Oskar Sosnowski

[1] In the fall of 1918, the recently renovated building of the Faculty of Architecture at the Warsaw University of Technology (Warsaw Polytechnic) was occupied by the Bolshevik army causing many Polish students enlisted to drive them out, and following this brief interruption, new professors arrived at the Faculty; including Sosnowski, who took the post of the Chair of Polish Architecture Division.

A unique complex of 21 houses built in the Powiśle district of Warsaw (within the triangular area delineated by the Górnośląska, Myśliwiecka, and Hoene-Wrońskiego streets).

[3] Of especial importance is the documentation, measured drawings and photographs made in the period between the First and Second World Wars by the Department of Polish Architecture of the Polytechnic of Warsaw, and in particular, the efforts of Professor Sosnowski and other architects, art historians and students which he led, has provided a unique collection of documentation[4] Sosnowski, photographer and art historian Szymon Zajczyk, and Warsaw Polytechnic students documented these wooden structures through architectural drawings, replica paintings, and photographs.

[5] He also prepared an extensive database documenting of other buildings and design elements[6] that has now become part of the work in preserving the European Wooden Churches Heritage.

But to find a broader appreciation of Sosnowski’s or Jan Koszczyc-Witkiewicz’s work, let alone adequate illustrations, is still virtually impossible for a non-Polish audience.

Polish art historians and their publishers have been very slow to produce thorough investigations and adequately illustrated books about those masters, and even what has been brought out during the last few years still appears to be destined entirely for internal consumption.

Here the aim is to signal some of the broader issues in the work of Oskar Sosnowski, arguably Poland’s most eminent designer in the period 1910-1940.

[12] German writers and architects had adopted a primitivist approach to village architecture from the 1890s and conceivably Sosnowski might have seen the publications advocating a ‘folkart’ style for rural churches by the Berlin architect and publicist Oskar Hossfeld (e.g.in his Stadt und Landkirchen, Berlin Ernst 1905 and later eds.

[13] The latter points directly to his next phase of numerous fiercely experimental projects of c.1912-1915, which can only be labelled as a primitivist kind of expressionism, and as such we may see them as Hans Poelzig avant-la-lettre.

One is reminded of the revolutionary drawings of the immediate post war years, by Wassili Luckhardt or Bruno Taut, but one would look in vain for a realisation of these dreams in Germany, in a manner that is both as daring and as controlled as Sosnowski’s church.

The quality of the interior space might be summarised by the way one can see it, almost simultaneously, as a dense forest of piers and as a continuous soaring of openings covered by the lightest kind of ceilings.

From that point one may, finally, look forward to the way in which the mighty Polish Catholic Church took up the task and built, all over the country, its large number of fiercely inventive sanctuaries in the 1970s to 1990s.

Andrzej K. Olszewski, Nowa Forma w Architekturze Polskiej 1900-1925, Wrocław / Warsaw, Polska Akademia Nauk 1967, was the first to point the international links of ‘the new forms in Polish Architecture’.

S.Muthesius, Art, Architecture and Design in Poland, 966-1990 An Introduction (editions also in Gerrnan, French and Polish), Langewiesche Koenigstein im Taunus 1994.