PLANTSTORIA exhibition in Museum of Architecture in Wrocław
Premiering at the Architecture Weekend in Gdynia in 2024, the exhibition “Plantstoria”, by Barbara Nawrocka, will be shown at the Museum of Architecture in Wrocław.
The exhibition tells the story of a housing estate in Ciechanów, designed and built by the Third Reich during the World War II. We can find similar housing estates, with their characteristic architecture, in many cities in Poland. We refer to them as ‘post-German’ or ‘Berlinek’.
The district in Ciechanów, designed as a Gartenvorstadt (garden-suburb), over time became known as the ‘Blocks’. It was created in the early 1940s. It was intended as a new housing base for officials and their families settling in the capital of the newly founded East Prussian district. The original name evokes associations with Ebenezer Howard’s utopian concept of the garden city. Huge tracts of land were built up so that the spaces between the buildings could be filled with green. Today, the estate is still bathed in greenery, despite later housing densification.
– This is the story of a housing estate in my hometown. About a troubled heritage, and, above all, about the local vegetation and its political entanglement in shaping the landscape of the conquered lands. About the history of the garden suburb from the perspective of nature, the introduction of the ‘German order’ and what escapes attempts at colonisation – Barbara Nawrocka, author of the exhibition.
The author of the exhibition, Barbara Nawrocka, is a graduate and scholarship holder of the Exercising Moderntiy programme, implemented by the Berlin branch of the Pilecki Institute.
The opening of the exhibition will take place on 15.05.2025 at 18:00.
The exhibition will be on view from 15.05. to 17.08.2025.
Museum of Architecture in Wrocław
ul. Bernardyńska 7, Wrocław
Organisers:
Pilecki-Institut Berlin
Muzeum Architektury
