Oskar Sosnowski - European Influences?

European Influences?

Although some basic information on historical Polish architecture is now more easily available, for the Western connoisseur it is still very largely a terra incognita. This seems particularly disappointing when one considers the work of a number of designers at the threshold of 20th century modernism. How many lavish books have there been devoted, during the last 50 years, to masters such as Victor Horta, Charles Voysey or Peter Behrens? 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. The reasons for this lacunae are manifold. Firstly, for Western architectural historians, particularly German-language ones, such as Nikolaus Pevsner, who began his writings on the history of Modern architecture and design in the early 1930s, a Polish work worth noting could simply not be imagined. 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. A comprehensive and discerning book on Polish 20th century architecture placed into a general Western context is still badly wanting.

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. What makes the task rather difficult is that neither the architect himself, nor Polish architectural critics of the time supplied us with much explanatory discourse.

Sosnowski’s professed aim early on was to create a new ‘old’ national style, as did many of his colleagues in Poland and in most other countries. 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.; many of his churches are found in the former Prussian parts of Poland).

The question whether Sosnowski ever arrived at a new (or old)national style cannot be answered here. But in any case, his Warsaw church (Church of the Immaculate Conception (Sw.Jakuba) of 1909 shows an astonishing range in its formal language, from the immense spatial subtlety and complexity of the circular formations of the East end, to the deliberately brutal treatment of the brickwork in the massive tower. 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. Indeed, the latter’s work, from his early designs in Silesia to his late buildings in Berlin, forms the closest parallel to Sosnowski’s work. Mutual influences? unlikely. A comparison with Czech Cubist architecture of those years might also be illuminating.