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
Inside a car shop in the neo-modernist Swedish block, Szklane Domy (B-32) Estate. It was designed by Janusz and Marta Ingarden in 1956 and built in 1957-9. The frontage was decorated with coloured plaster, a rather unusual method at the time. The 260-metre-long building housed 272 modern and practical flats, with various shops on the ground floor, including a car shop, a haberdashery, chemists and a shop selling seeds and vegs. Interiors were designed by Irena Pać-Zaleśna, Zdzisław Szpyrkowski and Kazimierz Syrek. In the picture: a Mikrus MR300. The prototype was presented on 22 July 1957. First Mikruses had engines with a capacity of 300ccm and a power of 14PS. Mass production of these cars began in September 1958. Only 1,845 Mikruses were made until 1960, including: 100 vehicles in the trial series and 17 prototypes. It was known as a car that is “…first heard, and then seen….” Late 1950s.
Wnętrze sklepu motoryzacyjnego w neomodernistyczny tzw. bloku szwedzkim, na osiedlu Szklane Domy (B-32). Zaprojektowany on został przez Janusza i Martę Ingardenów w 1956 roku, realizowany był w latach 1957-1959. Do ozdobienia elewacji użyto kolorowych tynków co wówczas należało do rzadkości. W długim na 260 metrów bloku wybudowano 272 nowoczesne i funkcjonalne mieszkania, na dole zaś umieszczono punktu usługowe takie jak: sklep motoryzacyjny, pasmanterię, drogerie i sklep nasienno-warzywniczy. Projektantami wnętrz byli Irena Pać-Zaleśna, Zdzisław Szpyrkowski i Kazimierz Syrek. Na zdjęciu samochód Mikrus MR300. 22 lipca 1957 roku zaprezentowano prototypowe autko. Pierwsze Mikrusy wyposażone były w silniki o pojemności 300ccm i mocy 14KM. We wrześniu 1958 roku ruszyła produkcja masowa auta. Ogółem do 1960 roku wyprodukowano jedynie 1845 sztuk Mikrusa, w tym: 100 sztuk serii próbnej oraz 17 prototypów. Mówiono o nim żartobliwie "… jeszcze go nie widać, a już go słychać…", koniec l. 50. XX w.
Photo by Wiktor Pental/idealcity.pl