Functional Warsaw: A challenge from the past

Abstract

This article describes the planning concept known as ‘Functional Warsaw’ (Warszawa Funkejonalna) prepared in 1934 by the architects and urban planners Jan Chmielewski and Szymon Syrkus. This planning exercise can be considered both as a most spectacular example of progressive trends in Polish urban planning thought in the inter‐war period, and as an attempt to respond to the challenge created by the widely known ‘Charter of Athens’ regarding the postulates of the functional urban region. The article is divided into four sections. The first considers the national background in which circumstances conducive to development of urban thought in Poland created favourable conditions for the relatively early practice of regional planning. The next section deals with the international context, the influence of the foreign avant garde movement as represented in CIAM (the International Congresses of Modern Architecture). In the third section, the authors’ model of the functional urbanized region is described; some c...