WARSAW SUBURBAN RESIDENCE OF KAZIMIERZ PONIATOWSKI IN SOLEC

JOLANTA PUTKOWSKA

Aristocrats from court circles were the first to create so called “English” landscape gardens. One of the first who succumbed to this fashion was the older brother of king Stanisław August Poniatowski - Kazimierz Poniatowski. In 1771, in Solec near to Warsaw, he transformed a inherited manor house into a suburban villa according to the design of S.B. Zug. The residence had an axis and symmetrical composition with legibly introduced hierarchy of space from the most important courtyard to useable garden. Interestingly, the belvedere initiating the entire system was a dominant there.
Soon after completing the modernisation, the villa in the adopted program and plan turned out to be insufficient and too conservative for the owner. In circa 1774, he doubled the size of his residence, and, using the services of the same architect, established on the new terrain a landscape park with original, carefully selected equipment, patterned on the latest valid fashion assumptions and additional necessary buildings. The buildings, partly added to the existing ones, supplemented and improved the functioning of the residential part of the villa, and pavilions located in the garden enriched and made its residential program more attractive.
The completed residence of Prince Kazimierz Poniatowski in Solec was undoubtedly original. It was established as a combination of two varied parts, of various composition, and in the case of the added part with a plan and development completely different from the original, rejecting the axis and symmetry. Apart from the correctly solved function, this did not allow the achievement of a cohesive system or to introduce spatial relations between them. The variety of the two parts was additionally augmented by different architectural developments – the first with late baroque and classicistic decoration with rigid forms hardly corresponding with functions of the villa, and the second with decorations surprising with diversity, originality, creativity and contrasting function with form and innovation.
K. Poniatowski used the residence in Solec for 11 years, but decided that when damaged by the Vistula floods it did not meet his functional needs and aesthetical requirements, and was evidently not sufficiently fashionable and peculiar. He sold it in 1782, but already earlier, from 1776, he started construction of a new villa in the neighbourhood, at the upper terrace of the slope, on both sides of the road from Nowy Ĺšwiat to Solec.