Zaplecze [1.]

Poznań, department store Alfa, Święty Marcin Street, view from the back, north side; ca 2000; scan from a black and white negative.

The hinterland, or 'scratch' of modernism.

Alfa Department Store was built between 1965 and 1972, designed by Jerzy Liśniewicz, on what was then Armii Czerwona Street, on the site of several tenement houses from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which were demolished for this purpose. It is a complex of five 12-storey high-rises, connected by a long common plinth in the form of a horizontal two-storey pavilion, with elevations divided by windows framed by vertical ribs. It was built along the northern frontage of the street, hiding behind it the blind walls of two quarters of buildings covering Gwarna, Kantaka and Ratajczaka Streets, which became exposed after the necessary demolitions. This resulted in a specific space separating the old from the new, as the "pavilion" form of the ground floor - in accordance with the modernist doctrine, which genetically most often did not fit into the traditional and historical structure of the city based on the building plot - required open space.

This specific, narrow and elongated space, stretching from the west to the east, like a Heideggerian 'interstice in being' or a 'break in the beingness' of the city, functions at the same time as a symbolic border between two worlds, the horizontal and the vertical, the historical and the contemporary, the pushing in and the pushing out, bearing in itself the traces of the indefiniteness resulting from its character, becoming a specific game of "Aussehen" and "Enseehen" (Ich erinnere hier an Heideggers Spiel von Emergenz und De-Emergenz). "The horizontal is something whose essence includes the open field or fissure (fugue) of vision that surrounds it from all sides," Heidegger wrote in his Conversations on a country road.

Poznań, department store Alfa, Święty Marcin Street, view from the back, north side; ca 2000; scan from a black and white negative.