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. When in 1918 Poland regained its independence, Warsaw was a capital again, hurriedly shedding vestiges of Russian peculiarities and vying for the rank of Central Europe’s principal metropolis. During the Second World War, it lost eighty percent of its buildings and nearly half its people (including practically all those of Jewish origin). Yet, once more, it was proclaimed the capital of Poland – a bold move at a time when its centre was still in smoking ruins and many doubted the economic sense of rebuilding it. After the year 1989 it found its place anew, as the mechanical heart of a country undergoing the shock therapy of economic transformation and modernisation, a promised land for the ambitious and talented, a city torn between old European values and an American vigour.
At times, Warsaw existed in a space more virtual than real; in the drawings of town planners sketching their visions of the future city amidst the upheaval of a World War; in the speeches of politicians; in the ideals of artists and social activists; in the sleepy thoughts of commuters taking morning trains to a city of success and plenty; in the legends of a city, ungrateful and demanding, that circulated the provinces; in the opinions of its inhabitants, ever-ready to assume the tone of critics of architecture. That incomplete and unpolished quality of Warsaw is unfailingly fascinating. The city is still full of places to which claims are endlessly laid: the empty space around the Stalinist Palace of Culture which for twenty years now has been a provocative challenge to the imaginations of politicians, architects and common citizens; the wild banks of the Vistula; hundreds of tiny fissures and faultlines around which the fabric of the city warps and contorts only to take up a new, smooth course.
Perhaps Warsaw is the most beautiful of cities; because its beauty is always promised and never consummated, like a banquet with no morning after hangover - or an everlasting election campaign with no post-election disappointment.
