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
Residential buildings on the Wandy Estate. The construction of the fist Nowa Huta estates began in 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. The Na Skarpie Estate was among the first to be built, in late 1949 or early 1950. The early stage of the construction included so-called peripheral estates in Sector A, with loosely spaced detached houses with hipped roofs (frequently covered with tiles). The general concept reflected the style of workers’ estates from the interbellum period, but these time empty spaces were filled with greenery. Adamski’s houses were also built in a section of the C-2 Północ (Krakowiaków) and B-2 Północ (Sportowe) Estates the next year. Late 1950s. Colour photography.
Domy mieszkalne na Osiedlu Wandy. Budowę najstarszych osiedli Nowej Huty rozpoczęto w czerwcu 1949 roku właśnie od jej południowo-wschodniej części. Powstały wtedy osiedla 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 wg projektów warszawskiego architekta Franciszka Adamskiego. Osiedle Na Skarpie było wznoszone jako jedno z pierwszych, pod koniec 1949 roku lub na początku 1950 roku. Wczesny okres budowy dotyczył tzw. osiedli peryferyjnych sektora A, charakteryzował się czterospadzistymi dachami (pokrytymi często dachówkami),, zabudowa był luźna a budynki wolnostojące.. Ogólna koncepcja nawiązywała do stylu osiedli robotniczych z okresu międzywojennego, z tym że wolne przestrzenie wypełnia zieleń. Domy Adamskiego wzniesiono również w następnym roku w części osiedla C-2 Północ (Krakowiaków) oraz B-2 Północ (Sportowe), koniec l.50.XX w. Fotografia barwna.
Photo by Wiktor Pental/idealcity.pl
Miejsce
Nowa Huta
Czas
1 July 1957
Tagi
carpet beating rack,
green space,
residential building,
Wandy Estate