Warsaw I: The library-garden, from a Benjamin perspective
The discovery of Warsaw’s City Library is experienced as a truly unexpected event. An illustrative image of such a first impression is given to us by The Garden of Forking Paths, which here serves as a preamble to evoke Borges’ library-garden, that a kind of allegorical space-time that connects itself with various imaginative past-futures:
The humid pathway zigzagged like those of my childhood. We arrived at a library of Eastern and Western books. I recognized, bound in yellow silk, some handwritten tomes from the Lost Encyclopedia, which was directed by the third emperor of the Luminous Dynasty and which was never printed. The gramophone record was spinning next to a bronze phoenix. I also remember a vase from the pink family and another, many centuries old, of that blue colour that our craftsmen copied from the potters of Persia… (Borges, 1995/2017, p. 129)
Entering the Warsaw Library does not correspond, strictly speaking, to an act of moving from one place outside to another inside, but simply to an act of passing through and lingering in that same passage. The threshold between east and west, past and future, the Library that you discover at the back of the University is a quasi-transparent building, intensely suggestive of the gallery-streets that Benjamin tells us about (Coles, 1999), when describing the experience of modernity in European metropolises at the transition from the 19th to the 20th century. Glass and iron give body to the structure of the Library’s dome, recalling the Galerie Colbert and other gallery-streets described by Walter Benjamin (2006). In the streets, as the author suggests, these covered passageways are a place of enjoyment and strolling, that invites us to transform our gaze regarding the urban landscape, which is made up of all kinds of stimuli and appeals:
Most of the passages were built in Paris in the fifteen years following 1822. The first condition for their development was the boom in the cloth trade. Then came the novelty warehouses, the first establishments to permanently stock considerable quantities of goods. These are the forerunners of department stores (…) The passages are centerscentres for the trade in luxury goods. With their development in sight, art enters the service of commerce. Contemporaries never ceased to admire them. For a long time they remained an attraction for tourists. An illustrated guide to Paris says: “These passageways, a recent invention of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed corridors with marble entablatures that run through entire blocks of buildings, whose owners have sympathized with this type of speculation. On both sides of the passage, which receives light from above, the most elegant stores are lined up, so that such a passage is a city, a world in miniature.” It was in these passages that gas lighting first appeared. (Benjamin, 2006, pp. 11-12)
Warsaw’s library-garden also appears to be a sensitive micro-universe, in particular a hybrid body that juxtaposes nature and culture within the city. The approach is firstly made by the imposing exterior façade. The façade beside Dobra Street has a monumental character in the form of eight panels (4 x 7 m) topped by a frieze with the inscription Biblioteka Uniwersytecka. The panels, which symbolize pages from books, feature excerpts from texts, with cultural and musical references: Jan Kochanowski’s old Polish Exhibition of Virtues, the old Russian Romances from the beginning of the 12th century, Plato’s Greek Phaedrus, Al-Jahiz’s Arabic Book of Animals, the Hebrew Book of Ezekiel, the Sanskrit Rig Veda and two notations: mathematical-physical and musical (from Karol Szymanowski’s Study in B-flat). The predominantly green colour anticipates the vision of the roof garden, partly foreshadowed by its reflections in the adjacent glasswork (Warsaw Library-Garden).
Figure 1. Warsaw’s Library-Garden Facade (2011)
Source: Henry Pisciotta / Penn State University Libraries Architecture and Landscape Architecture Library (CC-BY-NC-2.0)
On the side, we come across a double transition: from the city to the library’s atrium-passage – where you can find shops, a kiosk, a sales stand on the inner ‘street’, a bookshop and even vertical gardens (reminiscent of Patrick Blanc’s original creations), all of which make up a mini-city at the gates of the Library – and from this to the interior-exterior of the Library-garden. This intermediate atrium forms a kind of pre-chamber, somewhat hidden, literally called, according to the official website: “Passage”. There, an overwhelming staircase to the Library itself awaits us. A metal detector, similar to the ones at airports, and a uniformed guard warn us, in Polish, that access is subject to close scrutiny. Although it’s very unusual in Warsaw to find people who speak English, either at services or shops, which was also confirmed there, we were able to understand that a student card or some kind of document authorizing entry is required. If you show your badge from the University congress, which is taking place nearby, in return you get a gesture from the guard, who gives you the green light to go ahead. A roll-on next to the guard’s desk indicates an Ophthalmology meeting (as far as you can read, in English) taking place that day, precisely at the Library. Opening up our senses, like ants advancing mimetically following a trail of bodies that assertively conquer the wide staircase, we face an open book in patinated bronze, with the inscription Hinc Omnia. At the top of the stairs leading to the catalog room, there are four concrete columns with sculptures by Adam Myjak, representing eminent Polish philosophers from the Lvov-Warsaw School: Kazimierz Twardowski, Jan Łukasiewicz, Alfred Tarski and Stanislaw Leśniewski. Extracts of texts from their works decorate the columns and cover them (Warsaw Library-Garden). It’s immediately clear that the Library is a passage from a state of oblivion to the reification of a collective memory. Imagining the Library of Alexandria, the archetype of the universal library, the ideal of storing knowledge, and the fragility of that knowledge, becomes inevitable.
