Piękno miasta i przestrzenie reprezentacyjne w projektach konkursowych na Wielki Kraków

Kiecko, Emilia

doi:978-83-65880-53-6

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Title: Piękno miasta i przestrzenie reprezentacyjne w projektach konkursowych na Wielki Kraków

Abstract:

The architectural competition held in 1910 to design a “Great Kraków” was undoubtedly the most important event in Polish urban planning before 1918. It is not without reason that it was regarded as one of the breakthroughs, marking the beginnings of the “modern” rebuilding of Polish cities. At the same time, it inscribed to a longer worldwide chain of events related to urban planning “around the year 1910”, that included, among others, competitions for “Great Copenhagen” (1908–1909), “Great Berlin” (1909–1910), the plan of Chicago by Daniel Burnham and Edward H. Bennett (1909), and the competition for a plan of Canberra (1912). Despite its great significance, the Kraków competition has however not been thoroughly researched yet, especially regarding the designs that did not win awards, by Sylwester Pajzderski, and those that were purchased, by Ignacy Drexler and Juliusz Oleś with Szymon Weinberg. This article, while not pretending to exhaust the entire breadth and depth of the Kraków competition and submitted projects, focuses on the way in which the idea of Stadtbaukunst, the art of city building—such an important factor of urban planning theory at the end of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries—was reflected in these projects, together with the question of what constituted a “beautiful city”. There is no doubt that the ideas were mirrored in the competition designs, as they were also echoed in the competition programme. However, it was not always that the pursuit of making “beautiful Kraków” was compatible with the demands of the art of city building; often the participants postulated transformations, at times quite significant ones, of the historic substance of the city. Nevertheless, none of the designs presented a concrete vision of the coherent, mainly symbolic identity of the future “Great Kraków”. The participants seemed to have focused their attention mainly on attempts to transform Kraków into a healthy and convenient city to live in; thus, to direct it towards modernity.