Warsaw’s Poniatowski Viaduct: The World’s First Elevated Urban Expressway

Rapid urban communication was key to the utopian visions of the early twentieth-century Städtebau and City Beautiful movements. In Warsaw’s Poniatowski Viaduct: The World’s First Elevated Urban Expressway, Stefan Muthesius discusses an early realization of these visions. The particular topography of Warsaw, which linked a bridgehead with the upper town, necessitated an elevated roadway. The result was an arched structure in reinforced concrete and steel of an unprecedented size. Architect Stefan Szyller made sure that this feat of engineering also turned into a work of monumental architecture in the age-old Renaissance sense of the word, one that could thus serve as the sign of a new Polish self-assertion in the Russian-occupied city.