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
Buildings on Sector D estates. In the foreground (right): one of two modern blocks in Gen. Władysława Andersa Alley, on the Centrum D (D-31) Estate, the other is located nearby on the Handlowe (D-3) Estate. The new layout of Sector D was designed by architects Tadeusz Rembiesa and Bolesław Skrzybalski. It was built from 1957 to 1969. Diverse blocks were designed by architects Józef König, Andrzej Radnicki, Adam Fołtyn, Wacław Głowacki and Kazimierz Karasiński. The shape of Sector D was determined in the first project, but the urban layout and the height of buildings were related to the nearby airport in Rakowice-Czyżyny. Coloured buildings mostly had four floors, eleven-storey blocks were rare. Still, the majority are so-called Swedish blocks, or buildings considered modern in formal terms. Early 1960s.
Zabudowa osiedli w sektorze D. Na pierwszym planie (po prawej) jeden z dwóch nowoczesnych bloków stojących przy alei gen. Władysława Andersa na osiedlu Centrum D (D-31), drugi stoi obok na osiedlu Handlowym (D-3). Sektor D w nowej formie zaprojektowany został przez architektów Tadeusza Rembiesę i Bolesława Skrzybalskiego. Budowany był w latach 1957-1969. Różnorodne bloki zostały zaprojektowane przez architektów Józefa Königa, Andrzeja Radnickiego, Adama Fołtyna, Wacława Głowackiego i Kazimierza Karasińskiego. Kształt sektora D ukształtowany był w pierwotnym projekcie, jednak układ urbanistyczny i wysokość budynków uzależniony była od znajdującego się w pobliżu lotniska w Rakowicach-Czyżynach. Kolorowe budynki najczęściej osiągały wysokość czterech pięter, do rzadkości należą budynki jedenastokondygnacyjne. Niemniej jednak większość z nich to tzw. bloki szwedzkie czyli budynki zaliczane do nowoczesnych formalnie, pocz. l. 60. XX w.
Photo by Henryk Makarewicz/idealcity.pl
Miejsce
Nowa Huta
Czas
5 May 1960
Tagi
Centrum D,
construction,
modernism,
residential building