When I took over the construction of the Grand Theatre in Lodz, which had been dragging on for more than a decade, I made \u2013 with the support of only the theatre\u2019s general director \u2013 the difficult and risky decision to accept the building and the stage equipment with defects and omissions that, for various reasons and despite considerable help from the theatre, the contractors had been unable to remedy. At the same time, I undertook to have the defects and omissions remedied, and to design and build additional equipment not covered by the existing designs but essential for the theatre to function properly, using technical teams organised by the Grand Theatre in Lodz itself. Despite many difficulties, we succeeded and opened the theatre on schedule. We opened what was then \u2013 and perhaps still is \u2013 the best theatre in terms of functionality, a theatre designed entirely by Polish engineers and built by Polish companies. It is the theatre where great Polish theatre technology began. Our unconventional way of completing the construction, and especially the work of the theatre\u2019s technical teams, became widely known in Poland, and people came to believe that it was possible to build well and quickly. Directors, technical managers, stage directors and set designers from almost all theatres, philharmonics and large cultural centres came to Lodz for the demonstrations of the equipment held on the theatre\u2019s opening day and on later dates. The demonstrations were followed by discussions on the construction of cultural venues in Poland, which almost always ended with a proposal to set up a company that would handle the design of buildings and equipment and their delivery from start to finish. I was repeatedly encouraged to set up such a company, but although it was my dream, I did not let myself be persuaded to embark on such an adventure, because I had other plans at the time. In short, the idea of setting up a company dedicated to the comprehensive design and delivery of cultural venues should be considered a \u201ccollective\u201d one.<\/p>\n
![\"P\u00f3\u0142](\"https:\/\/teatr.com.pl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/50-lat-baner-1b.jpg\")
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How the company was created.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n In 1970, I accepted the proposal of Danuta Baduszkowa, director of the Musical Theatre in Gdynia, and of the authorities of the Coast region to set up and head the newly established Directorate for the Construction of Cultural Venues. The first project was to be the Musical Theatre in Gdynia. I knew the design of the building, because I had reviewed it earlier, and I knew that it was not suitable for a professional, modern musical theatre. I knew there was no money for the construction and that some of the authorities were opposed to building a theatre that wanted to stage Western musicals. But I also knew that the building was to stand in an attractive location at the foot of Kamienna Gora, that it was beautiful and designed by excellent architects \u2013 Dawid Ol\u0119dzki, Eng., and Prof. J\u00f3zef Chmiel \u2013 but that it was too small and had to be enlarged. I also knew that enlarging it would only be possible in a way that could be described, to put it mildly, as \u201cunconventional\u201d. Danuta Baduszkowa and I agreed that we would accept the existing design only in order to start the construction, which had been postponed for many years, and that we would build a building that met the needs of a modern musical theatre. There were no problems with approving the design, because the approval committee met during the December 1970 events, on the very day the building of the Provincial Committee of the Polish United Workers\u2019 Party in Gdansk was burning, and representatives of the Ministry of Culture and many representatives of the provincial authorities \u2013 including opponents of the theatre \u2013 did not attend. The construction and \u201cenlargement\u201d of the building, on the other hand, was a long and risky operation, sometimes dangerous and sometimes amusing \u2013 as when a senior official, fortunately an intelligent man who supported the project, asked me after visiting the site whether we had perhaps got the scale wrong. We had \u2013 and instead of a building with a volume of about 40,000 m3<\/sup> we have built a building with a volume of more than 80,000 m3<\/sup>. The number of difficulties and the scale of the risk were fascinating, and they allowed me to deliver the project in a different way from how such investments had been carried out in Poland until then. I started construction without intermediaries, without a general contractor and without the involvement of municipal or provincial investment services, managing it myself and, of course, taking full responsibility for it. Then, unexpectedly, another obstacle appeared. At that time, the design of stage equipment in Poland was the monopoly of a single company \u2013 one of the Warsaw design offices. That office did not accept my deadlines or the scope of changes to the original approved design. To the horror of my superiors, I had to terminate the contract with them, which put at risk the start of construction of the Gdynia theatre and even threatened to remove the project from the plans for the coming years. I could not let down the people who had trusted me, especially Danuta Baduszkowa, so in 1971 I had to set up my own Specialist Design Team. And that was the beginning of today\u2019s anniversary celebrant. In short I'm kidding,<\/strong> that the idea of the enterprise \"theater\" was \"collective\", and arose due to \"competition\" , i.e. the Warsaw monopolist.<\/p>\n Initially, the group was supposed to design only a musical theater in Gdynia, but after the project was completed, I did not decide on it, because it turned out that we were very much needed in Poland. After the Gdynia project was completed, among other things, we designed the entertainment theater in Chorzow, the theater in Kielce, the television theater in Warsaw, updated the projects of the Opera Nova in Bydgoszcz, in which we completely redesigned the large stage from a stage with a non-functional rotating machine to a stage with hatches.