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
Lenin Metallurgical Combine, Open Hearth Plant - interior fragment with furnaces. 1960s.
The open-hearth furnace is made of a combustion chamber with charging doors and a tap hole, noses (providing fuel and air, and discharging fumes), channels, slag chambers, regenerators and distribution valves. Regenerators in an open-hearth furnace recover heat from exhaust gases. Pig iron is charged from above with a mixture of ore, coke and limestone. Hot air is pushed from below to spark off chemical reaction to reduce iron oxides. Pig iron and slag are collected separately at the bottom of the furnace.
Kombinat metalurgiczny im. Lenina, stalownia martenowska – fragment wnętrza hali z piecami, lata 60.
Piec martenowski składa się z przestrzeni roboczej - tzw. topniska, z oknami wsadowymi i otworem spustowym, głowic (doprowadzających paliwo i powietrze oraz odprowadzających spaliny), kanałów, komór żużlowych, regeneratorów i zaworów rozrządczych. Regeneratory pieca martenowskiego służą do odzyskiwania dla procesu części ciepła, które zawierają uchodzące spaliny. Surówka żelazna jest ładowana do pieca od góry, wraz z mieszaniną rudy, koksu, kamienia wapiennego. Od dołu wdmuchuje się gorące powietrze, powodujące reakcje chemiczne, w wyniku których tlenki żelaza ulegają redukcji. U dołu pieca zbiera się oddzielnie surówkę żelaza oraz żużel.
Photo by Henryk Makarewicz/idealcity.pl
Miejsce
Nowa Huta
Czas
1 March 1965
Tagi
combine,
labour,
Lenin Steelworks,
steel,
steelworker,
steelworkers