New Facet of Warsaw of the Enlightenment: Barracks Designed by Stanisław Zawadzki

Ryszard Mączyński

Abstract

The Warsaw Barracks from the times of the reign of King Stanislaus Augustus have not as yet been thoroughly analysed; neither have archival sources nor printed records been studied for the purpose. In view of the fact that the Warsaw Barracks from the Enlightenment have been annihilated, first following various alterations to be later entirely demolished, what becomes of more importance is the preserved iconography, particularly the water colours featuring them by Zygmunt Vogel. The paintings’ realism and meticulousness allow to conduct the architectural study of the facilities they rendered.

The raising of the Barracks was the project entrusted to Major Stanisław Zawadzki who served as the military architect of the Army of the Polish Crown in 1777-95. He had enhanced his designing skills at the once prestigious Roman Academy of St Luke. He had also won esteem by designing the Kamieniec Podolski Barracks in 1782. By raising that edifice in the fortress which defended south-eastern frontiers of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the King intended to consolidate the defence potential of the country. Hence the uncompromised intention and readiness to implement the design by Zawadzki as a model boasting modern external forms and functionally solved interiors. Earlier still, in 1781, the architect had built Cadet Barracks in Warsaw; located in the vicinity of the Kazimierz Palace, they then served as the main seat of the School of Chivalry founded by King Stanislaus Augustus.  

The fundraising project and formal supervision over the construction of the Warsaw Barracks were assigned to the Founding Committee. Warsaw residents, already frustrated with their duty to ‘host’ soldiers, were eager to release themselves from that responsibility and sufficiently contributed to financing the raising of the Barracks for the Warsaw garrison. In order to collect the levy, in 1784, a special Tariff of the City of Warsaw  was mounted (for the first time all the properties were assigned consistent numbering). The project could hardly be more beneficial: not only did it release the residents from the curse of quartering soldiers, but also through grouping a given army unit within a single space, it somehow boosted the soldiers’ morale and availability.

The whole project, implemented until 1788, covered four barracks complexes at different spots within the city. On the escarpment along the Vistula on the northern side there were Barracks of the Foot Guard of the Polish Crown, while from he east the Barracks of the Lithuanian Foot Guard were located. Further away from the river bordering Old and New Warsaw from the west, on the north the Barracks of the Artillery of the Polish Crown were placed, and in the south the Barracks of the Horse Guard of the Polish Crown could be found. However, only one of the facilities, namely the Barracks of the Artillery of the Polish Crown was to be a complex raised entirely from scratch; meanwhile in two other cases: of the Barracks of the Foot Guard of the Polish Crown and those of the Lithuanian Foot Guard, the project implied a substantial extension either of an already existing barracks complex, or of an earlier civilian facility; in the last case, i.e. of the Horse Guard of the Polish Crown, it meant a thorough renovation of the already existing complex.

It is the Artillery Barracks that have to be regarded as the most important, since they provided the biggest freedom to the designer. Compositionally, they were enclosed within an extended rectangle of residential wings: of 23 axes from the front and of 26 axes on the sides. The wings marked out three internal courtyards: two smaller square ones, at the back, and one larger, rectangular, at the front. The elevations boasted austere décor. The most splendid was the façade, segmented by three avant-corpses, framed witth the articulation of the order of which the middle one was additionally decorated with a colonnaded portico crowned with a triangular fronton and featured the gateway to the premises, while the lateral elevations were crowned with sculpture decoration clearly speaking of the military purpose of the buildings, but also showing that it served as home to jj. The décor, albeit austere in compliance with the principles, gained a peculiar refined character meant to match the building’s location in the heart of the capital of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

While designing the Barracks of the Artillery of the Polish Crown, Zawadzki did not follow any definite model, but creatively resorted to the latest European trends. These can be testified to by a barracks plan created by Jean-François Neufforge almost contemporarily and included in the supplement to the publication he authored Recueil élémentaire d'architecture… released in Paris in 1775-80. However, Zawadzki’s concepts should not be regarded as a modification of the French sketch, since this is not what the similarity consists in. Actually, it is not the forms that are identical for both architects, but the principles they apply: composing with the use of strict symmetry rules of a monumental multi-winged edifice with internal courtyards featuring practical solutions resulting from the reiteration of meticulously planned formal and functional modules, adjusted to the varied comfort of officers’ and soldiers’ quarters.

The scale of the project to build the Barracks in the capital was unprecedented in King Stanislaus’ Warsaw. In 1788, the news was spread that ‘the Founding Committee financed the four Barracks factorias with 1,473,693 zlotys’. It was an impressive sum of money. Other statistical data also enter a large-figure scale. Four simultaneously run factorias employed over 1,000, an astounding number compared to the total of Warsaw’s residents in 1784 at 63,000. It was quite a challenge to coordinate such a giant team of workers involved in the construction process on distanced plots, and sometimes, as in the case of craftsmen and suppliers, dispersed throughout the whole of Warsaw’s territory. The extent of the works was so enormous that in 1785 the brick price suddenly soared by a third.

The first Neo-Classical works created in Warsaw could not make the decisive step towards transforming its Baroque facet. This was actually achieved only with the monumental Barracks, ‘superior to any other buildings of the capital in grandeur and architectural ornament’, scattered through different parts of the city, particularly by the Barracks of the Artillery of the Polish Crown and those of the Lithuanian Foot Guard exquisitely exposed in the urban layout. The feature that differed them clearly from other works which often, even if introducing the Neo-Classical stylistics, did not entirely dissociate themselves from the Baroque and Rococo, was the consistency in keeping the austerity of forms. This resulted on the one hand from the application of the principle of adequacy to military architecture promoted by architecture theoreticians, while on the other from Zawadzki’s clear personal preference for such a ‘revolutionary’ variant of Neo-Classicism, as it was sometimes defined by scholars.

The Garrison buildings raised in  Warsaw contributed to Zawadzki’s justified fame among his contemporaries who unanimously claimed that the ‘buildings of the military barracks raised by him in Warsaw and Kamieniec Podolski with incomparable economy not only provided comfort to the army and the two cities’ residents, but will also bring adornment to the country and glory to the nation for many generations to come’. When looking back from the perspective of over two centuries, Stanisław Zawadzki must be appreciated as an outstanding architect of Neo-Classicism who had the courage to express himself in utmost austere cubic forms, was able to take advantage of the most recent European trends in architectural art, and was also effective when it came to meeting complex structural and functional challenges of the works he created.