Białystok – An Open-Air Museum of Architecture from the Second Half of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

Article presents types of urban planning arrangements and characteristic for housing teams carried out in Białystok after the World War II. All this arrangement was composed in outdoor museum from the second half of the XX century Białystok till XVIII-century, when formed residence and private town of Jan Klemens Branicki. Unfortunately, during World War II city was completely destroyed (this refers to both physical destruction of the town, which exceeded 80% of the construction substance, and social destruction - the number of the town's population in 1939 was 107 000 and in 1946 there were less than 46 000 inhabitants). Its subsequent reconstruction was a combination of occurring conditions: economic, political and social. On the ruins of the industrial city, which in the nineteenth century was called Manchester of the North, a new urban area has been realized over the last seventy years. In this phase immediately after the war it was socrealist (Socialist realism in Poland), in the subsequent years modernist and postmodernist. Today city has 300 000 inhabitants. Current post-modern spatial arrangement of the city is neither accepted by its inhabitants (largely representing immigrant population) nor by designers of the subsequent phases of its development. Projects on the new street network, creating a new center. Summing up the analysis the author states that only continuous public education, indicating the valuable elements in our past, can build a positive image of today's cities.