Oskar Sosnowski - Magnum Opus

Magnum Opus

All this then led to Sosnowski’s magnum opus of the late 1920s, the Bialystok Church (St. Roch's Church in Białystok). It has sometimes been compared to the work of the pioneer of reinforced concrete, Auguste Perret; but Sosnowski’s spatial imagination and his judicious use of crystalline Art Déco motifs go far beyond anything one may find in the work of the French master. In a similar way one may draw again comparisons with German avant-garde design. 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. Naturally, the medium-sized town of Bialystok could not afford the vast building of the kind which appeared in the architect’s painted dreams of the same years, but Sosnowski maximised the effect of the church on a hill as a Stadtkrone – which is naturally something that can only be experienced on the spot. The quality of he 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.