“Slavic” or “Germanic Spirit”? Examples of the Ideologisation of Arcades in Research on Architecture in the 19th and 20th centuries

Abstract

Travelling across present-day Poland, it is only exceptionally possible to come across a specific type of historic urban and rural houses with a ground-level section open on three sides and supported on columns or posts. Yet still in the first half of the 20th century, in some areas of Europe this type of a house was commonly found, and already a century earlier it had intrigued researchers investigating among other things, its origins of development. Within the current borders of Poland, arcaded houses are found in greater concentration in territories that in the past belonged to different political organisms and thus their research was conducted with the adoption of different optics. It is noteworthy that arcades were easily subjected to various more or less conscious manipulations in order to justify their native character, sometimes understood as belonging to particular peoples, regions, nations or even races. The paper provides hypothesis that arcades are a construction element extremely liable to ideologisation. In order to illustrate this problem, the paper presents methods of interpreting the origin of arcades in former East and West Prussia, Silesia, Lesser Poland and Lublin Province in the period from almost the beginning of the 19th century, when researchers started to be interested in this element, until 1939 when Erich Kulke’s book was published, which was the clearest result of arcades’ ideologisation. These interpretations were divided into a few main groups, which made it possible to compare the narratives and to show how the same arguments could lead to different conclusions. Unique issues, characteristic only of particular regions, were also identified. Ultimately, an attempt was made to answer the question of what influenced the liablity of arcades to ideologisation. Since the authors of the research, often architects, promoted the preservation and use of arcades referring to old patterns in new developments, the question was also asked whether such developments actually occurred.