site-specific project
Pawilon Czterech Kopuł, Wrocław, PL
during the 7th SURVIVAL Art Review 2009

starring:
Łukasz Nawrocki as Hans Poelzig
and Łukasz Wasyliszyn as Max Berg

The Four Domes Pavilion in Wrocław, designed by Hans Poelzig ca. 1912, became after WWII a part of the state run motion picture studio Wytwórnia Filmów Fabularnych. Currently the building hosts the collection of contemporary art of Wrocław’s National Museum. Before renovation in 2009 the Pavilion was open to the public for a few summer days during 7th Survival Art Festival.

Through a small hole drilled through the thick concrete wall one could see a view to the park outside the Pavillion. At each full hour the ‘phantomes’ of two distinguished architects appeared in the park. Max Berg and Hans Poelzig, sitting or walking and deliberating. A lot of designs by these architects had not been carried out before Nazism came to power, nor later.

The Four Dome Pavilion has a classicist form typical for early modernism, nevertheless its meaning for the Wroclaw modernism is monumental, as are all other buildings designed by Poelzig and Max Berg—the co-author of modern vision of the urban planning of Wrocław (1919-1920), the architect of the nearby Jahrhunderthalle and the fairgrounds around.

Max Berg & Hans Poelzig

direction of the view through the hole
in the Four Domes Pavilion's wall

Spectres of Max in the title of the project is a reference to the title of Jacques Derrida’s Spectres de Marx, and the names of Max Berg and Max Stirner, a theoretician of anarchy, who claimed that the concept of something ‘public’ is a specter, a phantasm of no specific form of existence. The concept of ‘specter’ comes from the first line of The Communist Manifesto: A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism, and refers to the idea of hauntology. The theme of specters and ghosts started to emerge in the face of a rundown of the modernist impulse. It indicates a paradoxical longing for modernist ideals of innovation and constant change.

Hauntology is based on the old, at the same time it indicates a longing for novelty and change. Modernist architecture was rejected by Nazism because it reduces meaning and therefore such a reduced architecture is not able to transmit the “national ideology”¹. According to Krzysztof Nawratek, ‘modernist’ architecture is still blamed mainly for the reduction of meanings², nowadays as well.

¹ Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture, a Critical History, Thames and Hudson, London 1990
² Krzysztof Nawratek, Ideologie w przestrzeni, Universitas, Krakow 2005