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.

Warsaw is often considered chaotic. The city center is made of urban scale elements which are not sufficiently present in the collective consciousness. The Massive scale of the Second World War's destruction, largely removed the city's fabric and gave the postwar planners a huge freedom to rebuild the city as a mixture of reconstruction and newly created urban parts, in socialist-realist and modernist manner. The Fall of Iron Curtain started a compulsive growth without a clear vision or a coherent plan. Nowadays, what was intuitively obvious has become blurred. Citizens do not recognize the city structure and its logic, and do not have a picture of it in mind.

It seemed that the idea of making a survey of Mokotowska Street for the project “Anatomy of the Street”, meets our own interest in investigating one of the most important, but slightly forgotten, urban structures of Warsaw.

During our investigation, we found that the city center is more or less built on an orthogonal grid, with only a few streets cut it diagonally. Mokotowska has a mirror twin street and together they create a bigger structure. In fact the sequence made by Mokotowska, Bracka, Zgoda streets is a relic of a primeval highway, older than the city itself. It diagonally intersects the orthogonal grid of the Warsaw city centre like Broadway crosses Manhattan.

We focused on the relation between Mokotowska's morphology (which makes it peculiar compared with the surroundings) and its conscious and subconscious evidence and the effects generated by the that evidence. Despite of the fading awareness of this strong urban structure, we could say, on a “official” level, people subcutaneously sense its potential and place on fancy shops there trendy clubs and cultural institutions including the Museum of Modern Art currently being built.

Our study will support our vision of a boulevard that crosses the whole city center from Grzybowski square to the Pole Mokotowskie park. A Boulevard called, due to its characteristic shape on the map, “The Warsaw Smile”.

There is one element needed to achieve our overriding goal: a picture capable of structuring the physical shape of the city inside the common consciousness, which clarifies it and strengthens its sense of identity. To do that, in the case of the Warsaw Smile, we plan to use some unarchitectural tools like branding, gossiping, trend setting and creating art events. Our first idea is to install a led light milky way on the entire road's mileage, to merge the unconscious path with the physical structure, exploiting a direct experience.