Ideal City employs instrumentallythe phenomenon of Nowa Huta (Poland), a town imagined and made concrete from above, as a holistic urbanistic and social experiment, aimed at outlining prospective scenarios for the evolution of the concept of city. This time developed at grass-roots level by the community laying down its rules.
The case of Nowa Huta is altogether exceptional because the experimental concept of the city created for the purposes of social engineering accumulates an infinite number of previous urban scenarios, universalising in this way the experience of city in the broad sense.
The experience of Nowa Huta’s unfinished utopia goes along with an equally multilayeredvisual archive. Although it only has two authors [Wiktor Pental (1920–2013) and Henryk Makarewicz (1917–1984)], their photographic practices occurred on diverse planes, thus representing a number of simultaneous policies on working with the image. As a consequence, the mutually complementary and discursive character of specific narratives or single images constituting the collection makes it a perfect instrumentarium to be used in the investigation process of what the city is today or may be in future.
Therefore, Ideal City juxtaposes two experiences: a city designed from scratch—a laboratory not only in urbanist and architectural but chiefly in social terms, and its representation. Apparently a coherent whole, it is still based on a number of a number of overlapping views: strictly documentary, humanistic, propagandist, private, more or less directly involved in the sphere of art, frequently constituting afterimages of concurrent visual trends. Deconstruction of such multilayered and equivocal collection of photographs dedicated to the city, a product of intersecting views from above, private convictions and synchronic aesthetic regimes, gives rise to a laboratory where prospective scenarios for how the concept of city may evolve are drawn, but this time from the grassroots perspective.
Ideal City is an open proposition, and merely a leaven for a broader progressing discourse. Bordering on a display or a publication at first, it provides a platform for further research offering a living repository for interested researchers/artists to delve into within the framework of the website/exhibition, and suggest new ways of interpretation.
Curator: Łukasz Trzciński
Authors: Agata Cukierska, Dorota Jędruch, Marta Karpińska, Dorota Leśniak-Rychlak, Szymon Maliborski, Ewa Rossal, Stanisław Ruksza, Katarzyna Trzeciak, Magdalena Ujma, Michał Wiśniewski
Supporting voices: Christophe Alix, Piotr Bujak, Łukasz Błażejewski, EBANO collective, Nina Fiocco, Tomasz Fudala, Marek Janczyk, Kacper Kępiński, Paweł Kruk, Yan Kurz, Piotr Lisowski, Lukáš Machalický, Krzysztof Maniak, Tomáš Moravec, Wojciech Nowicki, Jan Pfeiffer, Agnieszka Piksa&Vladimir Palibrk, Aleka Polis, Tomasz Rakowski, Dominik Stanisławski, Stach Szumski, Yan Tomaszewski, Matej Vakula, Jaro Varga, Aleksandra Wasilkowska, Paweł Wątroba, Rafał Woś, Julita Wójcik, Ewa Zarzycka
Production: Imago Mundi Foundation in partnership with The Museum of Photography in Kraków
Possibly the construction of Converting Plant at the Lenin Steelworks, 1950s. The convertor is a tiltable steel plate container lined with refractory bricks, used for obtaining steel from molten pig iron by blowing air or oxygen through it. There are metallurgical converters (for producing steel from molten pig iron, copper and nickel matte) and casting converters (for smelting cast steel from pig iron). The most common are the Bessemer converter (from 1856 on) with acid siliceous brick lining and the Thomas converter (from 1872 on) with alkaline dolomite lining. 1960s.
Prawdopodobnie budowa Wydziału Konwertorów w Hucie im. Lenina, lata 50. Konwertor, przechylny zbiornik wykonany z blachy stalowej, wyłożony jest wewnątrz cegłą ogniotrwałą. Służy do otrzymywania stali z ciekłej surówki za pomocą przedmuchiwania jej powietrzem lub powierzchniowego wdmuchiwania tlenu. Rozróżnia się konwertory hutnicze (do otrzymywania stali z ciekłej surówki, miedzi i kamienia niklowego) oraz odlewnicze (do wytapiania z surówki staliwa). Najbardziej rozpowszechnionymi konwertorami są konwerter Bessemera (od 1856 roku) o wyprawie kwaśnej z cegły krzemionkowej oraz konwerter Thomasa (od 1872 roku) o wyprawie zasadowej z masy dolomitowej. Lata 60. XX w.
Photo by Henryk Makarewicz/idealcity.pl