International news

Andrzej Wajda – Space Director

text: Jacek PURCHLA
translation: Sabra DAICI
photo: www.manggha.pl

More than a hundred years ago, in Krakow, there was a visionary artist who tried to inscribe his artistic creations in the city's space. His name was Stanisław Wyspiański. His vision of Wawel as an Acropolis became legendary, but it was never - fortunately, perhaps - realized.
Towards the end of the 20th century, a visionary director appeared in Kraków who, unlike Stanisław Wyspiański, set out efficiently and consistently to realize and integrate his visions into the city's space. At first he dared to create on the opposite bank of the Vistula a counterpoint to the Kraków Acropolis. That counterpoint is Manggha.
Andrzej Wajda's idea to build the Center of Japanese Art and Technology opposite Wawel Castle was, for many, a profane thought. One need only recall the heated discussions on the location of the Center at the working sessions of the Kraków City Council. But it is not only the spectacular nature of the idea itself that should be emphasized, but also the noble generosity of the founders. Andrzej Wajda and Krystyna Zachwatowicz decided to donate the Kyoto Prize, awarded to the director in 1987, for the creation of the Manggha Center in Krakow. They then became involved in raising additional funds to build the building. It was a precedent, especially in the times of People's Poland, but even today - 30 years after the fall of communism - it is an exceptional event in recent Polish history of cultural patronage. The decision of Andrzej Wajda and Krystynej Zachwatowicz can also be seen as a reference to the generosity of the Polish bourgeoisie, still alive in Kraków at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, to create a Cradle of Poland near Wawel. Andrzej Wajda's cradle, so vividly portrayed in Andrzej Wajda's Z biegiem lat, z biegiem dni... (As the year goes by, as the day goes by...).
Director of space, Andrzej Wajda has given Kraków Manggha not only as an institution of dialog, but above all as a symbol of contemporary architecture. The creator of this unusual building, located right in front of the Wawel complex, is Arata Isozaki, a classic of Japanese architecture. The vision he envisioned in 1989 was realized between 1993-1994 by a team of architects from Krakow, led by Krzysztof Ingarden, and has become a symbol of the synthesis of idea and technology.
Manggha is an artistic import in the double meaning of the term. It is not just the work of a Japanese architect. The undulating, variable and capricious line is a specific lesson in speaking architecture and leaves no room for ambiguity as to the identity of the building intended for the culture of the Land of Cherry Blossom. The work of Arata Isozaki, harmoniously inscribed into the Dębnicki embankment, inaugurated not only the rehabilitation of the neglected Dębniki district, but also the creation of a Cracovian river front and the beginning of the process of turning the city back to the river.

The merit of Andrzej Wajda and Krystynej Zachwatowicz, who courageously supported him, is therefore the creation of an institution that gave back to Kraków the Japanese collection of Feliks "Manggha" Jasieński and at the same time opened the city to the world. The Manggha Pavilion became Kraków's first truly convincing monument to the New Poland of the early 1990s. Lech Wałęsa launched the motto of building a second Japan in Poland, and Andrzej Wajda realized this idea at the foot of Wawel. In November 1994, Lech Wałłęsa himself, together with Prince Takamado, cousin of Emperor Akihito, officially opened the Center of Japanese Art and Technology. Today, it is a museum complex representing a modern counterpoint to the Holy Mountain of the Poles and the reception of Kraków as the Cradle of Poland.
Manggha also marked the beginning of the friendship and collaboration between Andrzej and Krystyna Wajda and Krzysztof Ingarden, the outstanding Krakow architect. The next fruit of this symbiosis was the Tea Pavilion (Herbaciany), built between 1996-2000. The small-scale building was not only a natural continuation of the dialog with the culture of the Far East, but also drew attention to the richness of Japan's intangible heritage and an attempt to "graft" it onto Polish soil! In the carefully studied scenography of the Tea Pavilion, Krystyna Zachwatowicz presents herself year after year as a keeper of the secrets of tea preparation. The tea preparation ceremony of the URASENKE school, under the leadership of Professor Etsuko Yamaguchi, has become a good tradition at Manggha.
An important area of activity of the Center of Japanese Art and Technique is education. Not coincidentally, the third chapter in the creation of the Manggha complex was the home of the Japanese Language School. The idea was born as early as 1996, but the road to its realization was a long one as the initiators could not count on public funding. Andrzej Wajda again played the role of noble patron. By offering a hundred Japanese drawings from his own collection to friendly Japanese railroad workers for a hundred thousand dollars, he overcame the impasse in building the school. Krzysztof Ingarden was, of course, the creator of this new addition to the growing 'island of Japanese culture' near Wawel. The minimalist, modest school building opened in 2004.
In the same year, Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Ingarden began work on the Europe-Far East Gallery. It was intended to dot the "i", but also to broaden Manggha's cultural horizons to the entire Far East. The opening of the Gallery in 2015 was accompanied by the moving exhibition Wróblewski in Wajda's Vision.

