Wanders through .....Warsaw.

AEROPOLIS - THE HIGH-RISE CITY

Odi et amo.

The satirical poet Juvenal provides a vivid and unflattering, but not altogether impartial, picture of life in a Roman apartment block:

We live in a city supported mostly by slender props, which is how the bailiff patches cracks in old walls, telling the residents to sleep peacefully under roofs ready to fall down around them.

By the mid 4th century, there were 46,600 apartment blocks known as ‘insulae’ (islands), and only 1,790 ‘domus’ (villas) in Rome. Their heights, as well as their numbers, were something of a cause for concern; they continued rising higher and higher, even in spite of Trajan’s height restrictions of seven storeys.

At times, and places, wandering through Warsaw, I get to thinking of 4th century Rome.

This stepped residential block is part of the Goclaw housing complex on the north side of the Kanal Goclawski.

Apartment blocks are a visible part of any city. Warsaw's high and wide-rises however form an integral part of housing both in the centre and around it. Whole areas, like the southern suburban dormitory of Ursynow consist of nothing but them. Many were built in response to housing shortages in the 60s and 70s. This particular wide-rise was one of several in Zoliborz standing proudly off Krasinskiego Street near the river.

This colourful beauty is part of a complex between the main arterial roads of Ostrobramska and Grochowska. These areas are really 'spruced up' by all those trees and grassy areas. The proliferation of birds, notably pigeons, jackdaws, tits and sparrows aids this architecure immensely. When we talk of 'bionic architecure', this is where it all starts. These spaces in between buildings are as much a part of the building as the roof or the walls. In his list of the five most important elements in building Corbusier would reply: 'Sky, space, trees, steel and cement, in that order, and that hierarchy.'

This block in Ulica Prusa stands opposite the snazzy Sheraton and together form one of Warsaw's many enduring tectonic stand-offs.

Pre-amble

It has always struck me as enjoyably peculiar the orthographic similarity between the words ‘wonder’ and ‘wander’. Peculiar because despite their completely distinct etymological roots it might be said that they are still in fact nodes of the same plant.

In both cases, it is movement that is the stem from which both words diffuse. With wonder, in its capacity to marvel and wind out the possibilities thrown before it, it is a turning of the mind; with wander, in its power to gather ground, a turning of the foot.

The following blog, then, in its 3 years of stravaigs between Octobers 2006-9, presents something not just of a wandering of Warsaw, but of a wondering of this thing we call 'the city'. In the inimitable words of the cinematographer and traveller Wim Wenders:

Adventure, space and time.

spacers

Wandering from the strangled lanes and the tall thin houses of the city’s old town to the vast inglorious squares, runway avenues and wide-rises of the Socialist Realist Srodmiescie, and still further, to the open green spaces of Powazki Necropolis and Pole Mokotowskie, Skaryszewski and Lazienki Parks, Warsaw’s species of space are almost as varied as the life that inhabits them. From the perceived inhumanity of a discordant Centrum (and the ultra Palace of Culture) to the verdant ‘skwers’ of squat-block courtyards and the quiet compositions of Stary Mokotow and Saska Kepa, there is in Warsaw, from one quarter to another, and like no other European city, an ever-changing and pervasive sense of space.

To the avid wanderer, this often conspicuous melding of space is one of the city’s greatest attributes, for, in upsetting our normal rhythms of spatial interaction, the city brings the space itself to the fore.

In wandering the city (in ‘spacing’ it and engaging its space) the poems I have placed here effectively begin at this fundamental level. From here, they radiate outwards and encompass all aspects of the city, and whatever else, however distant, that may lie out there.

In broad daylight

In the widest daylight
in certain parts of the city
the human element
completely disappears
there is only a vague sensation of man
a few cracked tyre tracks in the earth
the sound perhaps of an airplane overhead -

This city
is the solitary city
the silent city
where all the flurry of talk has dissolved
into the air
into the earth
where the denizens
are dispersed
subterranean,
into iron and steel,
behind brick walls,
insinuated
into the integument of the city.

The city, rid of its self,
has become something else.
It is still the city
only not bigger not louder,
but quieter,
more alive.

Gradually,
the empty waste ground,
the weeds growing through the window,
the suddenly silent street,
in broad daylight,
smash the mind to pieces -

Extract from the song of space

…all these paths and tracts, interzonal,

Archived in the undergrowth,

Fugitive from the life that exhibits itself,

Draw the mindbody in

Draw the mindbody out,

Piece together a new city

By parallax, extract,

A city of space, that hides, accidental,

from all the standards hitherto published,

From purpose, profit, aversion

Harbouring petals of the unseen mover,

the flows overlapping,

enlarging,

Evolving

like flowers on a great chestnut

all these paths and tracts

The tree within a single leaf

drawing poetry in the earth.

KANDINSKY IN KABATY

The spirit, like the body, can be strengthened and developed by frequent exercise[…] for this reason it is necessary for the artist to know the starting point for the exercise of his spirit. The starting point is the study of colour and its effects on men. Wassily Kandinsky

Arriving at the end of the line
so tempted to keep going
I exit into Kabaty
the form-filled fringe of Warsaw
the precipice of city
cutting sharply into country.

Yet form in Kabaty is singularly suffering.
There are no pinnacles, no peaks,
no crags.
Simply blocks and cubes of
pulseless planes,
unfertilised space.

At the city limit,
the sharp teeth of humanity
stare at the brink of a world
from pastel-coloured blocks.

Red here
yellow there
green over there.

Blocks, ‘spiritually unsympathetic’,
(Kandinsky’s words not mine),
separated by canyons
of non-colour.
Blocks sometimes compounded,
fenced in,
by peach perimeters -

Buildings too far
buildings too near,
it is a riot of colour and non-colour,
a great spatial battle
of sound and echo.

When talking of the motion of colour
Kandinsky tells us, yellow -

can never have profound meaning […]
may be paralleled in human nature with madness,
not with melancholy or hypochondriacal mania,
but rather with violent raving lunacy.

There is madness here in Kabaty.

To try and displace the concrete grey
so profuse
in Warsaw,
the Kabaty colourists,
with their greens and reds,
blacks and whites,
have inadvertently uncovered grey
again.

(Delacroix sought to express rest
and the immobility of grey
through a mixture of green and red)

In The Language of Form and Colour
Kandinsky notes:

Two great divisions of colour occur to the mind at the outset:
Into warm and cold, and into light and dark.
To each colour there are therefore four shades of appeal -
Warm and light or warm and dark,
or cold and light or cold and dark.

Kabaty and Kandinsky
mull on the last
a seething spatial drama
a motionless discord
both cold and dark.

Wanders through .....Warsaw.

No comments:

Avian architrave

Pre-amble

ARCHIVE

PLEASE LEAVE BREAD FOR THE BIRDS

spacers

TODAY OUR GOAL IS MOVEMENT

RESPECT WOMEN OR THE BITCH GETS IT!

THE POSSIBILITY OF SPACE

This is no Warsaw

Looking onto ulica Goszczynskiego one white wintry morning

In broad daylight

The Pine Trees of Kampinos

The Mazowiecki Mindscape Park

Extract from the song of space

A moment of repose

Atop the tell kopiec powstania warszawskiego

by jezioro kamionkowskie in june

warsaw intra muros

the heart of an architect

KANDINSKY IN KABATY

In a Warsaw Winter

fort zbarz

fortress warsaw