Un progetto per Nowa Huta

Il volume raccoglie i progetti presentati alla IX Biennale Internazionale di Cracovia, 2002, sul tema "Less ideology - more geometry in the space to live the city". Oggetto del concorso sono quegli spazi della città, costruita come città dormitorio durante gli anni del Realismo Socialista, che possono diventare spazi pubblici per la città contemporanea. Progetto vincitore del primo premio. Born from a political will (socialist realism), from a model of urban and territorial organization (a new way of life) that imprinted its processes of conception and construction, Nowa Huta is, like all foundation towns, a city without a past, a city that appears today fixed in the everlasting present of the time (the ideology) which conceived and built it, and projected towards a future balanced between failure of the ideals (which were the very reason for the existance of the city) and the shutting-down of the huge factories to which it was connected (its practical reason). A city without a past and with an uncertain future. But the shape of Nowa Huta, its spatial structure, has an immense debt to the history and the tradition of the architecture and, set free form its political and ideological charge, it represents today an important contribution to urban research, both on a territorial scale (location, means of transport, water supply, production settlements) and on a urban scale (quarters, residential units, public services, collective buildings, green areas, traffic in its different forms). Therefore our reflection starts from the actual reality of the city, from its built structure (the layout of streets and its relationship with architecture, the residential districts and the emerging monuments) which represents the more constant and convincing element: the aggregative systems, the building types and the architectural forms have changed in the course of time, but the plan remained unchanged in its geometrical clearness.