Paper short abstract:

During Poland's Stalinist early 1950s, modernism was condemned for its 'cosmopolitan deviations' from socialist realism. Today, modernist buildings from this period participate in attempts to construct a heritage for contemporary Warsaw's self-presentation as an 'innately' cosmopolitan city.

Paper long abstract:

Polish architecture in the first decade after the Second World War was characterized (especially after 1949) by the supremacy of socialist realism. Architecture was to be 'socialist in form, national in content' and modernist buildings were routinely condemned for their 'formalism' and 'cosmopolitanism'. After 1989, but especially during the past several years, these very modernist 'deviations' are being celebrated as examples of an architectural 'resistance movement' against socialist realism. Many buildings from the 1950s are being painstakingly renovated to restore their faded 'avant-garde' glamour. Architects, critics, journalists and developers are citing these buildings as examples of Polish architecture's 'innate' embeddedness in international (or western) architectural 'trends', unshaken even in the face of 'imposed', 'totalitarian' (or eastern) aesthetico-political 'doctrines'. Moreover, the rebirth of Warsaw's 1950s modernist architecture is bolstering the notion that contemporary Warsaw is in the process of re-becoming a cosmopolitan, global city. These bastions (or 'Trojan horses') of modernity and 'worldliness' are being enlisted in attempts to construct a heritage for this new Warsaw, to prove that this is the kind of city it 'always was' at the core. Consequently, resistance and dominance are fused: the buildings which are being lauded as the physical embodiments and agents of historical 'defiance' are simultaneously being deployed to construct a heritage testifying to the 'naturalness' and historical continuity of a burgeoning, late capitalist, global Warsaw.