The slogan "Zakopane" evokes many, often extremely different associations - from idyllic images of picturesque mountains and a wealth of regional ornaments to visions of crowds on Krupówki and New Year's Eve celebrations on TV screens. The time has come to look at the city from a different perspective - on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the opening of the main building of the Tatra Museum, the New Zakopane project was created, about which its curators - Łukasz Gorczyca and Julita Dembowska- talk.
Ola Kloc: The New Zakopane 2022 project was born out of the idea of subjecting Zakopane's contemporary architecture and space to analysis. Tell us a little more about it.
Łukasz Gorczyca: The project started already last year. Its general idea was to subject to observation how the urban and architectural landscape of Zakopane is changing today. We also wanted to treat it as an opportunity to recall, rediscover or dust off various modernizing ideas about Zakopane and the Zakopane style of the last few decades.
The first tangible element that has been realized as part of the project is a guide to art in the urban space of Zakopane. It is a proposal for walks, looking at objects realized in the city space from the late 1930s to the 1980s by various artists, often very famous, such as Antoni Kenar or Władysław Hasior, which are now largely located in less obvious, hard-to-reach places or have become part of something else. The idea of this kind of archeology of modernity was also to make it clear that the slogan "New Zakopane" is not just about the twenty-first-century city, but that Zakopane reinvented itself from time to time, that modernism and regionalism struggled here basically from the very beginning, from Stanislaw Witkiewicz, who came with his vision of the Zakopane style.
In parallel, there was a series of public meetings with Zakopane architects who were or still are active in Zakopane and have various interesting realizations to their credit, or visions of what and how should be built here in the context of history and landscape. The subtitle of the project is "mountains - city - architecture," so it is not only about the discussion of the architecture of the selected buildings themselves, because that can be followed in press reports, but about the landscape as a whole, how the various architectures of Zakopane coexist with each other, how this city is changing dynamically, and how architecture tries to respond to the issue of landscape, or mountains, and identity, which is a strong element of the city.
Julita Dembowska: We don't want to tell some negative stories, we just want to look at it objectively, not trying to complain about how this space looks, but trying to understand it.
Zakopane, Granit Department Store designed by Anna Gorska (1965) - photograph by Błażej Pindor from the series New Zakopane, 2022
© courtesy of the Tatra Museum
Ola: Let's grumble for a moment, though! You point out myths and problems of the city that need to be worked through. What exactly do you have in mind? What is Zakopane facing today?
Lukasz: Most people who write about Zakopane's history, culture and identity point out that it is a city built on various myths or paradoxes, on various fantastic notions. One such contemporary myth is that Zakopane is terrible, that it is a living massacre. What is being done there in the urban space, the unbridled development rush that is devastating the areas around the national park, the way the city looks from the street, the comfort of the people who come there, the traffic jams in summer, the lack of communication... all this builds up the image of Zakopane as an apocalyptic place. Our project is not concerned with perpetuating these myths, but with verifying them. Our strategy is not to kick a person lying down, but to look at the phenomenon of this situation, its uniqueness.
Zakopane is a place where various problems are concentrated as if in a lens, including problems of urbanization or identity. It is peculiar - on the one hand it is very prosperous, and on the other, if we look at the construction movement, although it is developing very dynamically, the number of residents is not growing. This expansion is on the rise, for the sake of tourism. So the incredible financial possibilities and potential collide with a very deep-rooted need to express one's own identity - building in Zakopane does not mean the same as building in Silesia, Mazovia or the seaside. Here there is always the question of form, the relationship of architecture not only to the landscape, but also to history, the traditions of the Zakopane style, or in general the culture and style of the Podhale region. The need to express identity in architectural forms is often very pragmatic, investors or developers know that if they want to build the most packaged building possible, they must cover it with some kind of regional costume. There are also genuinely committed people who believe that houses should be built using traditional carpentry techniques. Educated carpenters are still able to build a house themselves, even without necessarily having a blueprint drawn up. There are also people who try to take a creative approach to this architectural tradition and create new architecture based on all these accidents.