<\/p>\n I had been interested in theatre and technology for many years, so I also knew theatres from behind the scenes. I knew how badly Polish theatre technology needed modernisation, but I only learned the scale of the needs in 1973, when I was working on the Advisory Committee on Theatre Buildings and Technical Equipment at the Ministry of Culture and Art. Of the 96 venues we inspected, only 31 were in good technical condition, while 65 were in poor or very poor condition. We prepared an assessment of their technical condition, which was meant to help the Ministry take decisions to improve their condition or prevent some venues from being closed. It was meant to \u2013 but it did not. More than a decade later, I was invited to take part in updating the assessment. I refused to waste time again on producing more paperwork; I preferred to spend my time on concrete action, and together with Prof. J\u00f3zef Chmiel and Daniel Ol\u0119dzki, Eng., we decided to extend the activities of the Specialist Design Team to include construction. And so, in 1988 (a year before Poland\u2019s change of political system), the Design Team was transformed into Przedsi\u0119biorstwo Specjalistyczne \u201cTEATR\u201d, consisting of Prof. J\u00f3zef Chmiel\u2019s Architectural Studio in Gdansk, Daniel Ol\u0119dzki\u2019s Architectural Studio in Sopot, and my own studio for the design and delivery of stage equipment, based in Zalesie Dolne. The company began its contracting activities straight away with very difficult tasks, including the reconstruction of the stage of the Grand Theatre in Poznan, the construction of the stage equipment for Opera Nova in Bydgoszcz and the modernisation of the stage equipment of the Drama Theatre in Omsk (Russia).<\/p>\n In the following years, the theater company also did not shy away from complex tasks, including rebuilding the stage of the Wroclaw Opera , the Musical Theater in Lodz, equipping the Pletuga Theater in Szczecin, the Horzyca Theater in Torun, the Polish Theater in Poznan, the Shakespeare Theater in Gdansk, the Jordanki Cultural and Congress Center in Torun, ICE Congress Center in Krakow, National Music Forum in Wroclaw.<\/p>\n We have invested a lot of effort in innovative solutions to bring Polish theater equipment closer to European standards, and so, for example, we developed and manufactured Poland's first automatic stage equipment with electromechanical drives, the first spiral-driven hatches, and equipped theaters with Poland's first digitally controlled voltage regulators.<\/p>\n One of the most serious problems of theaters was the lack of park lighting. There was a constant shortage of foreign currency to import from the West, and theaters were forced to buy equipment from the German Democratic Republic or, even worse, from the Soviet Union. In this situation, I decided to further expand the company's activities and initiated and managed the organization of the production of professional stage projectors under license from one of the best Western European companies of that time. We have produced several thousand projectors in Poland, not only for Polish theaters, but also for Western European theaters, and even in a special version for theaters in Japan.<\/p>\n In addition to design and implementation, we also tried to share our knowledge and experience by organizing symposia, trainings, equipment displays, responding to information about the latest achievements of the world's stage technology, and we also released the first electronic book on Theater Technology.<\/p>\n I believe that for half a century the \u201cTEATR\u201d company has served Polish cultural institutions well, but this was only possible thanks to wonderful, wise and talented people. For me, this is the most beautiful part of my memories. I wrote about some of them in the book dedicated to them, \u201cYears Pass, Theatres Remain\u201d. On the occasion of the anniversary, let me just recall that the most outstanding Polish specialists accepted my invitation to join the first Design Team: mechanical engineer Wilhelm Staszewski, acoustician Dr Witold Straszewicz, and Wies\u0142aw Kinderman, Eng., a versatile specialist in stage technology and the production of staging equipment. Sadly, none of them \u2013 nor our company\u2019s co-founders, the wonderful architects Prof. J\u00f3zef Chmiel and Daniel Ol\u0119dzki, Eng. \u2013 lived to see the anniversary. The team gradually grew, and we were joined by, among others, mechanical engineers Witold Ehlert and Miros\u0142aw \u0141ysik, and later the then still young mechanical engineer Ma\u0142gorzata Bober and Tomasz Zaborowski, Eng. \u2013 today Poland\u2019s best all-round specialist in stage technology, stage drives and stage lighting.<\/p>\n I have always had the happiness and honor of working with great people, and I am glad that my son Marek Guminski has had the same happiness, leading the company \"theater\" and further expanding its teams with great specialists in the field of technology and marketing, led by Pan Michal Fr\u0105ckowiak, in a great way and on an incredible scale for several years. It was under his leadership that the company built an impressive new headquarters, which included offices, a design studio, warehouses and a superbly equipped exhibition hall. It was under his leadership that the company established excellent cooperation with the world's leading manufacturers of technological equipment for theaters and other cultural objects.<\/p>\n On the occasion of this anniversary, I thank you and your wonderful colleagues for continuing your hard and honorable service to Polish cultural institutions and wish you further success and perseverance.<\/p>\n Jerzy Guminski<\/em><\/strong><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 27 marca 2021 roku Przedsi\u0119biorstwo Specjalistyczne \u201eTEATR\u201d, pierwsze polskie przedsi\u0119biorstwo zajmuj\u0105ce si\u0119 kompleksowo projektowaniem i realizacj\u0105 obiekt\u00f3w kultury obchodzi jubileusz pi\u0119\u0107dziesi\u0119ciolecia. Kiedy powsta\u0142 pomys\u0142 i jak powsta\u0142o przedsi\u0119biorstwo. Odbieraj\u0105c \u015blimacz\u0105c\u0105 si\u0119 od kilkunastu lat budow\u0119 Teatru Wielkiego w \u0141odzi przy wsparciu jedynie dyrektora naczelnego Teatru podj\u0105\u0142em trudn\u0105 i ryzykown\u0105 decyzj\u0119 odebrania gmachu i urz\u0105dze\u0144 technologicznych…<\/p>","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":5347,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bez-kategorii"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/teatr.com.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/teatr.com.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/teatr.com.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teatr.com.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teatr.com.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/teatr.com.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5353\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teatr.com.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/teatr.com.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teatr.com.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teatr.com.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"P\u00f3\u0142](\"https:\/\/teatr.com.pl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/mozaika-www1.jpg\")
<\/p>\n