WUC5. The Seduction of Place: The History and Future of Cities
WARSAW UNDER CONSTRUCTION 5
“To understand the city and to be able to work on it and with it, we need to see it as a concatenation of man-made, willed things – things that add up to a texture of places,” writes Professor Joseph Rykwert in "The Seduction of Place: The History and Future of Cities", the first of his titles to be published in Polish (forthcoming).
In it, he offers the diagnosis that the city “is in constant movement, at present in particularly violent movement. But in that process of change, we must not consider ourselves the passive flotsam which the impersonal swirling of great forces can toss about as it will. […] we can exercise our resistance as voters, as consumers, as agitators and as publicists.”
The discussion at the Museum of Modern Art will centre on the issue of prudent administration and management of the public space. For paradoxically, while Poland today has many talented architects, it has no culture of urban planning; it can boast superb artists and conservators, yet we are witnessing the degradation of the urban space, and conflicts are rife in the hearts of our major cities.
Joseph Rykwert
World-famous art historian and architectural critic, professor emeritus of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Born in Warsaw, he moved to England in 1939. He has lectured and taught at most of the prestigious universities the world over, and has written a number of books, all of which have been translated into several languages; in October 2013 the International Cultural Centre in Krakow is bringing out the first Polish translation of a book by Professor Rykwert: The Seduction of Place: The History and Future of Cities (Pokusa miejsca. Przeszłość i przyszłość miast).
Jacek Purchala
Art historian and economist, director of the International Cultural Centre in Krakow. Head of the departments of heritage at the Cracow University of Economics and at the city’s Jagiellonian University. His areas of specialisation are urban development, social history and art history over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and cultural heritage theory and preservation.