Szczecin - Architecture and Urban Planning

Architecture and Urban Planning

Szczecin's architectural style is due to trends popular in the last half of the 19th century and the first years of the 20th century, Academic art and Art Nouveau. In many areas built after 1945, especially in the city centre, which had been destroyed due to Allied bombing, social realism is prevalent.

The city has an abundance of green areas: parks and avenues – wide streets with trees planted in the island separating opposite traffic (where often tram tracks are laid); and roundabouts. In that manner, Szczecin's city plan resembles that of Paris, mostly because Szczecin was rebuilt in the 1880s according to a design by Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who had redesigned Paris under Napoléon III. This course of designing streets in Szczecin is still used, as many recently built (or modified) city areas include roundabouts and avenues.

During the city's reconstruction in the aftermath of World War II, the communist authorities of Poland wanted the city's architecture to reflect an old Polish Piast era. Since no buildings from the that time existed, instead Gothic, as well as Renaissance buildings,were picked as worthy of conservation. The motivation behind this decision was that Renaissance architecture was used by the Griffin dynasty, who had Slavic roots and was viewed to be of Piast extraction by some historians (later the Piast myth was replaced by a local Griffin myth, whereby the Slavic roots of the Griffin dynasty were to justify the post-war Polish presence in Pomerania). This view was manifested e.g. by erecting respective memorials, and the naming of streets and enterprises, while else German traces were replaced by symbols of three main categories: Piasts, Martyrdom of Poles and gratitude to the Soviet and Polish armies which ended Nazi German genocide of Polish people. The ruins of the former Griffin residence, initially renamed "Piast Palace", also played a central role in this concept and were reconstructed in Renaissance style, with all traces of later eras removed. In general, post-Renaissance buildings, especially from the 19th and early 20th centuries were deemed unworthy of conservation until the 1970s, and were in part used in the Bricks for Warsaw campaign (an effort to rebuild Warsaw after it had been razed to the ground by the Germans as part of genocide against Polish people): with 38 million bricks, Szczecin became Poland's largest brick supplier.

The Old Town was rebuilt in the late 1990s, consisting of new buildings, some of which were reconstructions of buildings destroyed in World War II.

A portion of the Szczecin Landscape Park, in the forest of Puszcza Bukowa, lies within Szczecin's boundaries.