Tarnów. 1000 years of modernity / exhibit prologue

Tarnów is a mid-sized polish city. In its long history, the XXth century is especially interesting. All the most important events in Poland’s modern history left their mark in the city. The architecture mirrored these events.

The exhibit and the book describe the intentions and the dreams of the builders of the city, and show Tarnów’s modernism in the context of polish and european architectures. We invited a group of polish artists to participate in the project, and part of the works, including Wilhelm Sasnal’s sculpture, will remain in the city permanently. The project will end in 2011 with a large exhibit in Tarnów’s urban space.

The prologue to the exhibit will take place in Mościce, a district of Tarnów built between the two World Wars. The workers quarter was built around the Państwowa Fabryka Związków Azotowych (National Nitrogen Works) in 1927, before the COP (Central Industrial Zone) was created. The 600-acre self sufficient industrial-urban complex was created according to the modernist city planning principles. The dynamic development of the modern industrial complex was stopped by the Second World War. After the war, the project was continued. At that time impressive public buildings were created: the railroad station, the community center, athletic facilities. The district is saturated with greenery, recalling the modernistic concept of garden-city.

The title, “Tarnów. 1000 years of modernity”, is a fantasy on the subject of planning the future, it alludes to futurology, to which all of the work by Jan Głuszak Dagarama (1937-2000), a visionary architect from Tarnów, was devoted. Dagarama was creating blueprints for cities of the XXXth century. Because of his schizophrenia Dagarama didn’t graduate from college, which didn’t stop him from creating expansive architectural treaties or inventing intricate solutions to future global problems. He worked as a doorman at the Tarnów district museum. One of the goals of the exhibit and of the book is to commemorate this colorful persona.