Postmodernism, the most prominent architectural current between 1975 and 2000, was much more than the stereotype of candy-coloured façades and ironic play with columns and pediments. This lecture will present postmodernism as a socio-cultural movement that lay at the bottom of many current debates, including those over dense, functionally mixed urbanism, visible historicity, or national identity.
In Poland, postmodern architecture emerged during a period characterised by the decline of the communist regime and waves of political protest. During that period, committed architects defied repressive politics and persistent shortage, and designed houses and churches, which adapted eclectic historical forms and geometric volumes, were based on traditional typologies, and often displayed conspicuous ornamentation.
The lecture discusses these examples of Polish postmodernism in an international context and the conspicuous differences to postmodernism in Western Europe or North America. In Poland, this new architecture marked the beginning socio-political transformation and successfully responded to the contradictory desires for historical continuity and acknowledgment of rupture and loss.
The architects of Polish postmodernism took up international influences as well as domestic traditions, including ideas of the Polish school of historic conservation and long-standing national-patriotic narratives. They thus contributed to the creation of both a built environment and intellectual climate that have been influential to date.
Florian Urban is Professor of Architectural History at the Glasgow School of Art. He was born and raised in Munich, Germany, and holds an MA in Urban Planning from the University of California, Los Angeles and a Ph.D. in History and Theory of Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 2018/19 he was a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw.
He is the author, among others, of Neo-historical East Berlin – Architecture and Urban Design in the German Democratic Republic 1970-1990 (Ashgate, 2009), Tower and Slab – Histories of Global Mass Housing (Routledge, 2012), The New Tenement – Architecture in the Inner City since 1970 (Routledge 2018), and Postmodern Architecture in Socialist Poland - Transformation, Symbolic Form and National Identity (Routledge, 2021). His forthcoming book Form Follows Fuel – 14 Buildings from Antiquity to the Oil Age (Routledge 2025, co-authored with Barnabas Calder) studies embodied and operational energy in historic buildings.
We cordially invite to our public lecture of the GHI Warsaw. On June 3, the lecture will be given by Dr. Florian Urban, Professor of Architectural History and Head of History of Architectural and Urban Studies at the Glasgow School of Art.