Figure 2. Warsaw’s Library-Garden Entrance (2024)
Figure 3. Stairway to Warsaw’s Library-Garden Entrance (2024)
Source: Cynthia Luderer
Figures 4 e 5. The library’s “inner city” (2024)
Source: Cynthia Luderer
On the upper floor, the initial stoic climb culminates in a large multipurpose area where you can see everything from beautiful metal furniture in the style of the old filing cabinets (albeit recreated with a modern design) that were used for meticulously researching the archives of books, documents and other publications, which were imagined to be in a gigantic warehouse, to an area with geometrically aligned shelves interspersed with study tables, which extended to the windows at the back. Abundant beams of light give colour to the ambience, but they don’t completely erase the solemn tone that the general quietness suggests. There are also study rooms, semi-delimited by glass. Everywhere, we find young people, alone or in groups, either reading or underlining notebooks with what appears to be Stabilo markers. There are plenty of free or unoccupied spaces, which seem to have been designed simply to allow the body to breathe and roam peacefully. Likewise, the whole building seems to invite different uses, with multiple ways of passing through and being. Unexpectedly, we come across, for example, a set of puffs on the floor, accompanied by blankets. A young woman, although the more than mild temperature didn’t justify it, was curled up in one of these cozy puffs, lying down and leisurely reading a notebook, raised high, from bottom to top. The unusual image of a comfortable bed for pet dogs or cats crosses our minds, prompted by such a surprising and amusing sight. As we explore the building, we realize that we are not just in a library, but in a truly indoor-outdoor space, akin to a greenhouse or a winter garden. Climbing a spiral staircase that gives us a vertiginous sensation and expands the view, both from above and below, we discover the interstices of the magnificent roof garden and the relationship with the plant universe intensifies. On the second floor, the oriental teahouse is one of the library’s highlights:
A special place is the Chashitsu Kaian – a traditional Japanese tea pavilion, donated in 2004 by the Kyoei Steel company to the Department of Japanese and Korean Studies at the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Warsaw, which is placed on the 2nd floor of the Library. Designed by Teruhito Iijima, the pavilion and its surroundings were built with natural materials (wood, bamboo, paper, clay, stone), making it a rare example of traditional Japanese architecture outside of Japan. There are university classes on Japanese culture, the tea ceremony, presentations and open chanoyu workshops (Warsaw Library-Garden).
Figures 6 and 7. Filing cabinets (2024)
Source: Cynthia Luderer
Figures 8 and 9. LIbrary’s dome and cozy puffs (2024)
Source: Cynthia Luderer
At every step, we stumble across statuary – abundant in Warsaw’s public spaces – cohabiting with nature, evoking “the material traces of inner consciousness, ‘the unconscious of the collective dream’” (Benjamin, 2006, p. 171). The references to Eastern European culture live side by side with abundant signs of Eastern (i.e. oriental) culture, and even Indian culture, the latter marked by the presence of a bust of Mahatma Gandhi. To visit the Library is, therefore, to witness the possibility of reading with the whole body a space that offers itself as an open book, materialized in every architectural detail. We are surprised by every nook and cranny and by all kinds of micro-details, accompanied by the impression that the direction to follow is not absolutely predefined, like a walk through “… a small labyrinth within the great labyrinth that is the city” (Benjamin, 2006, p. 171). At the same time, it’s hard to escape the grandiose and monumental character of the scenography, reiterated by the gigantic scale of the building’s central aisle, suggestive of the allegorical imperialist images of other times. The spiral staircase that simultaneously attracts and intimidates us, set up in one of the corners of the main stage, seems to perfectly symbolize the general impression of vertigo that places us halfway between the past and the future, tradition and modernity, the collective unconscious as a body, on the one hand, and the imaginative dream (Bachelard, 1960/1988), which rekindles a return to the universalizing idea of reconnection with ‘nature’, as a significant figure of an expansive human awareness, on the other.
Figure 10. Spiral staircase that gives access to the garden (2024)
Source: Cynthia Luderer
Figures 11, 12 and 13. Warsaw’s Library-Garden Interior (2024)
Source: Cynthia Luderer
We ended the visit with the paradoxical feeling of an overwhelming and melancholic experience, all the more so as it pushed us backwards and forward, leaving us fixed in back and forth, in the passage itself: the light coming through the glass indicates the anticipation of an imagined future, figured in the form of a wish-image that makes itself visible in the interior-exterior of the Library.
Helena Pires & Cynthia Luderer (CECS/Universidade do Minho)
Warsaw, september of 2024
Published in December 26, 2024
This short essay constitutes the first part of two short essays related to the Warsaw Library-Garden, with the second part available here.
References:
Bachelard, G. (1960/1988). A poética do devaneio. Martins Fontes.
Benjamin, W. (2006). Paris, capitale du XIX ͤ siecle. Éditions Allia.
Borges, J. L. (1995/2017). O jardim dos caminhos que se bifurcam. In J. L. Borges, Nova antologia pessoal. Quetzal (pp. 122-137).
Rendell, J. (1999). Thresholds, passages and surfaces: touching, passing and seeing in the Burlington Arcade. In A. Coles (Ed.), The optic of Walter Benjamin. Black Dog Publishing Limited (pp. 168-195).
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