It had been 28 years since I last visited Warsaw. At the time I was waiting for a train to Vilnius in the damp, chilly central station with pigeons flying in out of the broken windows overhead in the waiting area. I was reading a copy of Milosz' The Captive Mind at the time, a collection of essays that included his thoughts on the relationship between Eastern Europe and the West.
In 1994, the tallest building in Warsaw was The Palace of Culture and Science. Today it is joined by a myriad of skyscrapers. We went up to the 40th floor of the Hotel Marriott where you can take in a panoramic view of the city from the sky bar. Initially, the young host didn't want to let us in, as there were 20 of us and we didn't have a reservation. We were waiting for the elevators to take us back down when the manager came out and apologized for the young man's impertinence and escorted us in. There weren't that many persons and there was no way the manager was going to deny that many paying customers a drink after midnight on a Wednesday. One of our colleagues remarked on how nice the view must be during the day. I said I had thought the same when in Las Vegas, but it turned out night was much better.
The city was all lit up. The Warsaw palace awash in a lavender light. One of Stalin's "gifts" to the Eastern European countries in the old Soviet orbit. Vilnius has one too, only much shorter at 9 stories. You could base the hierarchy of the satellite capitals on the height of these Soviet palaces. Most people laugh now but it was pretty serious back then. Stalin even staged a competition for a mega skyscraper, The Palace of the Soviets in Moscow, replete with an enormous statue of Lenin on top, but mercifully it was never built.
Warsaw was pretty much razed during WWII. There was little left of it when the communists came to power, rebuilding the city along socialist realism lines. It isn't quite as glaring as Minsk. Still, you have the wide boulevards and heavy-handed buildings that defined the era. The city reconstructed a fragment of the old town after breaking free of the Soviet Union to serve as a reference point of what had been there before the war.
Today, Warsaw looks more like an American city, say Houston or Atlanta, spreading out in all directions on the flat plain. I thought the population closer to 5 million, but the latest census is 1.9 million. I guess it depends on how much you define as the metropolitan area. We had just one full day. We didn't have any time to explore the city other than the first night.
We were there for a lighting exhibition in the old Energy Institute on the outskirts of town. The hanger that once served as a high voltage laboratory was now used as an exhibition space. The space was over 30 meters tall with a winding metal staircase in one corner that took you up the catwalk which encircled the space. It was a cold day and the hanger was like an icebox, but the Trilux lighting sponsors had placed heaters all around the floor to provide some warmth.
It was interesting to see the contrast between old and new. Trilux offers state of the art lighting solutions. There were several presentations on how they approach lighting, especially city lighting. There was a professor from the technical university who specialized in sculpted lighting for buildings. He lamented that the lighting on the old Soviet palace was too flat. It didn't bring out any of the architectural details. So, he showed us what it could look like with a defter touch. You can over sculpt, as my wife noted. The buildings lose their real sense in all the light and shadows created and become caricatures of themselves. It's a fine line.
I was more impressed with the smart lighting. How you could program city lights to dim or turn off depending on the amount of pedestrian and vehicular traffic. Even get lighting to lead pedestrians home in the early morning hours so that they feel safer. Mostly, these smart lighting systems are designed to save energy, especially now with the looming crisis this winter.
No one seemed overly concerned by it. At dinner, we discussed what Putin might do next. We sat at a long table split between Lithuanians, Poles and Latvians. Everyone seemed prepared for the eventuality that he would use some sort of tactical nuclear weapon given his losses in Ukraine. You could only really talk to the persons next to you. I found myself sitting next to a young Latvian interior designer who wasn't too much interested in these doomsday scenarios, so we talked about better integrating interior design and architecture, and our love for cats. Much more pleasant.
It would be nice to return to Warsaw at some point and see the many museums and take a train ride to Krakow, which I've never visited. One of the architects at the exhibition was a retail interior lighting consultant from Krakow. He was telling me how beautiful the city is and that I should visit it. We don't get much occasion to go to Poland even if it is right next door. So, it is nice to have these opportunities even if only fleeting.
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