location: warsaw, poland
time: 1960-70s

next to wilanów palace, the polish versailles.

land of the pastels, bathrooms, balconies. green trees, concrete overpasses, loud city highways.

the diplomat housing estate.

the glass covered staircases.

the riverside and the polish caramel candies.

land of the early nineties, the memories before our birth.

the rain.

the future.

(the elite: here the 70s urban space starts to recall some desperate housewives scene. or, in this light, a bit of tel-aviv.)

location: warsaw, poland
time: 1977

it is wonderful again: since the estate is built by the housing cooperative gocław airport, the four subdistricts of gocław are named of different polis aircraft pieces:

iskra (spark)
jantar (amber)
orlik (eagle)
wilga (oriole) 

a secret sentence about socialism written into the urban landscape.

and in the middle of the estate there is a lake called BALATON!

location: warsaw, poland
time: 1980

going further on the bus, we arrive to a land even more out of reality. this is the postwar world of pastel lights reflecting eternal greyness. greyness is usual everywhere in warsaw, but here it looks like the official atmosphere ordered by the commanders of the neighbourhood. houses are tall and continue in endless fragmented structures, the strong aesthetic order of the elements which is a characteristic of all the concrete blocks is especially significant here.

and street names are written on the concrete walls with big letters, giving a title for every single artwork constructing this living reality.

location: warsaw, poland
time: 1977

it’s easy to say ursynów, although it is an unforeseeble area of different housing estates, where innumerable buses carry the passengers to unknown places. ursynów never ends, or the buses have round lines.

ghetto and garden city in one.

i have a hunch that it was the greyest place i’ve ever been, or i just don’t remember to romania anymore.

and this place consists of the most melodic streetnames, that generates nice synesthetic experiences in our mind. and there is a bartók béla street, which composes an interesting contrast with the budapest one.

warsaw is the city of trees and concrete. a city of may and rain, doesn’t matter when are we going there. but we can’t really miss it, light conditions around the central station are frighteningly similar in may and december. these pictures were taken in july. it’s kind of a solidity.

when the housing estates in warsaw were built in the years of oppression, one of the chief architects’ wife committed suicide in the bathtub. since then bathrooms in warsaw housing blocks are smelling like a fairy’s forgotten bathwater. conduits are not fogetting.

besides the magic forests, yellow and green houses are also very usual here. and the shades change in every block.

the next part of ursynów is blue for a change, and quotes greek villages. it doesn’t worth to give up dreaming at all.

location: warsaw, poland
time: 1970s

we don’t know anything about this place except that piasków means sand, which shows the less creative sort of naming, and that it is located next to chomiczówka, separated by a nice tram track.

at some point i could even experience that kind of sacralized space which sometimes appears in a random corner of conrete blocks, always next to the trees.

inside the block follow less interesting pastel houses with a summer garden feeling.

location: warsaw, poland
time: 1975-80 

chomiczówką, chomiczówką, pierwsze wino, pierwsza wódka, mean that anything, (obviously something with vodka)

that song shows that there should be some character in this neighbourhood, but i didn’t experience so much of that. it was just a new example of colorful toy cities arisen from rehabilitation programs or the planner’s fantasy. but nothing significantly original. anyway, it looks pretty amazing on this photo, so maybe i was in too much of hurry (i just stepped of from an urban activist workshop, where i had the task to make beetroot paint), and didn’t discover the exciting parts.

but there are some nice picture, where concrete blocs become pastel scenes of fairy tales,

where the essence of warsaw housing feeling, the light green walls and rich vegetation are in present,

and some harder contours.

location: hamburg, germany
time: ca. 1970

surprisingly ghetto-like landscape when we get off the s-bahn, that becomes different step by step.

slowly transforming into a decent post 70s garden estate…

stalin style blocks…

little streams and good pedestrian connections…

moderately exciting facades.

yeah, that’s pretty hard. le corbusier in the sky with diamonds! 

location: hamburg, germany
time: 1969-73

good to know that western europe is also keeping secrets for us. the keyword is diversity: more form, more material, more colour. and the condition of the buildings of course. but it’s still far away from the gloss of helsinki suburbs. and we can’t forget about the water, as in any point of this city. grand waters and frightening distances, this is hamburg.

contours.

corps.

spaces.

facades.

streetscapes.

contrasts.

location: riga, latvia
time: 1980-1991
 

zolitūde is on the ‘buda’ side of riga. sorry, it’s really a local approach from budapest, it means something nicer, calmer, hillier, grassier part of the river in a city, relatively of course.

it is also from the last moments of soviet times, when architecture seemed to find itself in a colorful postmodern way, but it was already too late. anyhow, it’s still not so depressing neighbourhood as usually, delight of lego bricks is floating over the buildings. (ok, maybe it doesn’t shout from the pictures. maybe in the summer!)

the name means solitude, which is really astonishing after lots of dreary and imageless place names. there are more explanations for it, one is about a part of napoleon’s army which remained here separated from others, other simply refers to the loneliness of inhabitants who lived between abandoned fields, forests and swampy grounds of the area. it is already amazing to have napoleon and this place in our mind at the same time, but the name perfectly fits today’s loneliness, which is a particular characteristic of housing estates in large distance from anything alive.

bus number 8 comes from the city, blue and modern, goes around the neighbourhood. colorful high-rises appear in front of the eye, as the bus goes, they are moving behind each other. appear, disappear and reappear after the curve. final station, we are almost back in the start.

they’re moving towards you with their colors all the same

time: 04.12.2010.
location: from purvciems to mežciems, riga, latvia

there is a 19th century worker district near the centre of riga, called grizinkalns. it’s brown and rusty and noble, details maybe later. in this neighbourhood the buildings are tied to each other by overcrossing trolley wires, and time to time, light blue trolleys appear on brown streets. they have numbers: if we miss 23, we still can catch the 18, and it takes us farther, even to mežciems.

first, we reach purvciems, which means ‘marsh village’, and it was built in the 1980s and 90s, so it is sometimes referred as postsoviet rather than soviet.

as journey continues, landscape becomes blurred, contours become soft.

than the trolley slowly arrives to the egde of the town, where fairy creatures are living in lakes called juglas ezers. it is already mežciems, which means ‘forest village’ and was built in the 1970s. it is hiding from the visitor, at first sight everything seems so distant, as if real life of the neighbourhood would happen somewhere inside, where outsiders can’t see it. it is just a bus stop in the end of the world, driving to the forests, and some houses in the distance, which could be built anytime, even in the nineties.