A Fragment in the City:

Discussing a series of mnemonic phenomena in his Memory, History, Forgetting, Paul Ricoeur describes a specific situation: ‘During a visit to an archaeological site, I evoked the cultural world gone by to which these ruins sadly referred’. ¹ In a sense, a city’s sequential building, demolishing, and rebuilding recall archaeological and historiographical operations that are always bound up with what is forgotten. ‘Narrative and construction’ – notes Ricoeur – ‘bring about a similar kind of inscription, the one in the endurance of time, the other in the enduringness of materials. Each new building is inscribed in urban space like a narrative within a setting of intertextuality’. ² Following Ricoeur’s line of thinking, which compares historiographical narration with architectural gesture, let us take a closer look at an architectural example, the Behind the Iron Gate housing estate in the centre of Warsaw, constructed between 1965 and 1972 (Figure 14.1). ³