Euronews – Spaceships and tulips

Euronews – With a reputation for conservatism, one might not immediately associate the Polish church with an experimental approach to church design. But one would be very wrong. 

In the 1980s, Poland built more churches than any other country in Europe and many of them are quite surreal in design. 3,587 churches were constructed in the Polish People’s Republic (PRL) between 1945 until it fell in 1989.

The iconoclastic and ad hoc splash across an often bland urban and rural landscape in Poland started after the ‘thaw’ of 1956 and gathered pace after the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) – between 1962 and 1965.

Church architects were fascinated by postmodernism, which the writer Kuba Snopek saw as a reflection of the ethos of Solidarity.

“This kind of architecture needed an entirely new language of expression and used postmodernism, which was infiltrating from the West,” Snopek writes. It was also clearly a deliberate affront to the proletariat-minded Modernism of the Soviets.

https://www.euronews.com/culture/2021/10/12/spaceships-and-tulips-how-poland-s-communist-era-churches-rebelled-against-the-regime