The city I chose to explore for project 2 is Torun, a city in northern Poland. Torun is well known for its cultural scene and advertises its tourism based upon its original gothic architecture (not reconstructed, as in most parts of Poland) and its famous gingerbread, which also has its roots in history. Its tourism and cultural ties are further advertised by its legal standing as a sister city to Philadelphia, USA – Torun even makes a point of naming certain streets with the names of these cities in order to honour their agreement.
To showcase the architectural culture of the city, I chose to use visual representations. Some of the more famous buildings in Torun create a baseline at the bottom of the poster and are labelled with small captions. They are displayed in the same order you would find them should you walk through the Old District. To give a sense of where these elements are located within the city, I used a series of maps. The first, a map of Poland, uses a small dot to show the location of Torun in the country. From there, a call-out brings a larger map of the municipal districts within the city (17 in total). The Old District, which is where all of the landmarks showcased at the bottom of the poster are located, is shaded a darker colour and labelled. Behind it is a map of the old district itself. Within this map, Philadelphia Boulevard is identified and, above it, there is a short explanation of the sister city tie between Torun and Philadelphia.
Just below the maps, a timeline of the famous gingerbread factory “Kopernik” is displayed on cut-outs in the shape of one of their most famous gingerbread products – ‘katarzynki’. The shape also calls to mind the Gingerbread Walk of Fame, which displays the names of actors, singers, and other artistic influences on similarly shaped metal plates. Below, a pie chart displays the ingredients used in their gingerbread, giving the ratio of each ingredient in order to make the perfect gingerbread. This recipe was passed down through the generations and has been used for nearly 250 years!
I imagined the poster to be 16x20” at full size, possibly to be used at Polish school open houses (in the Edmonton area we have three Polish heritage schools – two which operate on Saturday mornings and one that operates within the Catholic School District with a Polish language component). The poster could also be displayed at an International Heritage Language Association event, providing some historical and cultural information about Poland.
