From an early age, ever since we started walking, adopting the upright posture consistent with our human species, we view the world around us (without realizing it) from only one vertical position. When walking down the street, strolling through a park, or driving a car, we reflexively direct our gaze forward, sideways, or less often downward, looking at passing house facades, storefronts, fences, rows of trees, shrubs, gray sidewalks, streets and the cars parked along them. Far less often do we lift our heads and look up toward the sky, clouds or twinkling stars.
In interiors, too, we tend to focus our gaze on walls, furniture sometimes on floors and floors and very rarely on ceilings. The naturalness of the surrounding reality viewed from such a perspective is so obvious to us that we cannot imagine any other possibility. Daily repeated exposure to these views over the years somehow desensitizes our sensitivity and sooner or later we experience negative adaptation and even subconscious acceptance of the low quality of our space. Over time, it even seems to us maybe not the best, but the only possible reality.
an inverted world
Not long ago, a traumatic yet peculiarly interesting situation happened to me, contradicting these habits. Completely by chance despite my will, I had the dubious opportunity to view our space from a completely different perspective. During a severe illness, I was driven a couple of times in an ambulance in a horizontal position between a couple of Silesian cities and hospitals, which in the case of a pandemic was not unusual and was experienced by many patients. The view from this different, inverted perspective was a world automatically completely inverted. Passing buildings chaotically leaned with their cornices, attics and roofs against the smoggy sky. Straight-trimmed tree stumps, resembling panicles of straw instead of beautiful crowns, poked at the clouds, and street clumsy lanterns dignified the depths of the night sky, which had turned into a precipitous abyss of the floor. Only the primitive cuboid blocks remained unchanged in their expression and were as clumsy as when viewed normally. I was transported along familiar streets and roads, but I had the utmost difficulty recognizing them from this perspective. The perception of space from this position was not only baffling, but definitely inferior to the familiar and necessarily accepted views. The strange film scrolling outside the window consisted of a sequence of random, even surreal views of uncontrolled cancerous urban plasma. Watching from this new perspective the cities of Gliwice, Zabrze, Bytom, Piekary Slaskie, which were familiar to me after all, one could better see how uncontrollable and chaotic the urban element has become, over which we seem to have lost any control. It seems that we are not even trying to curb this element, but on the contrary, we are creating more and more fields of conflict and spatial dissonance. This ragged space, devoid of continuity and signs of any harmony passing by, was as severe as a serious illness.
different image of space
Evaluating a work or artwork from an inverted position is by no means some new discovery. Historical painters evaluated the correctness of the composition of their paintings by looking at them in a mirror, or put them "on their heads." Such perception showed the painting from a completely new perspective, revealing previously unseen flaws and shortcomings. A similar syndrome of project work fatigue and lack of freshness also occurs in our architectural work. Displaying on the screen in a mirror image of the situation, the projection, facades or visualizations, unfortunately, does not produce results that make it possible to correct and improve errors or shortcomings. It is puzzling that we have not yet invented, despite computerization, effective tools for correcting our design activity, and that verification, already impossible to make changes, occurs only after implementation, condemning the public to a very long exposure to an object that is far from perfect. Joseph Chelmonski and Witkacy used a different, yet, equally effective method. They stood with their backs to their painting with their legs apart, bent low and contemplated their works in this position. Witkacy jokingly called this method "duposcope." I guess this blunt term is as appropriate as possible to my former experience, as I saw no merit in the passing images, only indelible flaws and chaos. This passing space shows how our built world has been turned on its head. This quite unexpected insight from a new morbid position at one point made me realize that just as an infectious disease is a conflict between our physiology and a microorganism, so our space put on its head (both literally and figuratively) is deeply internally conflicted. When diagnosing the state of our space as the reasons for its very poor quality, we point to: the low state of consciousness of society, historical, social, economic or political conditions. This turning of our space on its head is not a matter of reverse perception, but the result of more than seventy years of persistent activity by our society, the authorities, politicians, and all of us, making it a caricatured image turned as in a distorting mirror.
