Modernism. Architecture of Poland and Italy 1918-1943

Organizer: Institute of Italian Culture in Warsaw

We invite you on an extraordinary journey through interwar architecture. Michał Łukasik, a graduate of the Warsaw Film School and the Academy of Fine Arts, has been traveling across Poland and Italy for several years, capturing the most important examples of modernist architecture and broadly defined modernism, rationalism, novecento, functionalism, and art deco in his photographs. The fruit of this exploration is a photography exhibition presented at the Italian Cultural Institute in Warsaw.

The author compares the Italy of Benito Mussolini and the Poland of Józef Piłsudski. The reasons for the emergence of modernism in both countries were different, just as its forms were different. However, a closer look reveals numerous affinities, both in stylistic solutions and in the way architecture was understood by the authorities and builders of the time. The exhibition will feature examples of school, sports, cultural, residential, and religious architecture built in Rome, Milan, Naples, Bari, Warsaw, Krakow, Gdynia, and Katowice between 1918 and 1943. The opening of the photography exhibition was preceded by a lecture on modernism by Professor Davide Lacagnina from Rome.