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, inside the hall of the Welded Pipe Rolling Mill Section. 1960s.
The construction of the Section commenced in 1958; it began operating in 1960. In 1973 the second pipe mill was opened at the Section. Basic equipment was purchased in West Germany, the rest was manufactured at home to a design by the Biprostal Studio in Krakow. The whole process was secured by installing such devices as a forming roller unit with a resistance welding machine, a tunnel kiln, a reducing rolling mill, hydraulic presses for testing the tightness of weld seams, hot-dip galvanising equipment, a device for electrostatic coating, a few sets of pipe threaders, a section for the production and galvanisation of joints, and numerous devices for sorting, packaging and binding pipes.
Kombinat metalurgiczny im. Lenina, wnętrze hali Wydziału Walcowni Rur Zgrzewanych, lata 60.
Budowę Wydziału rozpoczęto w 1958 roku, uruchomiono w 1960 roku. W 1973 roku uruchomiono drugi ciąg rurowni na Wydziale. Podstawowe urządzenia zakupiono w Republice Federalnej Niemiec, pozostałe wykonano w kraju według projektu biura projektowego „Biprostal” w Krakowie. Pełny cykl technologiczny został zapewniony przez zainstalowanie takich urządzeń, jak walcarka formująca wraz ze zgrzewarką oporową, piec tunelowy, walcarka redukcyjna, prasy hydrauliczne do badania szczelności spoi rur, ocynkownia ogniowa rur, lakiernice do elektrostatycznego lakierowania, kilka zespołów gwinciarek rur, oddział produkcji i ocynkownia złączek oraz szereg urządzeń pomocniczych do sortowania, pakietowania i wiązania rur.
Photo by Henryk Makarewicz/idealcity.pl