Podróż do wnętrza miasta. Pierwsze wrażenia Franciszka Krzywdy-Polkowskiego z pobytu w mieście „drapaczów nieba”
Journey into the City: Franciszek Krzywda-Polkowski's First Impressions of His Stay in the City of "Skyscrapers"

Summary/Abstract: In January 1925 on the pages of the Cracow journal ‘Architekt’ an article by Franciszek Krzywda-Polkowski was published. In the text entitled Impressions of the sojourn in the country of ‘sky scrapers’ the author described his memories from New York, where he started to work in 1924 for the architects office McKim, Mead & White. Special attention should be paid to the initial description of the very first moments spent in the city. The modern way of perceiving the city space, fully performed by Franciszek Krzywda-Polkowski in the quoted fragments, is characterised by abandoning the panoramic (static) perspective, typical for realistic poetics, for the benefit of the pedestrian’s perspective, which is determined by movement, changes of view points and removing the distance to the experienced space. Attractiveness of Franciszek Krzywda-Polkowski’s text, which undoubtedly comes as a new quality in Polish writing about architecture, derives from a few coinciding elements: an up-to-date topic, which New York was at that time and the discussion on acceptable heights of buildings in a city; the author’s writing skills, his courage in applying modern form of narration; also the character of his stay in New York – he was a traveler who, glancing ‘from the outside’, is able to notice the every-day life of the place where we happen to be in a more penetrating way.

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