An anchor interior was created in Poznań for a man who spends more time at sea than at home. Vague references to distant coffee fields and the hull of a boat passing through the fog give the impression of living in a landscape.
Hermann Joseph Stübben, while drawing the Sołacz project – a villa settlement in Poznań, did he notice a bird with its beak pointing west, which perched on the drawing? The yellowed Bebauungsplan, that is, the development plan for the area around the Sołackie ponds, dates back to the first decade of the 20th century. Despite the multitude of lines, numbers and plots, it is easy to discern the outlines of the beak, the full belly, lowered wings and raised tail, and even the soft shape of the digestive system, on which consists of green spaces, ponds and the Bogdanka stream. The Ringstrasse runs through the middle of the plan, from north to south. This layout of the streets around the city center is also a project of Stübben, who for several years was chairman of the royal commission for the development of the city. The construction of the Ringstrasse meant the demolition of the fortifications (as Poznań had the status of a fortress) and the possibility of incorporating neighboring villages into the city. But was a serious German professor of architecture and town planning, who made such a contribution to the present capital of Wielkopolska, also an amateur ornithologist? In any case, he made sure that nature was important in Poznań. Today, Sołacki Park is inhabited by greenfinches, nuthatches, ducks, siskins, piglets, tits and fares. This last species could serve as a model for the Stübben estate. By the way, the concept of a country settlement evokes no less sympathy than, for example, a city on a condor plan (cf. urban planning of Brasilia).
Green and blue ecosystem
The northern part of the Stübben project was completed before the First World War, as we read in the guide “Wielokulturowy Sołacz” by Grażyna Banaszkiewicz and Anna Wachowska-Kucharska, published by the Poznań City Development Foundation. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, many European cities built satellite and green neighborhoods meant to combine the advantages of urban and rural living, and the culmination of these trends was the reformist concept of the garden city of Ebenezer Howard.
Fair 13/2022
(100204) of December 12, 2022; home and interior; p.70
Original title of the text: “90 kilograms of sun”
