On a grey morning on Plac Piłsudski, the scaffolding tells you nothing about what is being built. The raw brick walls rising on the western edge of the square could be a new development anywhere in central Warsaw — except that they are not new. They are, by the explicit terms of a 2021 act of the Polish parliament, to be raised in the “external architectural shape” the buildings held on 31 August 1939: the last day before the war that would erase them. This is not a building site in the ordinary sense. It is a reconstruction of something that has been gone for eighty years, and the most contested public-works decision in the city.
To understand why Warsaw argues about a palace that no longer exists, you have to understand that no European capital has a stranger relationship with its own absent buildings. Warsaw is a city that was largely deleted and then redrawn from memory, paintings and survey notes. The unbuilt, the destroyed and the reconstructed are not separate categories here. They are the same conversation, and it has been running for eighty years.
The office that rebuilt a capital from rubble
By January 1945, when the Germans abandoned Warsaw, the city was, by the standard estimate, around 85 per cent destroyed — the historic centre worse still. The devastation was not only the cumulative damage of the 1939 siege, the ghetto’s liquidation, and the 1944 Uprising. After the Uprising was crushed, German Sprengkommandos, “demolition squads”, were sent in to dynamite what still stood, methodically, district by district. The intent had a paper trail: the so-called Pabst-Plan, drawn up under Nazi architect Friedrich Pabst, had envisaged levelling the Polish capital and replacing it with a small German provincial town. The unbuilding of Warsaw was, in the most literal sense, a plan.
The reply to that plan was another office. On 14 February 1945, weeks after the front had passed, the new authorities established the Biuro Odbudowy Stolicy — the Office for the Reconstruction of the Capital, universally abbreviated to BOS. Within months it employed something on the order of 1,500 people: architects, planners, engineers, art historians, lawyers. Its first work was not building but cataloguing — surveying ruins, inventorying what could be saved, marking buildings that might be reconstructed. The BOS was wound up by the early 1950s, but its archive survived, and in 2011 UNESCO added it to the Memory of the World register: the paper record of how a city was reassembled is itself now a heritage object.
Painted from a Venetian’s canvases
The most-repeated story about Warsaw’s rebuilding is also, unusually, true: parts of the Old Town were reconstructed with the help of eighteenth-century paintings. Bernardo Bellotto — a nephew of the Venetian view-painter known as Canaletto, and who used that name himself — served as court painter to Poland’s last king and produced a series of meticulous vedute, “city views”, of Warsaw in the 1760s and 1770s. Painted with near-photographic precision, the surviving canvases — some two dozen of them, now hung in the Canaletto Room of the rebuilt Royal Castle — recorded façades, rooflines and street plans that the demolition squads had since erased. For certain buildings, they were among the closest things to a measured drawing the reconstruction teams had.
It would be tidy to say the Old Town was rebuilt “from the paintings”, and the tourist literature often does. The honest version is more layered: the canvases were one source among many, alongside pre-war photographs, the careful survey records of conservators such as Jan Zachwatowicz, and a great deal of interpretation. What is not in dispute is the result. In 1980, UNESCO inscribed the Historic Centre of Warsaw on the World Heritage list precisely as a reconstruction — an “outstanding example” of near-total rebuilding — a listing that quietly broke the convention that heritage means original fabric. Warsaw had won the argument that a faithful copy could carry the meaning of the lost thing.
An outstanding example of the reconstruction of a span of history covering the 13th to the 20th century.
UNESCO World Heritage inscription, Historic Centre of Warsaw (1980)
The Warsaw that was planned and never came
There is, alongside the destroyed city, a second absent Warsaw: the one that was drawn but never built. The interwar republic produced ambitious modernist visions for the capital — functionalist masterplans that imagined a rationalised, zoned metropolis — most of which the war and then the politics of the post-war decades quietly shelved. The socialist era added its own unrealised grandeur: monumental axes, parade grounds and civic ensembles sketched on a scale the budgets never matched. Much of central Warsaw, in other words, is haunted not only by buildings that were demolished but by buildings that existed only as renderings. The city’s archives hold a great deal of architecture that was never poured in concrete.
This is the more accurate version of the romantic idea of a “commission for the unbuilt”: not a single office writing briefs for buildings that will never rise, but a whole municipal culture that has, for eighty years, treated the missing and the hypothetical as legitimate objects of study. In Warsaw, the unbuilt has always been part of the planning record.
The palace that came back as politics
Which returns us to Plac Piłsudski. The Saski (Saxon) Palace and the neighbouring Brühl Palace were among the grand buildings that did not return after the war; the surviving fragment of the Saski Palace’s arcade, sheltering the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, became the square’s defining absence. For decades, the empty western frontage was a recurring proposal — rebuild, or leave it. In August 2021, the question was answered by statute: an act, signed into law that month, committed the state to reconstructing the Saski Palace, the Brühl Palace and three townhouses on Królewska Street, with their pre-war external form, a special-purpose company established before the year was out to deliver it.
An architectural competition followed in 2023, won by a Warsaw practice, and archaeologists began uncovering the original foundations beneath the square — the dynamited cellars of 1944, catalogued and conserved as the new walls go up above them. The reconstructed buildings are intended to house public institutions, among them the Chancellery of the Senate. Completion has been targeted for around the end of this decade, though, as with any project of this scale and symbolism, the date should be read as an intention rather than a promise.
It is genuinely contested, and not on narrow grounds. Supporters frame it as the completion of unfinished post-war business — the last gap in the reconstructed heart of the city finally closed. Critics ask whether a state should spend heavily to rebuild a nineteenth-century façade in pre-war shape in the 2020s, and whether the impulse is conservation or a particular reading of national memory. The dispute is, in the end, the same one Warsaw has been having since 1945: what is the right relationship between a city and the buildings it has lost?
The argument moves to the present tense
Not every answer Warsaw is now giving points backwards. A few hundred metres south, on Plac Defilad in the shadow of the Stalin-era Palace of Culture and Science, the Museum of Modern Art opened the first phase of its new home in October 2024 — a stark white building by the New York architect Thomas Phifer, set deliberately against the dark mass of the Soviet “gift” beside it. After nearly two decades without a permanent building, the institution finally has walls of its own, and the contrast is pointed: a city that has spent eighty years rebuilding what was taken from it now placing a frankly contemporary structure on its most loaded square.
That is the tension worth carrying away from Warsaw. The Museum of Warsaw, on the Old Town market square, tells the story of the rebuilding to anyone who walks in; a few minutes away, the Saski Palace rises again from documented foundations; a few minutes further, a white box insists that the city does not only look back. The reconstructed and the unbuilt are not a closed chapter here. They are the live material of how a European capital decides what it wants to be — and Warsaw, more than most, knows that the buildings a city chooses not to raise say as much as the ones it does.
By the city’s own long habit, the brief is never quite finished. The walls on Plac Piłsudski will go up; the argument about them will not come down. That, in Warsaw, is the normal condition of a building — even one that has not yet been built, and one that was unbuilt long ago.
Sources: Biuro Odbudowy Stolicy (Warsaw Reconstruction Office) records, UNESCO Memory of the World register (BOS archive, 2011); UNESCO World Heritage List, Historic Centre of Warsaw (inscribed 1980); Royal Castle in Warsaw (Canaletto Room, Bernardo Bellotto vedute); Pabst-Plan and the documented destruction of Warsaw; Act of 11 August 2021 on the reconstruction of the Saski Palace, Brühl Palace and Królewska Street townhouses, and Pałac Saski sp. z o.o.; Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (new building, Plac Defilad, Thomas Phifer and Partners, opened October 2024); Museum of Warsaw.
