542

Peter Martyn

Public discourse has been further stimulated by the official declaration this December that
preparations are being made to develop into 2005, and under the auspices of the Chief Municipal
Architect's Office, two major sites in the city centre. One encompasses the vast semi-void behind
Marszałkowska Street and Jerusalem Avenue occupied by the Palace of Science and Culture and
what is still known by the anachronistic misnomer of Parade Square. The other area covers pre-
war Warsaw's most extensive public place currently bearing, as it did in the late 1930s, the name
ofMarshal Joseph Piłsudski (renamed in 1945 with a huge dose of doublethink Victory Square to
assuage the infamous wartime designation of Adolf Hitler Platz). While the first of these projects,
occupying approximately 25 hectares of premium 'CBD' terrain, partially built over with impro-
vised, gigantic shopping hangers, is bound to prove an overwhelmingly commercial affair, the
second project concerns the future plan and architecture of the prewar urban core's most represen-
tative public square, named historically after the Saxon monarch for whom the extensive palatial
forecourt was originally laid out as part of a grand Baroque ensemble modelled on Versailles.5

gallery of the 'Agora' headquarters of 'Gazeta Wyborcza'. Reportage of the momentous changes being effected in the
city could be said to have become as fragmentary as the processes themselves. While nothing could compare with the
journal 'Stolica' ("Capital City") for documenting the rebuilding and continued life and work of postwar Warsaw so
comprehensively, it had probably been too tainted by the ideological excesses of the former system to find a place - and
above all private sponsorship - in the new era dawning after 1989. Chronicling the affairs of a metropolis in ever more
frenetic times was left to the erudite but increasingly hermetic quarterly 'Kronika Warszawy', first published in 1970 (on
the purely academic annual 'Rocznik Warszawy', refer to: ftn. 18). Since the end of 1989, tvo journals hailing this
supposedly new age have sought to cover on a regular basis events and developments in the city: one published in Polish
and the other, somewhat symbolically, in English. The daily newspaper 'Gazeta Wyborcza' (literally "The Electoral
Daily"), originally launched in May of that critical year of milestone events as a community journal funded by the
Solidarity free trade union, first started to produce its own Warsaw supplement, 'Gazeta Stołeczna' in 1993, with regular
features by young journalists like J. Majewski, and D. Bartoszewicz. Apart from producing its own free monthly publi-

cation, 'Ratusz' ("Town/City Hall"), since the mid 1990s the Warsaw City Council has helped to fund the publishing of

a supplement to the English-language 'The Warsaw Voice', originally founded in the late 1980s. As a glossy free

supplement to the main paper, publicising some of the main commercial developments and selected cultural attractions
in the city, 'The City Voice' is a singular testimony to the spirit of the decade or so running up and into the New
Millennium. For a while at least, people enjoying regular access to these two-weekly, monthly or bi-monthly install-
ments promoting the city among Western investors were among the better informed as to what was occurring both in and
to Warsaw. The translated bombast of 'free-market economy' applied in 'The City Voice' may seem comically naive, but
it reads as a horribly sinister reversal of socialist-realist rhetoric to ring in the age that was now beginning. The 51st
edition for March 1998 was launched with the heading: These Are the Good Old Days, with opening sentiments: '[...]
the Warsaw of eight years ago [...] is a different place today [...] enlivened within by the residents 'new-found energy
and the city 's dynamie economic development.' (Cf.: sentiments expressed in Warszawa nasza duma i radość, 'Stolica'
[R. VII, 15. XI. 1952 , p. 2], eight years after the founding of the Polish People's Republic, drawing quotes from the
electoral programme of the 'Front Narodowy', New Constitution and Poland's own 'BB', president Bolesław Bierut:
"Osiem lat Polski Ludowej stało się okresem imponującego rozwoju kraju. [...] Bohaterska Warszawa jest dziś znów
tętniącą życiem, coraz piękniejszą stolicą kraju. [...] W okresie bieżącego dziesięciolecia zakończymy odbudowę
Warszawy...." )

5 A seminar and 'discussion' took place on 16th December 2003 at SARP, organised under the patronage of the chief
city architect and chairmen of the Warsaw branches of SARP and Society of Polish Urban Planners (TUP). This succes-
sive assembling of architects and 'urbanists' in a series of autumn meetings open to the generał public was given a
revealing, slightly apologetic and even doubt-ridden title: "Jak osiągnąć lad przestrzenny i wysoką jakość przestrzeni
publicznej na placu Defilad i placu Piłsudskiego?" ('How can spatial order[-liness - sic!] and a high quality of public
space be achieved on Parade Square and Piłsudski Square?'). The function, held in the conservatory of SARP's digni-
fied neo-Renaissance headquarters on Foksal (Vauxhall) Street, preceded an impressive gathering, organised by the
editors of 'Architekura-Murator' at the so-called Reed Factory (Fabryka Trzciny) in the Szmulki district of Praga. This
involved a panel composed of theoreticians, university lecturers and practising architects from various parts of Poland
who, under the generał title "Odczytanie architektury" ('[A ]Reading [of] architecture'), presented persona! reviews of
recent Western publications relating to architectural design, theory and criticism. It is regrettable that most of the archi-
tects and town planners present at the first function were unable, or unwilling, to attend the second one.