What happened to the curved line? What on earth did they do to the detail?
I opened the plain rectangle door of my place, walked down a completely flat road to the station, crossed the straight lines of the rails and got onto a predictably horizontal train to Warsaw.
There* I looked at the buildings (got depressed) and exclaimed to the passers-by: "Someone's stolen the curved line and the detail!" "Yes", they said. "Years ago. We forgot who and got used to plain things. They don't make us feel unfulfilled."
Because the mechanistic straight lines, right angles and near-perfect circles of modern architecture reflect - and perhaps reinforce - the modern lifeless lifestyle: the boring combination of work that's only done for weekends' sake, promotions that get you down, weekends that are less fun than weekdays, holidays that never go to adventure and yawn-yielding marketing crazes.
True: like old Gothic spires, new skyscrapers go high up - but in such an uninspiring way that even if you follow them up, you quickly climb down on finding that they point to nowhere.
So you focus, like in your life, on the simplistic flat horizontal.
*In Zielonka, apart from the church and two and a half other buildings, there's no architecture at all. In Ząbki, especially south of the railway line, it's even worse: the church wanted to be architecture, but I'm not sure if it succeeded; as for the rest, it's positively dangerous to your mind to look at the archi.. hmm, no - at the hous.. no - at the things lining the streets.
PS To remember that a renaissance may be on its way, I've decided that my new mobile is going to be curved (and called so, too)
(Top picture from: facepunch.com; bottom picture: Rys. M.Łukasik, Fasada jednej z secesyjnych kamienic w Warszawie, zaprojektowanej przez znanego polskiego architekta Mikołaja Tołwińskiego (1857-1924) i wzniesionej w latach 1903-1905; from http://www.wsipnet.pl)
