The face of today's Wrocław is made up of layers laid down by architects working in very different periods and political systems: from a reinforced-concrete experiment before the First World War, through a modernist showcase estate from 1929, to the post-war rebuilding of a city that had been almost seventy per cent destroyed, and buildings that are going up here today. A few names and a few places let us trace this line from the early 20th century to the present.

Max Berg and the Centennial Hall

Max Berg was born in 1870 in Szczecin, studied at the Royal Technical School in Berlin under the neo-Gothic specialist Carl Schäfer, worked in Frankfurt, and in 1909 took up the post of city building councillor of Wrocław, a role he held for the next sixteen years, until 1925. He was responsible for the greatest architectural experiment of pre-war Wrocław: the Centennial Hall, a reinforced-concrete exhibition and sports hall built between 1911 and 1913 for the hundredth anniversary of the appeal by King Frederick William III of Prussia calling for resistance to Napoleon. The hall's dome is 67 metres in diameter and, at the time it was built, was the largest reinforced-concrete structure of its kind in the world - the building is now on the UNESCO World Heritage list.

Besides the Centennial Hall, Berg designed, among other things, a children's hospital from 1911 on today's Hoene-Wrońskiego street, a municipal bathhouse from 1912, and a chapel at the Osobowice cemetery from 1920-1921. As the city's architect, he also planned Wrocław's development on a scale far larger than individual buildings: he proposed the strategic placement of high-rises at key points in the city as a compromise between the European model of horizontal development and the American vertical model. None of these projects was built - one tower was meant to stand where the cloth hall on the Market Square stands today, another where the provincial office building now stands, but both ideas stayed on paper. Berg ended his career as city architect in January 1925, resigning after a dispute with the city council over urban development plans.

Interwar modernism - the WuWA exhibition

The next layer of the city's architectural history was created sixteen years after the Centennial Hall, in 1929, when an architectural exhibition called Wohnungs- und Werkraumausstellung, or WuWA for short, the Exhibition of the Dwelling and Workspace, was organised in the Dąbie district. It was organised by the Silesian branch of the Deutscher Werkbund, and the person who contributed most to its creation was Heinrich Lauterbach, founder of the Silesian branch of the association, who together with Adolf Rading led the project's artistic direction. The exhibition brought together both avant-garde architects and more moderate ones, all locally connected with the Werkbund movement.

The WuWA estate was Wrocław's answer to the European modernist movement, the same current that was, at the same time, taking shape in similar housing exhibitions in other German cities - flat roofs, functional floor plans, an austere form without historicising ornament. Today the area between Kopernika, Dembowskiego, Tramwajowa, Wróblewskiego and Zielonego Dębu streets is listed on the heritage register as a complex of architectural importance, and the reconstructed DOIA kindergarten is one of the points that can be seen as a testimony to that exhibition. WuWA shows that modernism in Wrocław was not an isolated phenomenon, nor one lagging behind the rest of Europe, but part of the same discussion about what a 20th-century home should look like.

Post-war reconstruction

The Second World War destroyed or damaged about seventy per cent of Wrocław's built-up area, and eighteen million cubic metres of rubble piled up amid the fighting for the city, which the Germans had declared the fortress of Festung Breslau. The scale of the destruction is well illustrated by today's Plac Grunwaldzki - a pre-war representative thoroughfare linking two bridges over the Oder, planned back in the 1880s on the initiative of building councillor Richard Plüddemann and completed towards the end of the 1920s. After the war this place was rebuilt in entirely different conditions - as part of a post-war academic campus, with development typical of Polish reconstruction of the 1950s and 1960s, today largely reduced to a wide street and a junction instead of the former representative square.

A similar scenario, though on a smaller scale, applied to many of the city's monuments. Wrocław Cathedral on Ostrów Tumski, about seventy per cent destroyed, was rebuilt to a usable state by 1951, and it was reconsecrated then by Primate Stefan Wyszyński - conservation work on it, however, continued long after that date, even after 1968. The rebuilding of Wrocław after 1945 took place under conditions completely different from the city's pre-war expansion: at that time the city was settled largely by Poles resettled from the Eastern Borderlands, and the rebuilt development combined the need to provide housing quickly with an attempt to save what could still be saved of the pre-war heritage fabric.

Contemporary Wrocław

The newest layer of the city's architectural history consists of developments built in the free Poland era, of which the National Forum of Music on Plac Wolności is a well-documented example. Building permission was granted in February 2008, work started in December 2009, but in October 2012 the original construction consortium, with Mostostal Warszawa as main contractor, halted the project, and the building stood unfinished for a while. A new consortium finished it, and the hall was officially opened in September 2015. Today it is one of the largest concert venues in Europe, with its own orchestras and choirs, recognised in 2023 with an international award for architecture and acoustics - its construction history, with the work interrupted halfway through, shows that major contemporary architectural investments in Wrocław can be just as complicated as those from a hundred years ago.

From Max Berg's reinforced-concrete dome, through the functionalist houses of the WuWA exhibition and squares rebuilt from rubble, to a concert hall finished after years of standstill - this is a common thread in which every generation of architects working in Wrocław has had to face the question of how to keep building in a city that regularly lost and regained its built fabric.