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
An aerial photograph depicting a view from Zone C estates: Urocze (C-33) and Zgody (C-32) Estates, towards the central estates in Nowa Huta. In the foreground: buildings on the Urocze Estate, built from 1955 to 1958. Ten out of the nineteen buildings were designed by architect Jan Suliga, who also designed small architecture for some of them. On the estate there is also an inoperative fountain. Behind: Zgody Estate with the former seat of the District Militia Station in Nowa Huta (now Police Station). In the empty square beginning construction works of a modernist building, the characteristic building known as “Świat Dziecka” (Child’s World – the name of a shop and its neon sign). It was built in 1957-60.
The semi-circular residential block no 7 on the corner is a characteristic feature of this estate. Behind it: Centrum D (D-31) Estate with the characteristic modernist tower block known as “helicopter.” Left: buildings on the Centrum B (B-31) and Centrum A (A-31) Estates, built in 1953-6, further back: green areas known as Nowa Huta Meadows. Late 1950s.
Fotografia lotnicza przedstawia widok od strony osiedli w strefie C: osiedla Uroczego (C-33) Zgody (C-32) w kierunku nowohuckich osiedli centralnych. Na pierwszym planie zabudowania na osiedlu Uroczym, realizowane było w latach 1955-1958. Dziesięć z dziewiętnastu budynków zaprojektował arch. Jan Suliga, który był także projektantem małej architektury przy kilku z nich. Wewnątrz osiedla znajduje się także nieczynna fontanna. Kolejne, to osiedle Zgody z siedzibą dawnej Komendy Dzielnicowej MO w Nowej Hucie (obecnie mieści się w nim Komisariat Policji). Na pustym placu początki prac budowlanych przy modernistycznym gmachu charakterystyczny budynek zwany „Światem Dziecka” (od nazwy sklepu i neonu). Wzniesiono go w latach 1957-1960.
Na tym osiedlu charakterystyczny jest narożny blok mieszkalny nr 7 zbudowany na planie fragmentu koła. Za nim widoczne osiedl Centrum D (D-31) z charakterystycznym modernistycznym punktowcem zwanym „helikopterem”. Po lewej stronie widoczna zabudowa osiedli Centrum B (B-31) i Centrum A (A-31) zrealizowanymi w latach 1953-1956, w tle widoczne tereny zielone zwane „Łąkami nowohuckimi”, koniec l.50.XX w.
Photo by Henryk Makarewicz/idealcity.pl
Miejsce
Nowa Huta
Czas
7 September 1959
Tagi
Centrum B,
Centrum C,
Centrum D,
Nowa Huta Meadows,
Urocze Estate,
Zgody Estate