, 2025
Project activities of Jože Plečnik, Adolf Szyszko-Bohusz, and Juliusz Żórawski.
Location: Gallery of the Gdynia Film Centre, pl. Grunwaldzki 2, Gdynia
Admission FREE
Following the establishment of independent Czechoslovakia and the regaining of independence by Poland in 1918, the royal residences in Prague and Kraków gained special significance, associated with efforts to restore their former glory. Conservation and construction work on the royal hills was led by Jože Plečnik at Hradčany and Adolf Szyszko-Bohusz at Wawel. The varied interventions carried out at both castles became an inseparable part of the architectural image of the place.
The harmonious integration of these works into the context is evidenced by the fact that they remain mostly “invisible” to tourists visiting these significant sites for both nations.
Second Lecture:
In January 1948, a prestigious architectural competition for the design of the NBP building at Napoleon Square in Warsaw was decided, for which a whole issue of the journal “ARCHITEKTURA” was dedicated. Leading modernist architects of the interwar period participated in the competition (of course, those who survived and did not emigrate from communist Poland), including Bohdan Pniewski, Marek Leykam, Bohdan Lachert, Helena and Szymon Syrkus, Edgar Norwerth, Bolesław Szmidt, Leonard Tomaszewski, Anatolia and Roman Piotrowski, Hipolit Rutkowski, Arseniusz Romanowicz & Piotr Szymaniak, and... a surprising design team from Kraków: Adolf Szyszko-Bohusz and Juliusz Żórawski (whose careers were broken in post-war Poland for political reasons). Under the pretext of presenting the outcome of this competition (with particular emphasis on the unknown projects by Szyszko-Bohusz and Żórawski, preserved in the State Archive in Kraków), I would like to talk about the continuation of modernist architectural trends from the late 1930s in the second half of the 1940s, as well as a bit about the situation of architects in the early turbulent post-war years (including the environmental division of architectural schools into the “communist” capital and “reactionary” Kraków).