Powiśle

This guide to Powisle in Warsaw centers on a tiny glass ticket booth by the river, shaped like an upside down sphere, built between 1954 and 1963 by architects Arseniusz Romanowicz and Piotr Szymaniak, whom a Swiss critic once called the makers of pearls on the rails. It follows the booth's decline into a grimy, rotting waiting room as Warsaw grew up around it and mostly ignored it, and how a young design collective returned in 2009 to work with the surviving original architects on getting the details right. Powisle itself started out as the poor cousin of the city, its factory-worker tenements once famous for their genuinely terrible conditions.