Poza formą miasta idealnego. Przeobrażenia nowohuckich materialności
Beyond the Concept of the Ideal City. Transformations of Nowa Huta Materiality

Summary/Abstract: The article shows literary and documentary presentations of the first years of building Nowa Huta in the context of the avant-garde gesture of blurring the traces of the past and attempting at establishing a completely new beginning. Another equally important goal is to show how Nowa Huta, a model city of socialist visions, was organized by the dialectic of materialization and dematerialization which governed both the rhetoric of architectural visions and descriptions of human – especially women’s – corporeality. The author combines idealized (and therefore immaterial) approach whose ideological senses are projected onto the architecture of a utopian city with the socialistic approach to the body as a precisely shaped form whose biological and generally material qualities are disciplined. The author describes a few attempts of bodily disobedience to the dictate of the form, exposing the gap between postulated construction plans and the reality of everyday life entangled in the materiality of architecture and the biological nature of the body.

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