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
A team of bricklayers on the construction site on the Zielone Estate, with the Sportowe Estate in the background. The construction of the first Nowa Huta estates began on 23rd June 1949, in the south-eastern part of the town, with the A-1 Północ and A-1 Południe (Willowe and Wandy) as well as the A-O (Na Skarpie) Estates. Their urban layout was developed by Tadeusz Ptaszycki, Bolesław Skrzybalski, Adam Fołtyn and Zbigniew Sieradzki. Buildings were designed by the Warsaw-based architect Franciszek Adamski. These were typical one- or two-storey buildings with gable roofs covered with red tile, with no shops or offices on the ground floor. Adamski’s houses were also built in a section of the C-2 Północ (Krakowiaków) and B-2 Północ (Sportowe) Estates the next year. Unlike the buildings on the A-1 estates, they were not arranged in straight lines, but along winding streets. The early stage of construction was carried out without architectural or urban plans of the new town because Tadeusz Ptaszycki’s studio was still being organised and some of the architects stayed in Warsaw, where the Central Project and Research Bureau of Estate Construction by the Workers’ Estate Department in the Ministry of Construction (CBPiSBO ZOR) was established. The offices in 1 Maja Street no. 1 (now Biskupa J. Dunajewskiego Street) in Kraków opened on 1st January 1950, officially inaugurating the ZOR Bureau, 1949.
Brygada murarzy przy wznoszeniu domów na Osiedlu Zielonym, w tle Osiedle Sportowe. Budowę najstarszych osiedli rozpoczęto w 23 czerwca 1949 roku właśnie od jej południowo-wschodniej części. Rozpoczęto ją na osiedlach A-1 Północ i A-1 Południe (Willowe i Wandy) oraz A-O (Na Skarpie). Autorami projektu urbanistycznego tych osiedli byli: Tadeusz Ptaszycki, Bolesław Skrzybalski, Adam Fołtyn i Zbigniew Sieradzki. Domy budowano według projektów warszawskiego architekta Franciszka Adamskiego. Były to typowe budynki jedno lub dwupiętrowe z dwuspadowymi dachami z czerwonej dachówki i bez punktów usługowych i biurowych na parterze. Domy Adamskiego wzniesiono również w następnym roku w części osiedla C-2 Północ (Krakowiaków). W przeciwieństwie do domów budowanych na osiedlach A-1 usytuowano je nie w liniach prostych, ale przy wijących się uliczkach. Pierwsze domy rozpoczęto budować bez planów architektonicznych i urbanistycznych nowego miasta, gdyż pracownia projektowa Tadeusza Ptaszyckiego była w studium organizacyjnym i część projektantów przebywała w Warszawie, gdzie utworzono przy Ministerstwie Budownictwa Centralne Biuro Projektów i Studiów Budownictwa Osiedlowego Zakładu Osiedli Robotniczych (CBPiSBO ZOR) Do biura przy ul. 1 Maja 1 (obecnie ul. biskupa J. Dunajewskiego) w Krakowie wprowadzono się 1 stycznia 1950 roku oficjalnie inaugurując działalność Biura ZOR.
Photo by Wiktor Pental/idealcity.pl