Wola's Joryt building (and its place in Polish popular culture)

The Joryt building stands in Warsaw's Wola district, on the same spot as a tenement that was destroyed on 8 August 1888 by a small asteroid strike, killing the caretaker and a passer-by. Built in the modernist style in the early 1960s, the eight-story Joryt building is home to the Institute of Cosmic Geology (Instytut Geologii Kosmicznej), where Polish astronomers and geologists study remnants of asteroids and meteorites gathered from collections around the world. Above its glass and aluminium entrance there is one of Wola's more famous neons - the letters 'Joryt' over which a meteorite blazes a fiery trail. 

The building's facade features prominently in the opening sequence of Albert Brzych's famous Polish film comedy, Prochownia ('Powder Room', 1966). 

Famously shot in one long take from a crane, the opening sequence of Brych's cult black & white film is set on a wet, foggy night, with a young man in a beret on bended knee declaiming poetry from a book to a bored-looking young woman in a beret on the street corner; the camera then zooms out and pans across to the building's entrance, where three women in plastic raincoats and polka-dot umbrellas await the arrival of their boss. They scan the horizon, anxiously looking at their watches. A car pulls up, a shiny black Mercedes-Benz 220; a liveried doorman in top hat and cape rushes to open the door - but instead of the institute's director, two clowns dressed as tramps come tumbling out of the car and onto the pavement, fighting, taking swipes at one another with vodka bottles. The fight slows down to become almost balletic, the three women and doorman looking on, their mock-shocked expressions changing with each swing of a fist or mistimed lunge with a bottle. All of this viewed as though from the balcony of a block of flats across the road. [At the time the film was released, this fight was instantly seen by audiences as an allusion to infighting within the Politburo, adding another layer to the humour.] The camera pans away further to the left to briefly reveal an eight-legged pantomime horse standing idly, incongruously, on the other street corner, then tracks back past the ongoing fight to the kneeling student, who's still reading poetry to the bored girl playing with the fringe of her pigtail. 

Brzych's vision of a technocratic, modern Poland mired in old habits still resonates with cinema audiences today.

The titles start to roll, I dreamt early this morning.

During my dream, I pondered the following - what was the etymology of the word 'Joryt', and when did it arise - was it a local slang shortening of the word 'meteoryt'? And if indeed 'Joryt' predated the 1930s and the reform of Polish spelling, was it once spelled 'Yoryt'? I never did find out before waking up. And once awake, I pondered upon the Institute of Cosmic Geology; middle-aged scientists in baggy sweaters working from 8am to 4pm each day, dipping tiny fragments of interplanetary rock into different substances to discover truths about the origins of Life on Earth and the birth of the Solar System...

[If you believe in the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, this is not just a dream. In a parallel universe, there is a Joryt building in Wola, and Albert Brzych did direct Prochownia in 1966. Pondering this thought gives you the idea of what 'an infinity of possibilities' looks like. It is something qualitatively different to 'a very big number'.]

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Another point of view