Zakopane is also such a place where through architecture you can understand a lot about what this city is, what kind of hybrid between what was there locally - nature, nature - and what is brought from somewhere else.
And finally, it's not that Zakopane is completely buried in this process of crazy and unbridled development. Already a few years ago, a landscape park was introduced in Krupówki and, unlike in very many such places in Poland, some order has been put in place. Now work is underway on a Landscape Law for the entire area. So there is no shortage of reactions or reflections.
In fact, so far Zakopane has had no attempt to document its architectural and spatial status quo. I am not talking about attempts to create official plans, but about documentation or reflection, looking at the city from the perspective of a passerby, a photographer, an artist, someone visiting the place. When we look through archival photographs, albums or books, they are mostly stories about the Tatra Mountains.
Julita: Architecture is a subject that directly affects the locals, they are not indifferent to what is being built. The buildings that are built are then discussed on Facebook groups, there is appalled when they are too big and not for the size of the place where they are being built. Residents also try to discuss the issue with the authorities, appearing at various sessions at city hall to explain their point of view. We are also, Lukasz says, in a specific place, at a specific time. Zakopane has basically been changing all the time since the 19th century, it was constantly taking on a new shape, new architectural forms appeared - in addition to highland cottages there was the Swiss style, there were townhouses, the Zakopane style - but in most cases the existing documentation is mostly about the Tatra Mountains, not Zakopane itself. Modern times are practically completely ignored, and the dynamics of change at the beginning of the 21st century is probably even greater than at the beginning or middle of the 20th century. So it's worth looking into, because Zakopane is not completely disconnected from the Polish context and other tourist destinations that have similar problems with the construction of apartment buildings, lack of apartments for long-term rent. So maybe Zakopane will become the beginning of the discussion.
Zakopane, new Royal Resort apartment buildings on Goszczyńskiego Street - photograph by Blazej Pindor from the series New Zakopane, 2022.
© courtesy of the Tatra Museum
Ola: So what positive changes do you observe in contemporary Zakopane architecture?
Julita: The positive thing is that architects are looking for ways to insert themselves into the local architectural history. And, of course, these are more or less successful attempts, but they are not trying to come up with big glass skyscrapers (although glass in buildings is sometimes present), they are primarily creating this regional costume. Zakopane and the Tatra Mountains impose a certain thinking about design and looking for solutions that fit into this place, finding oneself in this space-time.
Lukasz: My professor, the famous architectural historian Adam Miłobędzki, once pointed out that Zakopane is a very specific example where a certain architectural idea or concept, in this case the Zakopane style invented by Stanisław Witkiewicz, was taken up and maintained. This idea, in spite of some ups and downs, has survived to this day, and not as a result of official regulations or impositions (although nowadays the modern development plan strongly determines what the roofs of the houses should look like, for example), but thanks to the residents, small investors. Before the war, in the 1920s or 1930s, strictly Witkiewiczian, Zakopane architecture was not supported by the state, on the contrary. For example, the post office building in Zakopane, which was built in the Zakopane style, was modernized to a more classical style before the war, it was supposed to face the politics and prestige of the state. The same was true after the war, in the 1950s and 1960s, what was built as official buildings, central investments, vacation homes, a department store, was late modernist architecture, geometric, devoid of sloping roofs or literal regional elements. Privately, on the other hand, people just built Zakopane houses. This architectural idiom was carried over by people and is dominant today.
If I were to point to something that I read as a kind of positive or distinguishing feature of this architecture, one of the interesting aspects of the regionalism readable in the new developments is the attachment to the material, to its truth. This is something that has been lifted from the Zakopane-regionalist tradition. The houses, however different they may look, have a lot of wooden and stone elements in them, and are constructed on the basis of faith in natural material. The famous pebbles, which formed the foundations of the houses, are fortunately already banned, but stone appears in other forms and gives the architecture a certain warmth, a connection with the landscape.
Julita: Ornaments, which have always been present in this culture, also continue to be used. Even if they are modern forms, a sash or rosette appears. There is still a sense that ornament should appear, be passed down and be present in the tradition. And, as Lukasz says, wood in a way defines the region, objects are created from wood, individual elements of architecture.
