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
Centrum B (B-31) Estate with the modernist French block in Aleja Przyjaźni Polsko-Radzieckiej (Polish-Russian Friendship Alley, now simply Aleja Przyjaźni – Friendship Alley). The building is also an “experimental block,” fully prefabricated and industrialised. It was designed by Kazimierz Chodorowski in 1956, and constructed in 1957-9. 74-metre-long, the block has eight floors, while balconies and loggias follow an alternating pattern. The ground floor housed avant-garde interiors with untypical semi-circular windows bent at corners. They were occupied by the offices of the Orbis Travel Agency; furniture and interior design by Irena Pać-Zaleśna. In the middle part of the trade and service complex there was a furniture shop designed by Zdzisław Szpyrkowski. At its end was the Polish Tourism Association Club, with interiors designed by Alina Zięba. 1960s.
Osiedle Centrum B (B-31) z modernistycznym blokiem francuskim przy alei Przyjaźni Polsko-Radzieckiej (obecnie alei Przyjaźni). Blok zwany był także „blokiem eksperymentalnym” całkowicie prefabrykowanym i uprzemysłowionym. Zaprojektowany został przez Kazimierza Chodorowskiego w 1956 roku, budowany w latach 1957- 1959 roku. Blok o długości 74 m wzniesiono na wysokość ośmiu kondygnacji a elewację urozmaicono naprzemiennym zastosowanie balkonów i loggii. Na parterze znajdowały się awangardowe wnętrza z nietypowymi, półokrągłymi szybami giętymi w narożnikach. Mieściła się tam siedziba biura PPiT „Orbis”, do którego meble i aranżację wnętrza wykonała Irena Pać-Zaleśna. W środkowej części kompleksu handlowo-usługowego znajdował się sklep meblowy zaprojektowany przez Zdzisława Szpyrkowskiego. Kompleks usługowy zamykała siedziba Klubu PTTK, do którego wnętrza wraz z wyposażeniem zaprojektowała Alina Zięba. Lata 60. XX w.
Photo by Henryk Makarewicz/idealcity.pl
Miejsce
Nowa Huta
Czas
20 May 1963
Tagi
Centrum B,
French Block,
modernism,
residential building,
Swedish Park