It’s like luxury here! - one could exclaim at the sight of many a Warsaw building constructed in the first years of the political transformation.
The ambiguity behind this cry - borrowed from the film Galimatias, czyli kogel-mogel II by Roman Załuski - perfectly sums up the architectural reality of the time. On the one hand, the 1990s was the decade of spectacle and representativeness, on the other, transience and deprivation were written into its DNA. How not to get lost among these contradictions?
The guide to the architecture of Warsaw in the 1990s presents 94 projects commissioned or designed in that period. They include well-known buildings, such as the Warsaw University Library or the Sobieski Hotel, as well as those yet to be discovered, such as the apartment complex in Konstancińska street or the office building in Jordanowska street. The context for them is outlined in an extensive introduction, in which the author tries to answer the questions why a given building stands in a particular place, why it looks like this, and whether it is really postmodernism.
Jakby luksusowo is not an atlas of architectural curiosities, although Aleksandra Stępień-Dąbrowska does not shy away from figurative language. Nor is it a proposal for a transformational canon, although the objects have been selected to show a fairly complete cross-section of the design trends of the time. It is rather a collection of stories about who we were not so long ago and who we dreamt of becoming. Perhaps this is the last moment to listen to them, before many buildings of the 1990s disappear irrevocably from the city map.
