Alina
Aglaia Konrad visits the work of Alina Scholtz. Text by Jelena Pančevac
This article is an excerpt from Alina, Barbara, Halina, Helena, Zofia, a new volume in the CCA Singles series.
Alina Scholtz (1908–1996) was a landscape architect at a time when landscape architecture was only just emerging as a professional discipline, in a place that had been destroyed during the Second World War, and where greenery was seen as both a means of urban redevelopment and the symbol of a better future. She designed gardens and parks, memorial grounds and green highway corridors, and housing estate landscapes. Her legacy is that of an invisible, heroic builder whose work is today taken for granted—as if it has always been there, a piece of nature.
Warsaw is now one of the greenest European capitals, with almost one third of the city taken up by public gardens, parks, nature reserves, and woodland. This was not always the case. Before the war, it was one of the most densely built cities in Europe. But by the spring of 1945, Warsaw was reduced to ruins. In its reconstruction, the city inadvertently became a modernist dream come true: an urban arcadia of built volumes blended within surrounding green areas.
These green areas, making about three quarters of the Warsaw masterplan, are as important and essential to the city as built-up areas. They are its huge lungs, necessary for proper functioning of an urban organism. These will be parks and public gardens, meadows and fields, and residential areas where inhabitants can do gardening and agriculture; these will be forests, existing and planted on wastelands […], these will be spaces full of sun and shadows from trees, surrounding places of working and living, available at all times and for everyone.1
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Grażyna Terlikowska-Woysznis, “O Warszawie, kt.ra będzie” (About the Warsaw that Will Be), Skarpa Warszawska No. 1 (1945): 3. ↩
The work of a landscape architect in the pre-war period was typically limited to the design of private gardens and city parks. This scope would change with the immense void left in the aftermath of the war. Scholtz’s work accordingly shifted in scale. In April 1945, she started working for the newly established Warsaw Reconstruction Office, and the following year became the head of the Greenery office of the Urban Planning Department. One of the first tasks of her department was to estimate the damage and start replanting.
Scholtz used readily available material in her designs. Dry-stacked masonry walls were made of local stone. They were bound with mortar or plain soil, allowing moss and other plant matter to grow between the joints and alter the stones’ colour.
Her previous hands-on experience with garden design influenced the attention she put into the choice of individual plants, even when she was working at an urban or territorial scale. Every stone and every tree contributed to a larger composition: the landscape design model reveals her sculptural thinking.
Paths and walkways, steps and platforms, stone and gravel. A wall that divides a footpath from a lawn, high enough to sit at, or low enough to climb over. The experience of the landscape is shaped by one’s interaction with these elements, whether walking through them or resting under the shade of a tree. In her work, nature is organized by architecture.
In terms of design, the Greenery office was enthusiastic, above all, about city-wide concepts—grand spatial assumptions that we believed would be fulfilled. This was the general attitude: rebuild Warsaw from scratch, enriching it with new elements based on the historical tradition. There was a freshness to this view which, among other things, allows you to learn from the natural values of the place, from the topography of Warsaw […]. On the other hand, the design focused on healthy urban organization and better living conditions of city dwellers.1
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Alina Scholtz, “Ruiny i wizja odbudowy – architekci o Warszawie sprzed lat 20, in Kultura. Tygodnik Społeczno-Kulturalny No. 3 (1965): 5. ↩
Trees play a central role in Scholtz’ projects. Their spatial arrangement defines the basis of her compositions. Oak, ash and maple, hornbeam and lime trees, chestnut and cedar, beech, poplar and linden, apple and pear trees. Old trees were often preserved, even when damaged and sick, as she appreciated their age and the picturesque appeal they gave to her landscapes. Many of them survive to this day.
A wasteland in Warsaw’s Wola district—with clay pits, landfills, and rubble—was cleared by citizens as part of voluntary community action to make space for what is now Moczydło park. An artificial hill was made from the rubble of the demolished buildings. Clay pits were transformed into four inter-connected ponds, creating an oasis in the middle of the city.
Scholtz first studied horticulture, then architecture, and in 1932 was one of the first graduates of the newly established Department of Landscape Architecture and Park Studies at the Warsaw School of Agriculture. Women received voting rights in Poland in 1918 and she would make the most of the opportunities her generation gained. Her work perfectly reflected the entanglement between architecture, urban planning, and landscape design. She created subtle narratives about places and their collective usage and meaning.
A park is also a memorial ground, recalling the ancient idea of a sacred grove as a place of ritual and collective memory. Rows of trees make a monumental colonnade along alleys and stand in contrast to the scattered trees that make a wild forest. The sheer scale of war atrocities required new forms of commemoration.
Large-scale landscape design was associated with the improvement of environmental and living standards, but also as an expression of collective memory and progressive political ideals of Warsaw’s new socialist society. Infrastructural projects, memorial grounds, or simply gathering places for the proletariat were all key investment projects. Mass volunteer planting campaigns and change from private to public land ownership enabled unprecedented efficiency in making new green areas. Modern architecture was seen as an instrument of progress, emancipation, as well as social transformation.
To build cities, not on the basis of abstract principles but thinking of the people, the thousands of simple men for whom we have to organize the space in which they live, work and rest and for whom we must conceive an architecture of such objectivity and stability that it can be defined as classical, and so solidly anchored to contemporary reality that it can at the same time be defined modern—this is the duty of our generation.1
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Barbara Brukalska, https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/08/builders-of-a-new-world (accessed 10 September 2024). ↩
Editing by Zaven Titizian