Zakopane, view from the window of the main building of the Tatra Museum - photograph by Blazej Pindor from the series New Zakopane, 2022
© courtesy of the Tatra Museum
Ola: What are your expectations from this project? What would you like to see perhaps change or stay among the participants?
Lukasz: My ambition is for people to see Zakopane. The point we are aiming for (because we still have a series of meetings with architects, activists ahead of us, these are very cool meetings, because they involve the local audience and generate a lot of interesting conversations) is a photo album, which we are working on together with Blazej Pintor, a photographer. It is meant to be a summary of the entire event, something that will be left behind. It is not so much an attempt at a jurnal documentation of individual buildings, but on the contrary - a visual essay that will show the space of this city as it looks today, with emphasis on what is new in it.
The new Zakopane for us is also a relation to the old Zakopane. In this book, somewhere in the background of the new buildings, there are old Zakopane villas that are over-fired and waiting to be demolished, and there are also examples of pre-war or post-war modernism in a very interesting way. This is meant to be a story from the perspective of the street, not of experts who photograph selected objects out of their context, but just to show the city as a continuous space, as it really is. That's why, as I said, our goal is for us to see it together and make a record of the state we are in, in order to bear witness for the future.
For me, it is very important that the project is being carried out by the Tatra Museum. On the one hand, it proves that the Museum is an institution that participates vividly in what the city is living, how it is developing, but it also gives an interesting and important perspective that what we create will be a document for future generations. Because that the city will continue to change, there is no doubt. It is also known that the discussion we are having now will continue for decades to come. Taking photos for this album, we can already see that there will be sights in it that no one will see again, because something has been rebuilt, something has been destroyed in these few months.
Julita: From a museologist's point of view, I would add that the main thing was to gather information about the present time, which we can pass on, because a museum is not only for collecting objects, but also intangible heritage, that which cannot be specifically drawn into an inventory, but which is a basis for future generations to study and analyze. I was interested in showing the truth. The narrative that is in the media is either candy-coated - with dancing highlanders and beautiful views, or shows crowds on Krupówki, spilling trash garbage cans that can't handle the onslaught of tourists. This city, however, is neither very ugly nor very pretty. It is simply what it is, and I really wanted our viewers to be able to see it from the perspective from which I see it every day. It's a city that's possible to like, it's also possible to live in it, to discover places that are off the main routes and that can be delightful or places that we don't want to go to again. It would be worthwhile to form an opinion based on what it is like, rather than on press or media reports alone, which by their nature tend to be exaggerated.
Lukasz: Zakopane is a super attractive place to look at the urban fabric. We've forgotten a bit about projects that try to document or map urban space, not just individual buildings. Going back in the history of photographic practices, back in the communist era, there was a custom of publishing sightseeing albums about various cities. They often had a well-planned structure - first the monuments were shown, and then what was built today, with rhetoric focused on how socialist Poland was thriving. These albums today are an interesting document, but also evidence of a professional photographic outlook. Currently, this escapes us a bit. The moment we ran out of propaganda, top-down control appears, as Julita said, visual production related to mass tourism, something that can be seen on thewebsites of various apartment buildings, hotels or recent postcards, or very specialized, out-of-context photos and descriptions in the architectural press or journalistic accounts of what happened on New Year's Eve. What's missing is a more calm, dispassionate, in-depth look. And I hope that what we manage to do will become a model, a key to looking at other cities. Saying: I'm checking out what it really looks like today, in addition to "we know," let's see if we can actually see the same thing in reality. Looking through the photos, which have already been largely created, we experienced a lot of amazement and became curious about this perspective, which refreshes our understanding of the space in which we function, allows us to distance ourselves from it. I think this tool will be an introduction, an inspiration for further discussions.
Ola: Thank you for the interview.
interviewed: Ola Kloc
The "New Zakopane" program is implemented by the Tatra Museum in Zakopane with funds from the MKiDN from the "Niepodległa" progam.
