Krakow is stuffed full of architectural marvels. What’s not immediately obvious is that the whole lot is built of brick. There’s nothing wrong with bricks, let me hasten to add, but it is a bit of a con job. The buildings look as if they’re made of stone, but they’re not; it’s brick all the way down. I spent another productive Sunday wandering around Krakow collecting evidence.
A typical Krakow building. Looks like it’s made of stone, but actually it’s brick covered in a layer of sculptured render.
Another typical Krakow building where the deceitful layer of render hasn’t yet been repaired.
Now, as I said, there’s nothing wrong with building in brick but I do wonder two things:
1. Why go to the trouble of pretending that a brick building isn’t a brick building? Especially when major municipal buildings such as the main cathedral, Kosciol Mariacki, is plainly and openly brick-built?
Brick-built and proud of it.
2. Where’s all the stone? Wawel sits on a mound of (rapidly dissolving) limestone but most of it seems to be made of brick. There are limestone quarries within the environs of the city including the notorious Plaszow quarry – adjacent to the Nazi’s Plaszow work camp. Why aren’t most of the building built of stone with all this limestone lying around?… ok, actually that was about four questions in one.
Wawel: Poland’s heart is made of brick (mostly).
In case you don’t believe me about the limestone, here’s a picture I took of a stone in the wall of a monastery in Krakow. You don’t get many fossils in brick.
I look at other buildings in ridiculous, but oddly exciting, detail over on Polandian.
Author, what you wonder at here is a well-known technique called “boniowanie”. Unfortunately I do not know the English equivalent of the term but I am sure there must be one.
Boniowanie was very popular in the 19th century and you can find numerous examples of it everywhere in Krakow. I assume that it was cheaper to use brick as building material (high-quality stone is not as plentiful here as it is in the UK) and then cover it with something pretending to be stone (or maybe it was just a fashion – you need somebody better-informed to give you a precise answer).
As you obviously know kosciol Mariacki is a Gothic building; typically, it was built mainly of brick and so were a great number of other Gothic churches in Poland (I detect German influences here – they have always preferred brick). I think it is a special kind of brick called “licówka” which can be left “naked”; lico means face so the name of the brick definitely makes sense. Licówka should not be painted or plastered because then it “sweats”.
J.
The Austrians also favoured brick; one can easily identify the buildings (especially the public ones) which were built when this part of Poland belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Just look around and you will recognise them in an instant.
J.
cheaters!
i remember seeing a programme about new york that said that the wonderful looking buildings on wall street (don’t quote me) that at first glance appear to be stone are in fact cast metal! the guy even wacked a magnet on one of them.
shame.
Tom: I believe this is also the case with St Stephen’s Tower (better known as Big Ben).
I forgot to say that the brick tower of the Mariacki church is a very bird-friendly building. The holes in the brickwork have been and still are great nesting places for swifts. Actually, what seems to be the largest swift colony in Krakow can thrive thanks to the Gothic brick (and to the effort of a few emphatic and elightened men).
During the renovation works the workmen were told to leave the holes intact; as a result, the “Market Square swifts” were not evicted and they did not have to share the fate of the other Krakow swifts. Hurrrra!
J.
Somehow i missed the point. Probably lost in translation
Anyway … nice blog to visit.
cheers, Scriptoria.
Actually what you observed is called progress. The only buildings in Poland built out of stone come from Romanism. By the times of Gothic brick was implemented and since it’s cheaper and allows for a more speedy construction it replaced stone totally. By Renaissance they implemented plaster, so they began to cover the brickwork. Bricks that don’t need to be pretty can be stronger.
There’s a steady chain of logic as to why Krakow is made of rendered brickwork. The first part is that bricks are a cheaper, more malleable building resource than stone; kiln-firing is cheaper than quarrying, and bricks are made into the perfect useable size by the thousands from the factory, rather than the arduous cutting, shaping and dressing that stonework requires.
Secondly, the harsh Slavic winters ravish stone and brickwork quickly. During the frosts, water penetrates stone and the pointing between bricks, and as it freezes it expands, cracking, splitting and destroying both dressed stone and unprotected brick. By covering the building in a cheap, replaceable renewable concrete skin, the building’s longevity can be assured quickly and easily rather than chopping out old gnawed bricks and stone after 20 years.
So there’s your reason why Krakow is a tarted-up sham of an architectural style; it’s also why England’s south coast and the Brighton Pavillion in particular are covered in render, and a few other cold cities like Stockholm, Helsinki and St Petersburg.
The picture of the fossil is just wonderful.
I’m in Warszawa, and I always wonder why they left their beautiful buildings decay before rebuilding them. Wilanow had paint peeling from it’s windows as if it were a condemned farm house. It’s a real shame (they’re fixing it up now.)
I own a building in the Old Town, and a close relative owns other buildings there, including an exceptionally historical building.
Actually, many of the buildings in the Old Town are contsructed of a combination of brick and stone. I’m not an architect, but stone seems to have been used in elements of buildings in which greater strength was required. For example, my basement walls are eight-foot thick stone; my relative’s much larger and older building has thicker stone walls in the first basement, which was originally the ground floor, and much thicker stone walls in the second basement. (Krakow was “filled in” centuries ago to raise the ground level to prevent flooding; what were street-level floors became basements, and basements became second basements.) The buttresses on his building are also stone, which seems to be very common. Stone also commonly appears in other parts of old buildings when the render is removed. But not being an architect I can only speculate that these were other “pressure points” of the buildings. Brick was used in the remaining parts of buildings. Both the brick and the stone tended to be covered with render, but sections of stone were (later) exposed in some buildings, apparently for decorative reasons.
Dear sad person,
I’m sorry it seems like you are having quite a miserable time in Poland. Or is it that you just enjoy pointing out all the flaws you can find? I’ve only skimmed all of your posts, but what I have read is upsetting to me, as someone who proudly identifies herself as polish though I was not born there. Every country has problems, and you should be cognizant of that. Having a post or two about some good things you notice wouldn’t hurt. If there are none then I am not sure what you are doing staying there.
Yours,
Concerned reader