The Polish School of Architecture 1942-45

The Polish School of Architecture joined that of Liverpool University between 1942-45. The harrowing times experienced by Polish emigres may be acknowledged in the skies in the Battle of Britain, as well as in other military and other services at the time, but I came across a compendium of Polish students design work when attending the school hidden deep in a second hand book store in Abergavenny, and what a read, if you like reading drawings that is, it is. You are transported to another world.
The book, published by Liverpool University Press at nearly 250 pages in 1945 is a time capsule, and represents an effort altogether different than you will find up on the walls of architectural schools today. The bacon factory, above, is especially captivating. Whilst I have seen rather wilful urban pig farms in recent years, spinning yards of narrative in an atmosphere resembling total doom, here is one cheerfully holding, slaughtering, bleeding, dissecting, cleaning and confecting the polish sausage no doubt sadly missed by it's author in drawings absolutely matter of fact, and how refreshing that is. I suppose when our image of a bacon factory is polarised simply in to Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall on the one hand and an ginormous anonymous shed in Denmark on the other, that's what attracts. Here is how it is done, in a process organised and for all to see in a modern building by a potential architect who is heading right back to Poland to build such a thing any minute now. And along side him in the studio were his friends all imagining (and also collected in this volume) other bacon factories, jam factories, newspaper headquarters, hospitals and so on all in the same optimistic vain, with not a hint of irony or distress. Meanwhile they were all dragooned into drawing fabulous plans and sections of historic Polish architecture; vernacular, secular and religious before they could set about their bacon factories, and that almost makes you cry.
Of course I wonder what happened to this third year student, he may have suffered reservations as to return at the close of the war, but what a book. A bacon factory; you wouldn't even set that project today, whilst a jam factory, in the midst of bloody carnage, would be seen as macabrely ironic.