Jakub Botwina, Beata Fortuna-Antoszkiewicz, Jan Łukaszkiewicz
DOI: 10.21858/msr.51.04
Vol. no: 51
The area where the Culture and Recreation Park in Chorzów was established consisted primarily of degraded post-mining areas, spoil heaps, landfills, sinkholes and marshes. In 1950, due to the initiative of General Jerzy Ziętek, the governor of Silesia, it was decided to establish one of the largest urban parks in Europe on the border of Katowice, Chorzów and Siemianowice. The design was commissioned to Professor Władysław Niemirski of the Warsaw-Ursynów School of Landscape Architecture at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences. The implementation work began in 1951 and lasted for almost 20 years until 1968. The park’s programme was designed to offer a great variety of recreational and natural functions, making this project unique both in Poland and in Europe. Among the numerous attractions, several objects deserved special attention, such as the Amusement Park, the Silesian ZOO, the planetarium, an extensive water system and a forest zone. The modernity of the park can also be demonstrated in the diversity of its internal transport system with a wide walking promenade, numerous paths for pedestrians and cyclists, as well as a narrow-gauge railroad and a cable car, which provide access to the most distant parts of this nearly 600 ha area. Along the central axis of the park, a series of theme gardens were designed, and only some of these have been created. The most important of these, designed by Professor Edward Bartman, are the Rose Garden and Japanese Garden, which have beenonly partially completed. In the cooperation between the Department of Landscape Architecture, Warsaw University of Life Sciences and the Silesian Park, a comprehensive natural inventory and a series of pre-design analyses of the area were carried out between 2014–2016. The concept for the modernization of the Japanese Garden was developed in the next stage, followed by a construction project and a building permit. The work on the detailed documentation was completed in the autumn of 2016. The project was completed and commissioned in July 2021. In 2023, it won the internauts’ vote in the Public Space category of the Poland Architecture 2022 Poll. The paper presents the key results of the spatial analyses carried out, the programme, assumptions and methods, and selected design solutions related to the design and implementation of the Japanese Garden in the Culture and Recreation Park in Chorzów.