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Warsaw

Sebastian Bałut (590 architekci), Małgorzata Kuciewicz, Simone De Iacobis (Centrala)

The Warsaw Smile

We are interested in the phenomena of perceiving, understanding and using the city in respect to the consciousness of its structures among its inhabitants. The city shape is made of physical elements and of the meta-forms conceived by human minds. This mental dimension has a significant impact on the perception of touchable reality.

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Gregorz Piatek

Promised City Warsaw

Destroyed and rebuilt, intended and never finished, dreamt of and carried out, non-restored and non-existent, censored and true, improved and injured – Warsaw has always allowed a wide margin for dreamers. The city had to begin anew, several times. In the late 18th century, as Poland was being divided between Prussia, Austria and Russia, Warsaw lost its position as capital and its life-force evaporated; yet the industrial revolution revived it as an economic and cultural centre.

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Aleksandra Wasilkowska

Marketmeter. A creeping trade

Street trade creates a fluctuating and self-organising informal city space.  According to Richard Sennett, informal spaces at the grass-roots level make up the essence of a city.  “Informal public space requires under-determined urban planning, that is, an architecture which allows flexibility of use and admits physical gaps and indeterminate relationships between buildings.  It is in these liminal spaces that informality can flourish – the cafe built into a parking lot or the market stall outside a loading dock. 

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Michał Murawski with Zofia Janina Borysiewicz, Natalia Jabłońska, Anna Migdał, Piotr Nowakowski & Monika Szybka

CONTINUITY STREET versus THE PALACE OF RUPTURE: Juxtaposing Mokotowska with its obverse

The modernist and socialist realist urban planners who drew up plans for the reconstruction and reorganisation of Warsaw after the destruction of World War II sought to consolidate and further accentuate the grid-based layout according to which the central part of the city had been developing since the late 19th century. The long, weird, early 18th century curve of Mokotowska, lined with bourgeois apartment blocks and the occasional industrialist’s or minor aristocrat’s palace, stood in the way.

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Helena Chmielewska-Szlajfer & Wojciech Kacperski

Mokotowska Street: The Fresh Start of an Old Sentiment

    “Are you a Varsovian? Bred-in-the-bone? Then show your ID!”, was one gentleman’s answer to the question what he thought about Mokotowska Street. In a perverse way his reaction expresses a pretty common attitude toward the street located in the city’s centre: Mokotowska has always been here and only those who know about it can claim to be True Varsovians.

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Warsaw symposium

Researching and shaping post-socialist urban space 3.

 

 

 

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