PARAGON & PAROXYSM

This is Warsaw in a nutshell: palaces and bloks; great gardens and spare ground; gothic churches and, well, high-rise tower blocks; past and future, all rolled up in pratically the same space. The more I wander the city the more incongruous she becomes. When recently, in one of my classes, I remarked at how 'ugly' Warsaw was (I said it with a smile), this was immediately misunderstood as somehow negative. When I call Warsaw 'ugly' it is as a compliment, for within this 'spiritual unsympatheticness' I see a raw and savage beauty, one that cares not for your feelings, for your humanity, or your attention. It is an unwitting beauty, inadvertent, ex-apted. I might refer to Warsaw as a flashing example of the seemingly anthropo-ex-centred city, where spatiality and town planning have carried on outwith the human mandate of dimension, form and colour. But of course, the lack of any political cohesion takes shape firstly in the city. The 'polis' embodies the politics. Here, we have history in all its brutal glory where the spaces themselves are buildings of their own sort. Vanquished architecture. Paragon and paroxysm. In a city called Warsaw.

A high-rise apartment block and St. Florian's Church in Praga.