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. The street was treated as a charming anomaly at best, a reactionary nuisance at worst.

Today, Mokotowska is often talked about as one of the last remaining vestiges on the city’s left bank of the “real Warsaw” – a walk through its long jumble of shops and courtyards, pets and inhabitants, sights, sounds and smells is said to reveal something of what Warsaw was once like, before Hitler and Stalin ravaged and transformed the city for ever. If Mokotowska functions as an index of the city’s “authentic” continuity with its past, the Palace of Culture and Science, a monstrous 231-metre high wedding-cake skyscraper “gifted” to Poland by Stalin, is Mokotowska’s obverse, the most prominent visual and material marker in Warsaw of rupture and alienness.

Some respondents were asked whether Mokotowska has the Palace of Culture “up its nose” – in other words, whether Continuity Street is indifferent to the Palace of Rupture?

Could anything be revealed by directly juxtaposing these two seemingly incompatible urban entities – Continuity Street and the Palace of Rupture? Together with a team of volunteers from Warsaw University’s Department of Social Anthropology, I spent a couple of days interrogating inhabitants, shop employees and various others encountered along Mokotowska about whether they could identify any sort of relationship – positive, negative or indifferent (the latter expressed in the question, “Does Mokotowska have the Palace up its nose?”) – between the street and the Palace. Most respondents were bemused: “How can you compare a tall building with a long street?” Some were comically hostile: “They’ve got FUCK-ALL to do with each other!” Quite a few, including many of those who couldn’t think of anything meaningful to say about this strange topic, were persuaded to produce drawings of how they perceived the relationship to look. Others, however, entered into long and more-or-less nuanced diatribes about their own experiences of both the Palace and street, or about Warsaw’s historical and contemporary development.

Many of the people we talked to on Mokotowska Street, and even the volunteers who helped me to carry out this project, were initially quite sceptical about the merits of such a silly comparison between two completely different things. And indeed, the bewildered, exasperated silences elicited from many of our respondents seemed to confirm their worries. In some cases, even when our conversationalists did see a link, they seemed to invent it on the spot, directed by the unabashedly biased, leading questions we asked. Perhaps this whole exercise was doomed, painfully contrived out of a schoolboy Rylean category-mistake?

“Mokotowska is urban. The Palace is un-urban”.

 “I could never have my Nepali knick-knack shop in the Palace of Culture. The Palace is too urban.”

However, as we reflected on our rambling around Mokotowska, we became convinced that we were able to draw something resembling what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as a “plane of consistency” between two seemingly incompatible entities, even if only temporarily. The full version of this text presents and evaluates a selection of the proclamations and sketches collected during our exploration of Mokotowska’s liaisons with the Palace of Culture. Hopefully our readers will agree that, at the very least, this exercise in forced juxtaposition has been able to reveal a good deal of (often contradictory) linked insights: about the Palace of Culture, about Warsaw as a whole, but especially about the complex, dynamic, often tense and conflicted urban livelihood of one street. 

Entrapment fantasy – a bird’s eye-view of Mokotowska changing course to triumphantly encircle the Palace of Culture.