After a few weeks and a return to my usual position and a relatively normal lifestyle, these negative and pessimistic observations lost their sharpness and clarity. The surrounding space became indifferent again, becoming a long-familiar but not fully accepted reality. However, these reflections of a conflicted space returned each time like a bad dream, when I momentarily realized that we were living in a space that had been overrun and in which a coronavirus was still rampant. Although the pathogen did not physically affect buildings, street squares, and urban greenery, its omnipresence described as a pandemic changed their perception. All of these spaces became unsafe for health and life, and thus, in individual and social perception, affected by the conflict of the epidemic. Immediate associations with an epidemic not in the literal sense, but with a widespread epidemic of dehumanized chaos came to mind. Its scale and scope became so widespread that it ceased to be noticed, much like the microscopic covid virus.
society in space
These largely intuitive paraliterary analogies, can be explained by the pessimistic atmosphere of the past few months. Nevertheless, even as professionals, not to mention normal users, we perceive space in intuitive terms, subjecting it to rational analysis only ex post. Therefore, it is worth looking at the interrelationship of people and the surrounding space to some extent also in terms of momentary subjective intuition.
The second factor, besides the pandemic, that changed the functioning and image of our space in recent months were the mass demonstrations associated with the Women's Strike. These seemingly distant events are perhaps, as sociologists point out, nevertheless closely related. In situations of danger, people gather in communities, and paradoxically the threat of coronavirus forces them to isolate each other. It was frightened by the impulse of the Constitutional Court Judgment for people to spontaneously feel the need to gather in the spaces of our cities, in reaction to both the months-long isolation and the actions of authorities and offices. These mass demonstrations reported widely by the media, regardless of the fueling by politicians and journalists, show the remarkable consistency of social conflicts with the spatially conflict-filled fabric of our cities. Although the aggressive or angry slogans shouted by demonstrators are intended to reach the media and politicians first, and the public further, their first addressee is the seemingly silent space surrounding the demonstrators. Its silence, however, is illusory. Just as disgruntled demonstrators contest the reality in which they function, the space they have constructed confirms, supports and fuels their discontent.
society in space
© Piotr Średniawa
Protest organizers use criteria other than the aesthetic expression of space to determine the routes of their demonstrations, but nevertheless the shape in which they take place largely, in a haphazard way, remains parallel to the negative emotions surrounding the demonstrations. The accounts of the demonstrations in Warsaw and Katowice were particularly characteristic. It is hard to imagine a better setting for them than Warsaw's Dmowski Roundabout and Katowice's Market Square. These incoherent, jagged, never-quite-designed spaces, even under normal conditions, give a depressing impression. The haphazardness of the buildings that surround them, and the lack of an organizing urban design thought, is in no way conducive to any kind of inclusive, community-oriented thinking. Filling them with protesting crowds of people has, ironically, indicated their most sensible use. The attributes of these places as public spaces unexpectedly acquired a new hitherto hidden and unpredictable dimension. Since demonstrations also have the character of a most public activity, spaces appropriate to this activity should also belong to them. One gets the impression that a conflicted and divided society generates this hostile space and is incapable of thinking constructively about it.
These mutually negative relations were perfectly conveyed by a video circulated on the You Tube channel from the recent Independence March, which was completely different from the Women's Strike demonstrations. The beginning of the video documents the pelting, or shooting with flares, of tenements along the Poniatowski Bridge overpass by aggressive marchers. The video is then reversed and it is the tenements that are pelting demonstrators with flares. This Internet joke, perhaps unwittingly, brilliantly demonstrates the relationship between society and the space in which it lives. Just as space becomes the object of society's aggression, space reciprocates by resenting people. This short film prompts the important question, can such an atmosphere create a friendly space in which society will feel comfortable and function harmoniously? Unfortunately, the answer seems negative. This conflict-filled inverted space created by a conflicted society causes a permanent feedback loop. Daily exposure to such a space exacerbates the conflicts consuming our society, and the chronic nature of these conflicts fosters the creation and persistence of an internally conflicted space.
Social conflicts are not something unique and peculiar. We know from history that the Second Republic was also saturated with social, economic and political conflicts. However, looking at the architectural achievements of the Second Republic from an eighty-year perspective, we see first and foremost the efforts of a society building the space of its country and pursuing a common goal with positive results. After a few decades, will historians and architects, analyzing our contemporary urbanized space, which is a material document of the social processes happening in it, also evaluate our contemporary Polish history in positive terms? One may be concerned that they will not, although perhaps recent events are a harbinger of impending changes, not yet seen too clearly by us, which will also affect the space of our cities.
