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
Inside Open Hearth Steel Plant, open hearth furnace hall. 1960s.
Open Hearth Steel Plant opened in February 1955; the tenth and last furnace was built in 1961. Open hearth furnaces were used for smelting steel from foundry pig iron and steel scrap. Furnaces operated on molten pig iron brought by torpedo ladles from mixers. Steel from furnaces was received from ladles and poured into ingot moulds placed on ingot mould wagons which, appropriately prepared, were steered to the filling hall by railway. Most of the output of open-hearth steel plants was moved to continuous roughers still hot. 1970 saw a modernisation of the Steel Plant, with two old-type furnaces removed. They were replaced by a modern tandem furnace, the first in Poland.
Wnętrze Stalowni Martenowskiej, hala pieców martenowskich, lata 60.
Stalownia Martenowska została uruchomiona w lutym 1955 roku, ostatni – dziesiąty piec – wybudowano w 1961 roku. Piece martenowskie używano do wytapiania stali z surówki odlewniczej i złomu stalowego. Piece pracowały przy udziale surówki płynnej, którą pobierano surówkowozami z mieszalników. Stal z pieców odbierana była z kadzi i rozlewana do wlewnic ustawionych na wozach podwlewnicowych, które po odpowiednim przygotowaniu były podstawiane przy pomocy trakcji kolejowej do hali rozlewniczej. Przeważającą większość produkcji stalowni martenowskiej przekazywano do walcowni wstępnych w stanie gorącym. W 1970 roku zmodernizowano Stalownię likwidując dwa piece starego typu. Na ich miejsce wybudowano nowoczesny, pierwszy w Polsce piec typu „tandem”.
Photo by Henryk Makarewicz/idealcity.pl
Miejsce
Nowa Huta
Czas
1 March 1966
Tagi
furnace hall,
Lenin Steelworks,
open hearth steel plant,
worker,
workers