Today we can say with conviction that, if Berlin has its Museumsinsel, Frankfurt - Museumsufer, Vienna - MuseumsQuartier, then Kraków has on the opposite side of the Wawel a whole complex of buildings serving culture, directed by Andrzej Wajda and Krystyna Zachwatowicz. Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński would no longer say that the city on the Vistula has only rive gauche. Manggha has arguably become the catalyst for urban change for this neuralgic fragment of Kraków.
If the "peripheral" location - in the eyes of many Cracovites - of the Manggha center in the Dębniki district stirred controversy, what a stir Andrzej Wajda's idea must have stirred up to build the so-called Wyspiański Pavilion right in the heart of Cracow, in Wszystkich Świętych Square (All Saints' Square)! It was a new precedent set by Andrzej Wajda, which sparked heated discussions. For the center of Kraków is a finished work! This conviction has for decades paralyzed the idea of introducing contemporary architecture into the area bounded by Planty Park.
The narrow plot of land - on the site of the "Pod Lipką" mansion destroyed during the war - had previously been the subject of numerous urban planning debates, and even of an architectural competition at the 1992 International Architecture Biennale, won by the courageous design of Korean Wang. Andrzej Wajda's idea (expressed as early as 1997) was not only to regulate the representative square in the vicinity of the Kraków City Hall and the Franciscan Church, but also to exhibit Stanisław Wyspiański's unrealized stained-glass windows designed for the Wawel Cathedral. In 1940, then aged 14, Andrzej Wajda first saw Wyspiański's stained-glass windows in the nearby Franciscan cathedral. They stayed in his mind for the rest of his life.
Discussions on the shape of the pavilion and the possibilities of financing the construction lasted for many years. The debate required courage and determination on the part of the screen master. With infinite care and patience, Krzysztof Ingarden prepared new versions of the design to receive the go-ahead for construction in 2003. Work only got underway in 2005, when the then Minister of Culture, Waldemar Dąbrowski, secured funding for this spectacular new idea. Andrzej Wajda was thus able to pay homage to Wyspiański not only with a brilliant film version of The Wedding (Wesele), but also with a construction dedicated to the master of the Young Polish Movement (Młoda Polska).
The reconstructed stained-glass windows depicting St. Stanislav, Henry the Pious and Casimir the Great were 'framed' into the elongated facade, covered with specially designed brick slabs. In this way, by introducing a form of contemporary architecture into the heritage interior, Krzysztof Ingarden wished to refer - through the material used - to the historical context of the site. Small brick elements in changing positions were fixed to metal bars, 'giving life' to the elevation of the pavilion.

><img src= The Wyspiański Pavilion 2000, finally erected in 2005-2007 on a difficult but one of Kraków's most iconic sites, has integrated into the cityscape. The introduction by the Wajda-Ingarden couple of the contemporary language of forms in the heart of the historic center was then a new phenomenon for the city. Here I see the great merit of Andrzej Wajda as a spatial director. The Wyspiański Pavilion put an end to the dominance of the reconstruction doctrine in Kraków.
Wyspiański, Młoda Polska, the Wawel Royal Complex constantly stimulated Andrzej Wajda's imagination. He was the initiator of the Wing of the Kings at the opening of the European Capital of Culture in 2000 and proposed to build the Wing according to the idea of Wacław Szymanowski from 1907-1912. The monumental group of 52 historical figures, led by Fatum, would have stopped at the foot of Wawel Castle. Just as a hundred years earlier, Wajda's idea sparked heated discussions. In several location variants, presented in 2007 by Professor Aleksander Böhm of the Faculty of Architecture at Kraków Polytechnic, the Halle was to start from Manggha in the direction of Wawel. The unrealized idea was not only a metaphor of Andrzej Wajda's universal understanding of the artist's mission, but also of the meaning he gave to art in its spatial dimension.
In Andrzej Wajda's thinking about Kraków, many aspects of Camillo Sitte's urban vision can be found. Focusing on the experience of Italian cities, Sitte analyzed in detail, among others, the Florentine compositions Piazza della Signoria and Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence, as well as the Capitoline Square in Rome. Referring to the work of Michelangelo and other Renaissance masters, he emphasized the specific role of sculpture in the artistic shaping of urban enclosed spaces. The principle of the harmony of architecture and sculpture, as well as the principle of the integrity of the space of city squares, can be considered the foundation of Sitte's doctrine. In 1889, Sitte's famous book Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen (City Planning according to Artistic Principles) was published. It became a manifesto of thought on the creation of urban space in artistic categories. Sitte produced an extensive historical analysis of the urban planning of several cities in northern and southern Europe, including Florence, Pisa, Padua, Padua, Rome, Siena and Venice. Characteristic was the reduction of the city's artistic themes to individual examples of urban spaces.
The consequence of his reflections became, first and foremost, All Saints' Square in Kraków. Thanks to the director's courageous vision, it fitted in perfectly with Sitte's idea. And not by chance!
For decades, Andrzej Wajda's films have shaped Polish identity. At the same time, through his vision and creations in space, he has forever inscribed himself in the identity of Kraków. Thanks to Andrzej Wajda, his Kraków is the same, yet different - enriched with places directed by the Master. Wajda proved to Kraków that even today the city can be understood as a creation, a living work of art. Through imagination and determination he has shown that this need not be just an illusion of the motion picture.