From Plato to Poland: Zamość & the Dream of Utopia
Everyone knows that Zamość is one of the world’s few embodiments of the popular Renaissance concept of an ideal city. But it wasn’t only in the Renaissance that the perfect model of human settlement was being sought after. Indeed, designing one has preoccupied architects to this day.
It’s hard to tell whether Jan Zamoyski, a grand chancellor of the crown and a great hetman of the crown in the Republic of Both Nations (Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth), became fascinated with the Renaissance concept of an ideal city while at university in Padua or, perhaps, during his studies in Paris and Strasbourg. We do know for sure, however, that in 1580, when he issued the charter for a new city – located near Skokówka, the seat of the Zamoyski family – he wished for the settlement to embody this ideal. The nobleman entrusted the design of the city to Bernardo Morando, an architect brought over from Italy (most likely from Padua).
Together, the architect and the founder developed the city’s concept, which Morando later translated into urban and architectural design. That’s how a fortified settlement, meant to accommodate up to 3,000 inhabitants, emerged basically from scratch. By virtue of its highly convenient location at the crossroads of key trade routes, King Stefan Batory granted Zamość many privileges, such as an exemption from customs, rent and taxes, as well as staple rights and the right to organise fairs, which allowed the city to flourish and become wealthier. Nowadays, we would likely deem unethical the behaviour of the king, who gave his most powerful ally and close associate so many advantages… Still, we owe the very existence of Zamość – as well as the fact that it became one of Poland’s few historic cities mentioned in every art history textbook worldwide – to this manifestation of self-interest.
Bird’s eye view of Zamość, photo: Kacper Kowalski / Forum
Jan Zamoyski and Bernardo Morando did indeed succeed at a project that in most cases existed on paper only. They brought to life a vision of an ideal city, a concept going back to Plato (according to whom a city should consist of a large, main public square surrounded by smaller sectors-districts). Hippodamus of Miletus, a Greek mathematician and urban planner living in the 6th century BCE, called, not unlike 20th-century modernists, for planning cities in such a way that certain districts served specific purposes: commercial, religious, residential, etc. Vitruvius, in his treatise Ten Books on Architecture (written between the years 20 BCE and 10 BCE), preached that cities ought to be founded on hills, on a circular plan, surrounded with walls, and with streets planned in such a way that they are protected from illness- or cold-bearing winds. The vicinity of rivers and fertile farmland was deemed advantageous as well.
Guided by Vitruvius’s treatise, Italian thinkers, artists and architects developed their own conception of an ideal city – città ideale. Among them were, for instance, Leonardo da Vinci, Giorgio Vasari and Filarete, a Florentine architect who designed Sforzinda – a utopian city that was never built but that inspired many later artists. Filarete outlined his project in the 1560s. Sforzinda was meant to be founded on a plan of an eight-pointed star (optimal for defence purposes), with a public square as the starting point for a geometrically spreading grid of streets. Key buildings – a town hall, a church, a castle – were supposed to tower over the rest. The ideal city was intended to be harmonious, orderly (subject to the rules of geometry), functional but also… beautiful. The authors of these concepts emphasised that a settlement devoid of beauty could never be a good place to live. The ideal city fascinated not only Italians – Albrecht Dürer himself also drew up plans, including an expansive square with an imposing structure of a town hall and four main avenues spreading from the square towards the four cardinal points.
Sforzinda, design of an ideal city, 1457, photo: Wikipedia
Zamość, whose building started in 1580, was founded on a polygonal plan. As a defence settlement, it was surrounded by walls with bastion fortifications. However, it was designed with diverse functions in mind. Zamość was intended to be home to its founder, Jan Zamoyski, as well as a cultural, academic and religious hub, a judicial seat, and a city of trade and craftsmanship. For this last purpose, the city plan included two additional market squares intended for trade and manufacturing activities.
At the centre of the city was the Great Market Square (Rynek Wielki) with a monumental town hall, recognisable thanks to its soaring, over 50-metre-tall tower and ornamental stairs. The remaining frontages of the Market Square boasted arcaded townhouses decorated with paintings and reliefs. Other key points on the map were a collegiate church (now a cathedral), the seat of the Zamoyski Academy (a cultural and academic centre) and the founder’s palace. These buildings were incorporated into the city in such a way that they formed a layout resembling a human figure (anthropomorphising was a key element of Renaissance culture). And so, the palace of Jan Zamoyski was meant to symbolise the head, the Academy and the cathedral stood for the heart and the lungs, the three market squares were the stomach, and the defence bastions were the arms and legs. The Zamość built by Bernardo Morando covered an area of 24 hectares, measuring 600 metres in length and 400 metres in width. It was not only a safe place but also a beautiful one, and its Renaissance ‘beauty and virtue’ were to be manifest not only in the form of the charming buildings. They were also supposed to be achieved through social harmony. This is why, from the very beginning, Zamość was home to churches and temples of many denominations, with Poles, Armenians, Greeks and Jews living side by side.
