Nowa Huta: An elegant expression of Soviet socialist might

You might be surprised by the number of tour guides operating in the Polish new town of Nowa Huta, a name which means New Steelworks. However, it makes sense when you realise that 15 million people visit the baroque beauty of nearby Krakow annually and there will always be a few, more adventurous tourists who want to learn stories about Poland’s immediate past.

In addition, Nowa Huta is elegantly designed. From Lenin Square (now called Ronald Reagan Central Square), five treelined boulevards emanate. As you walk them, the standard story which the guides will tell you is that Joseph Stalin himself deliberately located the Lenin Steelworks and the town which serviced it, here, due to the particular bourgeois, anti-Soviet tendencies of Krakow.

In truth the Cursed Soldiers, as the native resistance to the Red Army occupying Poland were known, were more active in rural areas near the Belorussian border. The real reason is more practical. While iron ore was transported all the way from Ukraine, Nowa Huta was near the Upper Silesian coal fields. Even if its symmetrical network of avenues and cross streets are strikingly similar to the plan of Magnitogorsk, an industrial city on the east side of the Ural Mountains, local architects were given enough scope to give the early grander phase of building an architecture with flourishes recognisable to those who have visited Krakow. The tiered façades of the main streets and the ornamental mouldings on the door frames of the mansion blocks make reference to the baroque language of the older city, albeit in concrete and with an extra level of muscularity.

Construction of the pumped-up neo-Classical architectural, ornamental parks and symmetrical plan, which the more intrepid tourist discovers, began in 1949 with Soviet technical assistance while production at the plant began in 1954. The steelworks became one of the largest employers in southern Poland, producing a broad range of steel products used in domestic construction and export. The plant was an expression of socialist might, and shaped Nowa Huta’s urban and social identity, with housing, cultural centres and worker amenities built around it. The Lenin Statue by Marian Konieczny, one of the truly great social realist sculptures, on the Avenue of Roses was removed in 1989 and currently stands in a wild west theme park in Sweden.

Were it not for the singular intervention of a cleric known in his early life in Krakow as Karol Józef Wojtyła, but later when he moved to Rome as Pope John Paull II, Nowa Huta would still be a fascinating and in parts, to outsiders, attractive place; the lines of trees and linear plantings down wide boulevards are particularly striking. Nowa Huta is unique outside Russia as a major expression of Stalin’s proclivity for neo-Classical planning as well as architecture. The reality of Soviet economics kicked in later. The stripped back Modernism found to the north of Nowa Huta tells a story of decline. However, Wojtyła’s influence has created another fascinating layer to the city.

Perhaps understandably no churches were built by the Marxist Leninists in the original iteration of Nowa Huta. However, as Archbishop, Wojtyła began celebrating mass in Nowa Huta from 1959, outdoors, before a wooden cross. It says a lot about Polish Soviet relations that even in this ideal socialist city, there were protests that the authorities were forced to contain rather than suppress. Stalin described the process of making Poland communist, as like ‘putting a saddle on a cow’, with the Catholic Church constantly giving the Poles the strength to buck Soviet imperial dominance. Wojtyła supported the widespread desire for a church to be built in the new town, and, in the face of opposition from the authorities, was finally able to complete one in 1977 against a backdrop of food riots throughout Poland.

Shaped a little like Noah’s Ark and nicknamed as such, The Church of the Mother of God, the Queen of Poland, as it is officially known, owes a huge debt to Le Corbusier’s Notre-Dame-du-Haut Chapel; a primitivist assemblage of curved geometries that speaks to an architecture that both pre-dates and supersedes the linear rational lines of Nova Huta’s plan. Wojtyła gave the local church a stone brought back from the moon by American astronauts that had been given to him: modernity overstepping rationalist Modernism to place man closer to the cosmos.

People’s spiritual and social needs must be part of any urban plan: even if it comes late. The Church of Our Lady of Częstochowa was begun in 1982 close to the site where Wojtyła’s masses took place. It was built from brick, the same material used for the later, post-Stalin apartment blocks, although it is not plastered as they are. The design is ingenious, a series of pitched roofs, receding from the front elevation and growing in height, its façades are lattice windows, creating a series of tree-like crowns on the exterior and a shaded bower within. Nowa Huta may struggle in today’s economic climate, due to the enduring dominance of the steel work as employer, (it is now owned by Arcelor Mittal) but as a place it gets ever more fascinating.