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'BEHIND THE IRON GATE': SURPLUS OF MEMORY, PLACE OF MEMORY, AND FORGETTING IN A CONTEMPORARY CITY (Za Zelazna Brama. Nadmiar pamieci, miejsce pamieci i zapominanie we wspolczesnym miescie)

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Switek G.

Ikonotheka

2007

issue 20

117-146

'Behind the Iron Gate' is the name of the massive-scale housing estate in the centre of Warsaw, consisting of 19 apartment blocks, 16 storeys each, designed by a team of Polish architects (Jan Furman, Jerzy Czyz, Jerzy Józefowicz, Andrzej Skopinski) between 1966-1970. This realisation has been interpreted as one of the far-reaching consequences of the Athens Charter which commited CIAM to a single type of urban housing, described as high, widely-spaced apartment blocks wherever the necessity of housing high density of population exists. In the 1970s, the Behind the Iron Gate housing estate was considered a symbol of Polish socialist prosperity. The principles of so-called modern rationalism - that is, 'Siedlungen' responding to the drastic housing shortage, and 'Existenzminimum' understood as the apartment for the minimal existence - became subject to a political propaganda which affected the post-war urbanism in Poland as the country behind the Iron Curtain. Since 1989, the Behind the Iron Gate area is one of the most active construction sites in the city, attracting foreign investments, and gradually shaped as a 'Warsaw Manhattan'. Former green zones and playgrounds now host parking lots, bank and insurance company buildings, business centers, and exclusive hotels. At the same time, the Behind the Iron Gate housing estate is a rather neglected part of the city; the pre-fabricated apartment blocks are often referred to as 'architecture on pension', 'slums' or even 'pathological substandards'. 'A Surplus of Memory' is the title of memoirs by Yitzhak 'Antek' Zuckerman, a member of the Jewish Fighting Organization Command, who took part in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The Behind the Iron Gate housing estate was designed upon the field of ruins of the so-called 'small ghetto' liquidated in August 1942. On today's map of Warsaw, there are only few ruins in this highly built-up area that constitute the Jewish Route of Memory: a part of the ghetto wall, a gate, fragments of the original pavement and rails, and some pre-war 'memory places', such as the sites of non existing houses: of Isaac Bashevis Singer at Krochmalna street and of Icchok Lejbusz Perec at Ceglana (now Pereca street). Designed as a narrative walk along the contemporary streets and squares of the Behind the Iron Gate area, the paper examines the specificity of urban memory and questions the notion itself. Paul Ricoeur's description of the threefold, interpretative nature of the historiographical operation (as demonstrated in his 'Memory, History, Forgetting') is referred to the concrete urban site with its ambiguous character. Acknowledging the reciprocity of writing history and collecting memories, as well as the difference between the ontological question and the 'hauntological' description, the paper discusses the possibilities of historiographical and commemorative tasks of architecture. The Behind the Iron Gate area with its contemporary in-fills, socialist blocks and ruins, where architecture is not turned into a timeless monument or a museum-district, serves as an example of both the space of memory and the space of forgetting.

HE TRANSCRIPTIONS OF THE 'GESAMTKUNSTWERK' (Transkrypcje 'Gesamtkunstwerku')

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Switek G.

Konteksty - Polska Sztuka Ludowa

2008

vol. 62

issue 3-4(282-283)

47-53

The article addresses the question of the 'Gesamtkunstwerk' as a keyword with which to describe the ideal of modern culture. The programme of a 'Gesamtkunstwerk' was first explicitly formulated in the mid-nineteenth century by Richard Wagner in his essays 'Art and Revolution' and 'The Artwork of the Future' written in exile in Zurich after the failure of the German revolution in 1849. Traditionally seen as the invention of the nineteenth century, the notion of 'Gesamtkunstwerk', has been applied to a great variety of phenomena, ranging from the theatre, music, architecture, urban projects and political systems. Despite the elusive nature of the concept, some attempts have been made to set forth its essential characteristics; Harald Szeemann's exhibition 'Der Hang zum Gesamtkunswerk. Europäische Utopien seit 1800' (Zurich, 1983) is a case in point. As Odo Marquard notes, the concept of 'Gesamtkunstwerk' is already implied in Schelling's philosophy of art and its identity system: the system (das Gesamte) becomes an artwork and the artwork becomes a system. Although the early German Romantics did not use the term itself, Friedrich Schlegel's famous 'Athenaeum Fragment 116' is also considered as an anticipation of the nineteenth-century concept of 'Gesamtkunstwerk'. The Romantic claim for the synthesis of the arts and poeticization of life opened a path for a modern utopia, where art has been endowed with a 'redemptive' power, and had far-reaching consequences for the development of modern aesthetics. Although the notion of the 'Gesamtkunstwerk' now seems archaic or 'suspicious' - especially in the context of postmodernism and its valuation of the fragmentary - it has reappeared in the expanded field of contemporary art and architecture, especially in happenings, installations and projects in public spaces

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1 Ikonotheka

1 Konteksty - Polska Sztuka Ludowa

1 2008

1 2007

2 Switek G.

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'BEHIND THE IRON GATE': SURPLUS OF MEMORY, PLACE OF MEMORY, AND FORGETTING IN A CONTEMPORARY CITY (Za Zelazna Brama. Nadmiar pamieci, miejsce pamieci i zapominanie we wspolczesnym miescie)

HE TRANSCRIPTIONS OF THE 'GESAMTKUNSTWERK' (Transkrypcje 'Gesamtkunstwerku')