Modernist Architecture in Illustrative Art for Children and Teenagers in the People’s Republic of Poland

Abstract

Books and periodicals for children and teenagers constituted an important instrument of education and also social persuasion in the People’s Republic of Poland. In such publications, illustrations played a crucial role. Printed in several dozen or even several hundred thousand copies, such publications circulated among great numbers of young readers, therefore becoming a very effective medium for disseminating certain desired views. There can be no doubt that the messages directed at the youth largely reflected the opinions held by the adult section of the society: the authors and the people ordering and authorising the publication. The numerous topics presented in a form suitable for young readers included architecture. The nature of architecture-related themes was varied indeed; at times architecture (historical or contemporary) appeared in the foreground, but most often depictions of buildings served only as a visual backdrop for the narrated story. However, even presented in the background, the forms of architecture chosen by illustrators were not received indifferently by the readers, since they conveyed a certain model imagery of houses, flats, housing estates, or entire cities. Since such images were published by the thousand, a thorough analysis of the issue would not fit the spatial constraints of a single article. The aim of the text is, therefore, restricted to identifying the possibility for expanding the source material for studies on architectural culture; it focuses on a single theme, namely the methods in which publications for children and young readers issued in communist Poland presented, and often even propagated, modernist architecture. Due to the choice of the subject matter, the article mainly concentrates on the period of the post-Stalinist Thaw when modern forms gained a true monopoly in Polish architecture. The tendencies observable in architectural theory and practice at the time were reflected with considerable fidelity in publications for young audiences. Popular images included the vision of a modern metropolis with heavy pedestrian and automobile traffic, full of high-rise buildings, lit by lamps and neon lights after dark. Depictions of modernist housing estates with blocks of flats, as well as modern schools or playgrounds were equally common. The message conveyed by such imagery may easily be summarised by the title of one of the children’s rhymes analysed above, namely Nasz dom [Our home]. Both the texts and the visual depictions of the day constructed a vision in which modernist architecture became the natural habitat of contemporary people. The present article describes numerous depictions which corroborate such an interpretation of the phenomenon under analysis.