MARIA POPRZĘCKA

Łódź Fabryczna station, like most of Polish railway stations, is neglected, dirty and off-putting. Its surroundings are even worse: spray writings made by supporters of a local football team, hordes of cars parked virtually everywhere, casserole booths and a chaotic and inert city tissue. The renovated Orthodox church looks like a brooch pinned to a worn out donkey jacket. This is how the city of Łódź welcomes its guests and bids them farewell. But it is Łódź that has the chance to transform the dilapidated surroundings of the station into a New Centre, the first such idea in Poland.

The station is supposed to disappear below the ground, whereas on the surface it will be replaced with a transparent cylinder building of the Special Art Zone. A vast centre with various public spaces, cultural, educational, leisure, commercial cultural and tourist institutions will be organised around the station, according to the design elaborated by a prominent architect – Robert Krier. The construction works, aptly called an operation on an open city, are supposed to begin next year. Why has the New Centre of Łódź been planned on a railway station area? Why is a place for culture and entertainment to be erected first, and not administration offices, office buildings, shopping malls or banks which usually make the centres of cities nowadays? Can art be a stimulus to create the new city centre?

 In case of such important investments, choosing a particular location is influenced by many economic, financial, urban, communication as well as social factors. I would like to indicate the historical and cultural aspect of the location of the New Centre and remind of the past significance of this, now dilapidated, space. Edifices and streets are not just inanimate matter. They lead an intensive life, have their own secrets and are full of energy. For the industrial and rapidly developing 19th-century city like Łódź, it was the railway station that accumulated and catalysed human activity. It was neither a marketplace, as in the Middle Ages, nor a palace court, but the station. Although it did not have an impressive architectural shape, it was the place where the heart of this multinational and multi religious industrial agglomeration used to beat.

From a station to the New Centre of Łódź
Not only Łódź looked like that. The history of the 19th-century urbanisation process indicates that the station was the place of the highest dynamics, a traffic and change generator. It was a place of departures and arrivals, of abandonments and returns, welcomes and farewells. It used to be crowded, pulsating with travelling excitement, haste, strain and extreme emotions. Just think about the novels of that time – how many key scenes take place at stations! Wokulski cried at the platform in Skierniewice: ’Farewell miss Iza, farewell!’, the female protagonist of Maria Rodziewiczówna’s Wrzos, was stopped by an ominous warning: ’No exit here’ Borowiecki set off on a dangerous escape with somebody else’s wife... These are all a testimony to the unique role that the station played in the life of people those days, in their contemporary culture and social custom.

The station is also a symbolic place. It is a gate to the city, which has its traditional meanings: the border between worlds, the threshold separating what is near from what is far, the homely from the foreign, the familiar from the unknown. At the same time, when railway was invented, these gates had to assume brand new, unprecedented functions and rise to new, technical and social, requirements. For architects, it was a great challenge to find proper shapes for the buildings which had no models in history. The great invention – railway – had to be given a proper frame, significant, prestigious and splendid enough. A railway station was a sign of modernity, advancement and the rank of a city. By welcoming guests, it represented a city and was its showcase.

It was not easy, so people tried a bit of everything.  The whole history of 19th- and 20th-century architecture could be described on the basis of station architecture. In the 19th century, it was common to refer to historical, national and exotic styles and their possible and impossible eclectic combinations. With ideas for designs and patterns taken from absolutely everywhere, stations were clothed in various garments and costumes. They could assume the shape of a Florence renaissance palace (for instance, the Warsaw-Vienna railway station), Mauritanian-Spanish fantasies (like the first station in Skierniewice) or English gothic castles (for example, the still-working station in Wrocław).  Great metropolises searched for noble and, more importantly, monumental inspirations, such as the stations in New York which were inspired by Caracalla hot springs in Rome, or the Paris stations which ended the perspective of boulevards with huge screens of Neo-renaissance façades. Stations would also provide a good opportunity to manifest national identity, to mention just the Russian vokzals which looked like magical vehicles of Old Russian nobles. In the independent Poland, it was common to design stations in the national style, which usually meant the picturesque Kalisz-Lublin style. Many of them have survived to the present day, e.g. in Lublin and Żyrardów. Until the middle of the 20th century, stations remained an attractive architectural subject, also in the period of modernism, which can be seen in the huge Roman station Roma Termini, for instance. Stations did not avoid the touch of socrealism, which welcomes travellers in Gdynia.
The decline of stations began when railway lost importance as a means of transport. This problem first emerged in the USA. Twenty years ago, the useless ruin of the gigantic Chicago station haunted the city. Gradually, stations are given new functions and most often become commercial and gastronomic facilities. Of course, they also house cinemas, multimedia conference rooms or even chapels.
 Poland is still waiting for it. Railway stations are the worst public buildings in the country – the Warsaw Cental Station looks like a huge shelter, Katowice Station is an example of dilapidated concrete brutalism. What it is like in Łódź, everyone can see.

Special Art Zone
The design of the New Centre of Łódź is much more than just the revitalisation of neglected railway and industrial areas. It is planned that in the next stages, the zone will extend and cover bigger and bigger areas, totally changing the character of districts and, as a result, it will transform the industrial Łódź into a city of culture. The great metamorphose is supposed to start at the old station. Here, the first symbolic shovel will be plunged and the new heart of Łódź will start beating. Has the place managed to store the latent, old energy which can now be used again? What is the Special Art Zone that is supposed to give the vibrating dynamics of the 19th-century station to the 21st-century city? Will it rise to the role of the new city gate? It will be the first building that visitors to the city will see. A new showcase of the new Łódź – the city of culture.

The Special Art Zone will not be a new museum of contemporary art. Łódź already has such a museum, one of the first institutions of this kind in Europe, and is rightly proud of it. The Special Art Zone is not supposed to duplicate any of the existing cultural institutions or to imitate any of the existing solutions.  It is going to be an art centre that dynamically reacts to social needs and combines exhibition functions with educational, creativity, and integration programmes animating the participation in culture. It will bind the artistic groups of Łódź, and attract common people to culture and art. Together with the successively opened institutions of the New Centre, it will play an active role in transforming Łódź into the city of culture.