Ruin porn has arrived in Mexico City, as I noted in my last post. Now I can confirm that it has come to Poland as well. During my recent visit there, I stayed at Hotel Warszawa, the high-rise equivalent of Mexico City’s recently renovated Círculo Mexicano, and saw the Elektrownia Powiśle (Electricity Center), a former Warsaw power plant that’s been transformed into a shopping mall anchoring a new residential and office development.
The Warszawa Hotel occupies the former Prudential Building, home to the Polish headquarters of the British insurance company by that name and, at 16 floors, once the highest tower in Warsaw. Completed in 1933 according to designs by Marcin Weinfeld, the building was a target to both sides during World War II. It was later fixed up under the Communist regime, and then Weinfeld converted it into a hotel in the socialist realist style. Now local architects GBD have stripped it down to its concrete frame and then slathered its interior spaces with marble, wood, and copper. The new materials may be veneers but they make up for their thinness with expressive veining and a sense of luxurious shimmer to compete with the raw power of the concrete columns and beams.
The Warszawa makes its boldest statement in the restaurant and bar, which occupy two subterranean levels. There the structure dominates, its columns with splaying capitals, diagonal steel supports, and thick beams creating a display worthy of a serious gym or Vulcan’s forge—or, for the architects drinking there, a Piranesi drawing. That sense of things made with bravura and brawn is what usually creates most of the visual and intellectual interest in such down-to-the-bones renovations, and the underground location, along with the sheer scale of the structure, makes this one of the most beautiful such reimaginings I have seen.
If the other public spaces and bedrooms do not match this oomph, they instead create a three-dimensional collage of planes and supports sliding by each other, with sections of the plaster ceiling stopping to reveal the slab above, and doors made of what appears to be wood showing off their grain next to sealed concrete. There is, of course, something perverse about visitors deriving sensual pleasure from the formerly hidden structure, and the architects heightening of the luxury with the palette of new materials takes that perversion to new heights for those who can afford the hotel’s steep prices.
The Electricity Center renovation is a more restrained affair, a necessity because of the need for the project to serve a mass market. When the local architecture firm APA Wojciechowski found the plant, the place was largely a ruin, filled with asbestos, and polluted by the coal that was used for power generation. The site was in a less than fashionable part of the city, but the construction of the nearby Copernicus Center science museum, along with the spread of luxury housing developments near the river here, made it economically attractive to renovate the power plant.
Much of Electricity Center now is the result of rebuilding. The bricks, though placed in the same steel frames as the original ones, retain only the color of the materials that were there before, while the glass is resolutely new. Instead of the original smoke stacks, there are beige-painted metal cylinders that hide many of the service components. Above the original trusses over the main hall a new line of structural elements does the actual work of holding the roof up. The elements that most clearly evoke the building’s original use are the control panels, which are preserved, slightly cleaned up, and newly wired to give you the illusion that you could still turn the power on and off with the flip of switch.
Occupying the interior of the building is the usual array of stores, restaurants, and beauty salons, although the strength of the steel elements and the overall shape of the building manages to overshadow their shiny slickness to a remarkable degree. Walking through the Electricity Central does give you a certain amount of cognitive dissonance as you try to square the history of production with that of consumption. But the architects’ skill at extending and extrapolating the steel structure and the glass and brick infill into new forms transforms what was once a dark and sooty space into one of light and ease. And then there are the quirky moments, such as the blue-painted supervisor’s offices cantilevered off the front façade, now just an empty icon to the building’s former life.
These designs, together with the ones in Mexico City I described in my last post—as well as many such projects happening around the world—do raise the question of what happens when places of production, once used by working people, become objects of leisure bought and consumed by the upper classes. That’s capitalism, you might say, but I cannot help but wish that such structures could be used for the common good. There are, alas, very few examples of public-purpose ruin porn. At least these buildings were reused, and their embodied energy was retained—a big plus in a world in which we cannot afford to expend natural resources we cannot replenish. The buildings also remind us of the history and the reality of what was there, expressing it in a three-dimensional and emphatic manner that is the particular power of good architecture.
Aaron Betsky is a regularly featured columnist whose views and conclusions are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine nor of the American Institute of Architects.