Plan of Zamość, 1708, photo: National Digital Library
Added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1992, the Old Town of Zamość is one of the few embodiments of the Renaissance concept of an ideal city. Another one is Pienza near Siena, rebuilt in the 15th century in the Renaissance fashion by Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II. However, due to its provincial character and intimate scale, the town constitutes more of a local curiosity than a model to be replicated.
View of Pienza, photo: Wolfgang Kaehler / LightRocket via Getty Images
In 1898, British urban planner Ebenezer Howard published a treatise titled Garden Cities of To-morrow, where he outlined the concept of a garden city, one in which his contemporaries could live in a healthy manner close to nature. We must remember that at the end of the 19th century, British and French cities were dominated by the fruit of the industrial revolution – factories, which not only polluted the environment to a terrifying degree but also attracted to the already overpopulated cities successive thousands of destitute people searching for work. Labourers in the 19th century lived in ghastly conditions, and the idea of a garden city, with its districts of small houses submerged in greenery, located in the vicinity of shops, schools and churches, was seen as a utopia. In subsequent ages, architects would reference Howard’s vision – as seen, for instance, in the design for the Katowice district of Giszowiec – but the overall concept of a garden city clearly belongs to the history of ideas.
Original ‘Garden City’ concept, designed by Ebenezer Howard, 1902, published in ‘The Garden City Utopia: A Critical Biography of Ebenezer Howard’ by Robert Beevers, Olivia Press, photo: Wikipedia
Modern ideal cities were designed with much more of a flourish. Ideas for such a city, which were as visionary as they were controversial, were designed, of course, by the ‘father of modern architecture’, Le Corbusier. In 1927, he wrote:
Modern life demands, and is waiting for, a new kind of plan, both for the house and for the city.
Two years earlier, he developed Plan Voisin de Paris, a vision for a radical – arousing strong emotions to this day – rebuilding of the French capital, involving a geometrical grid of wide streets with skyscrapers placed along them in neat rows. The year 1930 saw the emergence of the concept of Ville Radieuse, a city set on a plan resembling a geometrised human figure (that is, similar to Zamość!), with broad streets and tall residential buildings. Significant components of the city were greenery and sunshine (homes were supposed to stand far apart), and individual buildings were to be raised on poles and equipped with rooftop terraces. The capstone of Le Corbusier’s urban planning visions was The Athens Charter. Developed in 1993 by an international team of avant-garde architects led by Le Corbusier himself, it described the rules of planning and building modernist cities – and it would later be implemented in the form of, for instance, contemporary residential estates so well-known to us now.
Ville Radieuse, designed by Le Corbusier, photo: Wikipedia
A visionary design for a modernist city was successfully implemented in Brasilia, the new capital of Brazil, built from scratch between 1956 and 1960. The city’s urban plan, resembling the figure of a bird or an aeroplane, was developed by Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer. Broad avenues divide the city into different zones – a government district, an office district, a residential one, a commercial one, etc. What emphasises their prestige are monumental, grand buildings devoid of context (designed by Oscar Niemeyer). The city’s perfectly orderly laid out structure, large distances between buildings, underground passages (the wide streets were meant for cars; after all, basically no pedestrian traffic was planned for in Brasilia), enormous buildings and greenery filling the empty space between them – all these elements were meant to betoken modernity. However, they ended up making Brasilia a place particularly difficult to live in…
Brasilia, first plan of city, designed by Lucio Costa & Oscar Niemeyer; contemporary satellite image of Brasilia, photo: Uri Rosenheck / Wikipedia, NASA
Numerous experts claim that visions of ideal cities ought to stay on paper, since no ‘ideal’ imagined in advance could ever answer to the complexity of people’s needs. Nonetheless, architects and urban planners continue to dream of envisioning the best possible living space. The city being built since 2006 on the territory of the UAE in the Masdar desert (the design was developed in the studio of Norman Foster) is itself meant to produce energy and serve as a science hub while also offering perfect living conditions. Laid out on a geometrical grid of streets, it was supposed to be a self-sufficient, hyper-modern city of the future. So far, however, it is faced with multiple delays in construction and suffers from… a lack of inhabitants. A similar fate previously befell Ordos, built on the territory of Inner Mongolia in China between 2004 and 2006. Intended to accommodate as many as 1.5 million inhabitants, it was planned with a flourish: elegant public spaces, spectacular edifices for offices, businesses, museums and concert halls, as well as a great number of new flats in houses big and small designed by well-known architects – have all failed to attract the masses. Ordos is now referred to as a city of ghosts since it remains largely empty. Is this how ‘ideal’ visions are bound to meet their ends? Will Zamość remain the only embodiment of the concept of an ideal city that at the same time provides humans with hospitable living space?
Construction site in Masdar, United Arab Emirates, designed by Norman Foster, photo: Jan Seifert / Wikipedia
Translated from Polish by Anna Potoczny
