At the end of the Second Polish Republic, preparations were underway in Warsaw for a large international exhibition to be held in the early 1940s. However, the outbreak of World War II interrupted the entire project. Today, only conceptual sketches remain of those grand dreams. The World Exhibition in Warsaw was to present the achievements of the reborn country and its plans for development.
World Exhibition in Warsaw
The idea for the World Exhibition in Warsaw emerged before 1939. The plans were to hold the exhibition in the first half of the 1940s to celebrate the 25th anniversary of regaining independence. It was to be a very significant event of international importance, comparable to other exhibitions around the world at that time. The aim of organising this event was to highlight the achievements of the young, reborn state and the importance of its capital city. The work on the concept was entrusted to Juliusz Nagórski, among others. The architect’s initial plans envisaged using a large area in the Saska Kępa district and the vicinity of today’s National Stadium for the exhibition. The event was to attract millions of people wanting to see Poland’s achievements, all presented in an elaborate arrangement of elegant pavilions.
The grand plans of architect Juliusz Nagórski
The surviving information shows that those working on the event managed to prepare urban sketches and designs for exhibition buildings, with architecture corresponding to the modernism that was fashionable at the time. Individual pavilions were to present various areas of the country’s life, from industry and technology, through agriculture, to art and science. The exhibition programme referred to practices known from other world exhibitions of that period, where, alongside the achievements of the state, ambitious visions of development and future changes appeared. The documentation of the Warsaw concept has been preserved only in fragments and is known today mainly from studies devoted to unrealised projects of interwar Warsaw.
World Exhibition in Warsaw – details
Preserved descriptions and analogies to other world exhibitions from the 1930s allow us to reconstruct the general picture of the planned development. Warsaw planners devised a composition based on wide viewing axes, expansive squares and pedestrian routes leading between the pavilions. These were designed as temporary structures with a distinctive form, simplified details, but elegant and interesting. Among them, several towers and an obelisk in the centre of the roundabout were to dominate. Light-coloured façades, large glazing and rhythmic divisions of the façades were typical of the exhibition architecture of the time. The whole was complemented by orderly greenery, water reservoirs and small architectural features.
Germany’s aggression against Poland and the end of dreams
September 1939 put an end to all the grand plans. Germany’s aggression against Poland and the capitulation of Warsaw made such a large undertaking impossible to implement, a distant dream. All aspects of life were subordinated to the war, and the future of the capital was called into question. In the following years, the idea of the Warsaw World Exhibition was never revisited. In 1944, the Germans turned the city into a sea of ruins, which ultimately buried the grand pre-war plans. Today, they exist only as a curiosity, although in the 1930s they took on real shape and aroused pride in the reborn Poland.
Source: dzieje.pl, historycy.org
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