Central Department Store in Warsaw (Centralny Dom Towarowy, CDT) was the first modern public building in the city, constructed after World War II according to the Le Corbusier’s concept of ‘5 Points of Modern Architecture’ having entirely glazed elevation and free plan. It became a kind of manifesto of its authors’ approach (Zbigniew Ihnatowicz and Jerzy Romański) and also a vivid identification of the cultural circle to which Polish architecture and art belonged or aspired. The CDT project was completed in 1947, in the period of ‘mild revolution’ when it was still possible to continue the tradition of modernism. It was built during the period of stalinisation of Polish culture and proclamation of Socialist Realism in art and architecture. The new building came under heavy criticism demanding transformation of its ‘ideologically alien’
form or even its demolition. Its authors were forced to give public self-criticism. After the political change in the second half of the 1950s, the building gained its significance becoming one of the most important visual elements of Polish mass culture of the 1950s and 1960s. CDT began losing its truly modern feel when it ceased to be the only place for exceptional shopping in Warsaw. The new Department Stores Centrum (Domy Towarowe Centrum) on the eastern wall of Marszałkowska Street and the fire that broke out in 1975 transformed the symbolic field of reference that connected CDT with modernity. In 2006 the building was entered in the register of objects of cultural heritage, but only partially, without the office area. The argument of compositional inconsistency was used following the Stalinist self-criticism from 1951. This decision became a beginning of a slow, but constantly performed process of annihilation and abolishment of the building for the sake of a new developer-led project. The destruction of this historical edifice that one might analyse in the categories of affective heterotopia began in 2015. The project of its reconstruction was created in 2008 by the architectural consortium AMC-Andrzej M. Chołdzyński and RKW Rhode Kellermann Wawrowsky Polska. The developers’ plans fit into a growing interest in socialist modernism. The investor’s strategy was to appropriate the entire discourse on the value of the building and to subversively act as a defender of Warsaw’s modernism. The CDT survived the pressure of Stalinist liquidators of the 1950s, which openly considered the possibility of demolishing such ‘improper’ building. Why haven’t it survived the pressure of the developers? What caused the symbolic European architecture from the ‘canon of European modernism’ to be brutally annihilated and instrumentally used in a country currently reconstructing its relationship with the rest of the continent? Nowadays the architecture of PRL modernism is being ruthlessly and effectively destroyed in a way unknown to the Stalinist enforcers of the Socialist-realist doctrine.

The author’s biographical note is available only in the Polish version of the magazine.