Kraków Castle: Re-imagining St Michael’s and St George’s

Drawings and Digital Collages by Tomasz Trzupek and Monika Trzupek

BOTB In the nineteenth century, the Austrian army demolished the churches of St. Michael’s and St George’s in the outer courtyard of the Wawel Castle in Krakow – a former capital of Poland - to facilitate the construction of buildings for the military occupation. In 1905 the Emperor Franz Joseph I ordered the Austro-Hungarian Army to vacate the Wawel Hill and, although Polish Independence would not arrive until 1918, Krakow’s Castle Hill would, for a period, become the site for an imagined architectural embodiment of the (re-)emerging Polish national identity.

At the beginning of twentieth century the playwright Stanisław Wyspiański (1869-1907) and architect Władysław Ekielski (1855-1927) proposed demolishing the military structures within the castle courtyard and rebuilding the two destroyed churches. Emerging from designs that utilised the Castle grounds as a background and stage scenery for plays by Wyspiański, the proposal to reconstruct the churches was part of a wider scheme to reconfigure the castle grounds as a ‘Polish Acropolis’. This was a vision of the Wawel Hill as a setting for the key institutions of the Polish nation such as the Senate, the Sejm, the Polish Academy of Sciences, and the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences. The design for the Acropolis was inspired by both Classical precedents and by the architecture of the city of Krakow itself.

In an article for “Architekt’ magazine published in 1908 the playwright and architect declared: “Our work had no foundation for the restoration of existing buildings, although we placed some of it within the historical fabric: we thought that Wawel should focus on the life of the nation, an ideal vision of its state and culture and be its embodiment in the form of a series of buildings that will support its living organism.”

Wyspiański and Ekielski went on to describe their approach to the re-construction of the two church buildings: “The idea of ​​the restitution of the two churches: St. Michael’s and St George’s, whose location and general shapes we found on the plan of the Castle from 1796, were created with the utmost care for the past and gave us, we think, the peculiar architectural motif for the system: St. Michael’s stands almost centrally and is an important link in the square in front of the Cathedral, whereas St. George’s asymmetrical form softens the strictness of the layout of Victory Square.”

The proposals of Wyspiański and Ekielski would never be realised but have recently become the inspiration for a paper project by Polish Architect Tomasz Trzupek and his partner the painter Monika Trzupek. The pair are known for their projects revolving around the idea of the ‘czarny dom’, or ‘black house’; a form they describe as both familiar and ‘carrying within it some anxiety characteristic of art objects’.

Tomasz and Monika have re-imagined the churches as a pair of abstract, blackened-steel sculptures sitting atop the still-visible foundations of the original structures. St George’s asymmetrical shape is invoked in a series of hovering roof planes while St. Michael’s is proposed as a more unified form reminiscent of the Royal Tombs of the Wawel Castle.

The design for St. Michael’s is also inspired by the work of Polish Architect Adolf Szyszko-Bohusz, the castle’s one time head conservator. As well as working on the restoration of the castle, Szyszko-Bohusz is known for a series of buildings built in Poland in the twenties and thirties and as one of the designers of the tomb of General Jozef Piłsudski, viewed as the father of the Second Polish Republic which was re-established in 1918.

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Published April 20th 2020