Wielki Means Great: Visual Story of the Teatr Wielki, Polish National Opera’s Building

Abstract

Subject of the article is the possibility of constructing humanities based on visuality, virtuality and digital techniques shown in example project Wielki means Great — the building of the Teatr Wielki – Polish National Opera in films and interactive resources.

Wielki means Great is an interdisciplinary project involving history, architecture and art. For the first time ever, the fascinating history of the Teatr Wielki — Polish National Opera’s building has been told through historical iconography, collected and turned into film especially for this purpose. Since March 2015 the project has been available on www.teatrwielki.pl/wirtualnyspacer.

As a result of several months of research conducted in several institutions, the author gathered hundreds of iconographies. Some of them had never been published, while some had been considered lost. The original drawings, paintings, prints, photographs, audio-visual recordings, documents, maps and plans were hiding unknown bits of information — precious traces of history. Discovering the past of a contemporary building through the analysis of iconography revealed many intriguing spatial relationships between present day form and the old layout of the Teatr Wielki. The visualization of the changes that had taken place in the building of the Teatr Wielki was made possible by modern technology. The Internet has been used as a tool for both data acquisition and presentation of the results.