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ResumenEl concurso para el Memorial de Auschwitz-Birkeanu, iniciado en 1957, representa un hito en la reflexión sobre el sentido de un paisaje arquitectónico de la memoria en la segunda mitad del siglo XX. Los proyectos que se presentaron en las diferentes fases del concurso, que se alargó diez años hasta 1967, contienen no solo una fuerte carga formal sino una importante búsqueda conceptual por reflejar y sintetizar de manera simbólica, mediante elementos arquitectónicos y de paisaje, la huella de todo el horror que se había vivido en el campo de exterminio polaco. De entre todos ellos destaca el proyecto “The Road”, del equipo dirigido por el arquitecto Oskar Hansen, una propuesta que, de haberse realizado, hubiese marcado un sentido nuevo en el proyecto de paisajes arqui­tectónicos en su relación con los movimientos plásticos de vanguardia. Sin embargo, el resultado final del concurso fue la construcción de un mero monumento conmemorativo de escaso carácter, perdiendo así una gran oportunidad en la investigación y el desarrollo de los paisajes arquitectóni­cos contemporáneos.AbstractThe competition for the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial, started in 1957, represents a milestone in the reflection on the meaning of an architectural landscape of memory in the second half of the 20th century. The projects that were presented in the different phases of the contest, which lasted ten years until 1967, contain not only a strong formal charge but also an important conceptual search to symbolically reflect and synthesize, through architectural and landscape elements, the footprint of all the horror that had been lived in the Polish Death Camp. Among all of them stands out the project “The Road”, developed by the team led by the architect Oskar Hansen, a proposal that, if it had been carried out, would have marked a new meaning in the architectural landscape project in its relationship with avant-garde plastic movements. However, the end result of the competition was the construction of a mere commemorative monument of little character, thus missing a great opportunity in the research and development of contemporary architectural landscapes.

This thesis presents the Polish architect duo Oskar and Zofia Hansen’s (1922-2005; 1924-2013) theory of Open Form (1959) as an essentialist interpretation and revision of mainstream European modernist architecture from the early twentieth century. It identifies theoretical continuities between the Hansens and their interwar predecessors from the Polish artistic avant-garde, namely, the painter Władysław Strzemiński (1893-1952) and sculptor Katarzyna Kobro (1898-1951). Strzemiński and Kobro’s theory of Unism (1924) provided an essentialist definition for modern art, i.e., it articulated an artwork’s core concerns by addressing its medium-specific properties. The Hansens expanded Unism’s essentializing approach to the spatiotemporal and social domain of architecture. By relegating the formal and object-based qualities of their designs in order to promote social effects, the Hansens articulated architecture’s core concern: the individual in space, a fundamental reality which they had believed was obscured from mainstream modernist architecture’s standardizing tendencies. The Hansens exercised their Open Form approach in the latter half of the twentieth century through teaching, design, and theoretical writing. Their work revealed their Unist influences, and, thereby, the continuity of the interwar Polish artistic avant-garde into post-war architectural debates.

In this paper I will analyze a project of a monument titled The Roadby Oskar Hansen addressing Walter Benjamin’s and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theses. I have presented it as an attempt to establish a discourse about Auschwitz-Birkenaubeyond monumental history within the account of Friedrich Nietzsche. This example illustrates how monuments exemplifying the Open Form have been attempts to use the critical micro-narration in the field of sculpture. I refer to it through my presentation of how such a strategy makes preservation of individual postmemory possible and resists the use of history as a tool of propaganda.

RESUMEN Durante las décadas de la Guerra Fría, el continente europeo se encuentra sumido en un complejo proceso de transformación, reconstrucción y planteamiento de nuevos proyectos políticos y territoriales. Esta situación es especialmente convulsa en la franja centroeuropea, donde en estados como Hungría, Polonia o la antigua Yugoslavia se daban profundos debates acerca de su identidad y su organización geopolítica. El progresivo aperturismo hacia los países occidentales, junto a la necesidad de modernizar en profundidad los sistemas e infraestructuras estatales, sirvieron como catalizadores para la proliferación de grandes proyectos territoriales y urbanos con el fin no solo de mejorar la calidad de vida de los habitantes, sino también de reforzar la posición de dichos estados en el continente y el resto del mundo. Este texto se centra en el caso de la República Popular de Polonia, donde estas cuestiones se trataron con gran profusión desde diversas ramas. Concretamente, la propuesta del arquitecto Oskar Hansen para un Sistema Lineal Continuo aúna la visión socialista del estado como agente productor del espacio con la participación individual dentro del colectivo –siguiendo su Teoría de la Forma Abierta y sus conexiones con el Team X- sobre un soporte arquitectónico : un modelo de “anti-ciudad” que abriría cuestiones que todavía hoy permanecen vigentes. SUMMARY During the decades of the Cold War, Europe was plunged into a complex process of transformation, reconstruction and the emergence of new political and territorial projects. This situation caused particular upheaval in the central European strip, where states such as Hungary, Poland and the former Yugoslavia were struck by a profound quandary as to their identity and their geopolitical organisation. As they gradually opened up towards western countries and understood the need to drastically modernise the states’ systems and infrastructures, this triggered the proliferation of large-scale land planning and urban planning projects with a view to not only improving the quality of life of their inhabitants, but also strengthening their position on the continent and worldwide. This paper focusses particularly on the case of the People’s Republic of Poland, where such issues were tackled profusely from a number of angles. As a specific example, the idea by architect Oskar Hansen of a Linear Continuous System combines the socialist vision of the State as a producer of space with the concept of individual participation within a group – following his Theory on Open Form and his connections with Team X – based on an architectural substrate: the model of an “anti-city”, which gave rise to issues that remain relevant to this day.

