Port of Gdansk - grand and beautiful

02.06.2014

The Port of Gdansk, which for generations has provided livelihoods to thousands of families in the region of Pomerania, has also become an important part of their everyday visual experience thanks to its technical infrastructure. Throughout the centuries, its location has shifted from the centre of the historic Gdansk Old Town towards the deep waters of the Gulf of Gdansk, where new terminals, storage facilities and buildings have spurred the development of new districts of Gdansk, with the intertwined port facilities and urban landscapes. The austere and simple industrial landscape has dominated the public spaces.

The vast area of land allocated under the 1996 Act on Harbours and Sea Ports included more than 3.5 thousand of hectares of land under the port management, situated between the Baltic coast and the Dead Vistula river and stretched from Gorki Zachodnie to the canal estuary in Nowy Port. However, the Port of Gdansk is currently utilizing only part of that land.

The new composition of the PGA SA Board of Directors commenced their work on 15 July 2013. As a follow-up to one of its initiatives, numerous meetings were held over the last few months, gathering representatives of the Port of Gdansk, the City of Gdansk and the local universities invited to contribute their ideas and expertise. The concept began to take definitive shape with a jointly developed project under the working title "Visual enhancement of the Port of Gdansk". Several dozens of art, design and architecture students were invited to join the project. The first outcomes of this cooperation have been presented as a timeline of events on the port website www.portgdansk.pl/visual-enhancement.

On 2 June 2014, an agreement was signed that will have a significant impact on the future of the port and the city of Gdansk. The Partnership Agreement regarding joint implementation of the project entitled "Visual Enhancement of the Port of Gdansk" was signed by: Pawel Adamowicz - Mayor of the City of Gdansk, Dorota Raben - PGA SA President of the Board, Marek Pietruszewski - PGA SA Vice President of the Board, Professor Antoni Taraszkiewicz (PhD, DSc, Eng Arch) - Dean of the Faculty of Architecture of the Gdansk University of Technology, Professor Krzysztof Gliszczynski - Pro-Rector of the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk and Professor Teresa Martyniuk (PhD, DSc) - Rector of the Sopot University of Applied Science. The parties confirmed that the valuable advantage of the Agreement is the involvement of students from the partnering universities working together towards the implementation of the project. Phase I of the Project will close with selecting the best conceptual designs presenting the visual enhancement of the port and city spaces, which will open up the humanisation of the port landscape. The Agreement, which was signed on Monday, is the culmination of the preceding efforts and activities that came in the wake of direct discussions held by the parties involved in the project. The complex and extensive nature of the Project required a great deal of preparations, presentations and inventories of buildings and structures, as well as photographic and video documentation and workshop pictures to be provided during the academic year. The first effects include a scale model of the designated area of the port grounds and its electronic rendition. The designs prepared by students will be assessed by the competition board comprised of members representing the Port of Gdansk, the City of Gdansk and the three partnering universities. The results of the competition will be announced at the turn of June and July of this year. Further details regarding the place and date of announcing the results, the exhibition of works entered for the competition and the implementation of the "Visual enhancement of the Port of Gdansk" project will be available at the project implementation website.

- The area of land designated for Phase I of the "Visual Enhancement of the Port of Gdansk" project - as emphasized during the signing ceremony - is highly diversified in terms of their current operational use, visual appearance and degree of development. Therefore, the implementation of the Project will be further enhanced by the involvement of participants representing a wide variety of emotions, experience and age. We greatly hope for an innovative and fresh approach.

Janusz Kasprowicz
PGA SA PR Officer