Der Artikel behandelt das Verhältnis von Kollektiv und Individuum in künstlerischen Performances in Polen und der Sowjetunion in den 1970er und 1980er Jahren. Dieses Verhältnis ist zentral für die Analyse sozialistischer Gesellschaften in dieser Zeit. In der vergleichenden Gegenüberstellung werden Ähnlichkeiten und Unterschiede herausgearbeitet. Die in diesem Artikel beschriebenen künstlerischen Aktionen – sowohl das 1971 von Przemysław Kwiek initiierte Spiel Gra na Wzgórzu Morela / Spiel auf dem Morel-Hügel in Elbląg (Polen) als auch die Aktion Desjat’ pojavlenij / Zehn Erscheinungen der Kollektiven Aktionen im Moskauer Gebiet 1981 (UdSSR) – zeichnen sich zunächst durch formale Ähnlichkeiten aus: Außerhalb von Städten, in schneebedeckten Landschaften und auf Feldern werden ästhetische Formen der historischen Avantgarde bzw. des Suprematismus aufgerufen. Darüber hinaus findet sich in beiden Aktionen jedoch auch eine intensive Auseinandersetzung mit der Bedeutung und der Auswirkung von Gesellschaft bzw. Kollektiven auf das Individuum. Beide betreiben eine Form von Gesellschaftsanalyse, mittels derer sie Alternativen zur bestehenden sozialistischen Gesellschaft jener Zeit formulieren. Während jedoch bei KwieKulik die Abschwächung des Momentes der Subjektivität und der künstlerischen Individualität etwas Positivem, nämlich der Schaffung einer offenen Form dient, die letztendlich die Idee einer nicht-autoritären Gesellschaft von freien, selbstverantwortlich handelnden Individuen fördern sollte und somit eine Alternative zur bestehenden Ordnung darstellte, stand die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Thema Kollektiv vs. Individuum bei den Kollektiven Aktionen an einem ganz anderen Punkt. Hier war die Unterordnung des Individuums unter ein größeres Kollektiv etwas Negatives, nämlich alltäglich empfundene Realität. Die (durchaus selbstkritische) Frage bei den Kollektiven Aktionen war immer, noch bevor man sich über Alternativen Gedanken machen konnte: Wie geht der Einzelne mit dem Druck um, den das Kollektiv (die Gesellschaft, die Ideologie) auf ihn ausübt? Wie reagiert das Individuum auf diese Kollektivität, welche Taktiken erlauben es ihm, sich in der Kollektivität einzurichten?

In 1990 a newsreel which documented the emergence of new types of services arising after the fall of socialism in Poland showed a private company working on a security scheme for the Przyczółek Grochowski Housing Estate in Warsaw. Bending over the plan of meandering buildings, the guards tried to establish effective procedures for protecting the inhabitants from increasing petty criminality. A difficult goal indeed, complained the narrator, since the buildings “were first harmed by the architects”. Yet also the designers themselves – Oskar Hansen, architect, artist and theorist affiliated with the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and an active member of Team 10, and his wife Zofia Garlińska-Hansen – did not hide their own disappointment with this project. Oskar stressed how much the buildings, comprising flats for 6 600 inhabitants, designed in 1963 and constructed between 1969 and 1973, differed from the original plans. More recently, Zofia pointed out mistakes of design rather than of execution, and confessed: “I think that in a practical sense, Przyczółek Grochowski is not a success, because people are not happy there.” Happiness of the inhabitants is not a modest criterion, and one that could make the architects an easy target for a critique of modernist “utopias”. When applied to Przyczółek, this commonplace is fused with a more specifically postsocialist debunking of large housing estates as symptoms of the fiasco of real existing socialism. While, as we will show in what follows, Przyczółek was by no means an example of “real existing modernism” and its position within Polish post-war urbanism and architecture is exceptional, this critique did not facilitate the acceptance of this complex as valuable architectural heritage, in spite of some recent suggestions inthe daily press. In the current political and economic climate in Europe, the housing projects of Hansen’s colleagues from the Team 10 network are often deemed too expensive for restoration, in particular since the broad public is not always convicted about their aesthetic value: some visual education is still needed to recognize the delicate details of the staircases in the Robin Hood Gardens in London by Alison and Peter Smithson, or the radiating surfaces of the Bobigny Housing by Georges Candilis, Alexis Josic, and Shadrach Woods. The case of Przyczółek is particularly controversial, because the challenge of preserving a housing estate with a complex ownership structure is exacerbated by the appearance of the buildings, which does not easily lend itself to aesthetic consumption. The starting point for conceiving Przyczółek as heritage requires questioning the first impression of this estate and to recognize it as a promise. Or, rather, as multiple promises: that of the socialist state – to coordinate the production of space beyond the contradictions of capitalism and to provide egalitarian housing for all; that of the architect – to give the inhabitants...