Ki Yan Hung

Territorial context

This project began within the wider territory of Krzemionki, a limestone landscape shaped by extraction, industry, war, and ecological succession. Having passed through Austro-Hungarian rule, Nazi occupation, and the communist era of post-war Poland, the area retains layered cultural and spatial remnants, including remnants of film sets from Schindler’s List within Liban Quarry.

While other decommissioned quarries within and around Krzemionki, including Zakrzówek Quarry, have been transformed into nature reserves, cultural parks, and residential landscapes, Liban Quarry remains comparatively inaccessible despite its significant ecological and cultural value. 

The project explores how its evolving landscapes might support new forms of public, ecological, and commemorative engagement within contemporary Kraków.

Transition from Territorial Strategy to Site-Scale Design

Building on the Harmonising Krzemionki framework developed in Semester 1, the project later shifted toward a focused investigation of Liban Quarry.

Initial investigations identified a series of socioecological conflicts across southern Krzemionki, including tensions between remembrance and everyday recreation around the KL Płaszów memorial landscape, alongside wider pressures from tourism, urban development, and environmental change. These challenges were examined through an integrated reading of land use, ecological networks, biodiversity, and ecosystem services, considering how urban allotment gardens, community-run tree nursery, public green spaces, and emerging habitats collectively contribute to human wellbeing and environmental resilience. In response, the Harmonising Krzemionki transformative framework was developed in alignment with the Kraków Metropolis 2030 strategy, establishing strategic directions for green infrastructure, public green space provision, ecological connectivity, and the balance between commemoration, community life, and landscape regeneration.

In Semester 2, the project focused on Liban Quarry, critically reinterpreting its role within the wider framework and exploring alternative relationships between ecological succession, post-industrial heritage, and public engagement.

Walking-based fieldwork: Creative Making and Multisensory Engagement

Drawing on Krzemionki’s sedimentary geology and Kraków’s material histories, the work translates walking-based fieldwork into site-specific clay models and botanical soaps made from collected plant communities. Each set forms a named, descriptive assemblage linking ecology, materiality, and making. Beyond physical conditions and multisensory dimensions, the process expands the depth of fieldwork, where writing and design thinking emerge through making, extending walking into a generative, process-driven practice.

Planning with Imagery and Metaphor

Through repeated tracing and iterative planning studies, certain features of Liban Quarry began to suggest aspects of a violin when viewed in plan. The opposing curves of the quarry walls near the centre of the site, loosely resembling an S-shape and its reverse, together with the elongated entrance sequence and rear plateau, prompted an exploration of the instrument's anatomy as a way of reading and organising the site. Key locations within the quarry were associated with different parts of the violin, providing a loose spatial framework that informed the arrangement of routes, programmes, and landscape experiences.

This interpretation is further enriched by the cultural associations of the violin within Schindler's List, parts of which were filmed at Liban Quarry. In John Williams' score, the violin carries the film's iconic main theme, its solo voice emerging from the wider orchestral texture to convey themes of memory, loss, and remembrance. Referencing the instrument therefore extends beyond its suggestive resemblance to the quarry, introducing an additional layer of cultural and commemorative meaning that connects the site's industrial, cinematic, and memorial histories.

Tuning the Post-industrial Park: A Violin-Based Zoning Strategy (E–A–D–G) 

E String — Empathise
The E string corresponds to the area of the quarry worker graves, where the memorial garden is situated. This zone strengthens the site’s commemorative role by acknowledging both the quarry workers and victims of the Second World War associated with the quarry landscape, creating a space for reflection, remembrance, and quiet engagement with the site’s layered histories.

A String — Archive
The A string extends from the foreman’s building to the chimney and forge, preserving and revealing key industrial structures within the quarry. This zone communicates the site’s industrial heritage through the conservation, adaptation, and interpretation of surviving buildings, allowing visitors to engage with the material traces of extraction and production.

D String — Discover
The D string creates opportunities for exploration and embodied engagement throughout the quarry. Through quarry-inspired play elements, interpretive features, and moments of anticipation, visitors are encouraged to discover the site’s industrial legacies, material qualities, and evolving landscape character through movement and interaction.

G String — Gather
The G string brings together social gathering and water gathering within a shared landscape setting. Surface runoff is collected and directed towards a climate-responsive dry deck fountain, where water management becomes part of the visitor experience. Adjacent picnic spaces, lookout platforms, and an inclusive boardwalk network create opportunities for meeting, resting, and observing the quarry from different elevations. Positioned between woodland and quarry, this zone acts as a social heart of the park, connecting people, landscape, and environmental processes through everyday use.

Detailed Design

Walking Dry Stone Wall

Inspired by Andy Goldsworthy’s Taking a Wall for a Walk and Walking Wall, the dry stone wall reinterprets limestone as a dynamic landscape element. Extending from the main entrance into the park alongside step access, it guides visitors through the first sequence of the post-industrial landscape and towards further exploration of the quarry.

By transforming an existing mortared wall into a dry stone structure, the intervention symbolically liberates limestone from fixed industrial form and reconnects it with natural processes. Set against the vertical brick chimney and former foreman’s building, the flowing wall highlights the contrast between stone and industry, while suggesting a metaphorical return of extracted material to the quarry landscape.

Placeful and Climate-Responsive Interventions

Drawing on the industrial heritage and spatial character of Liban Quarry, a series of interventions support comfort, social interaction, play, and environmental performance within the post-industrial park.

Solar pergolas provide shaded resting spaces and passive thermal comfort, while a solar-powered dry deck fountain offers evaporative cooling and interactive engagement during periods of hot weather. Quarry-inspired seating, timber play elements, and picnic furniture encourage everyday occupation and social gathering, extending the site's industrial language into contemporary landscape experiences.

The rain garden follows the presumed alignment of former quarry railway tracks, recalling the site's industrial history while functioning as part of the sustainable drainage strategy. Surface runoff is filtered and directed towards an underground storage tank beneath the fountain, enabling seasonal water reuse and supporting the park's climate adaptation objectives.

Resonant Trio: Three Ecological Routes in the Living Basin

The violin metaphor is extended into the living basin through three ecological routes that guide movement while responding to the site's evolving successional landscape.

The Salix Route follows the wetter areas of the quarry basin, reinforcing existing willow-dominated habitats. Existing Salix stands are retained and managed through coppicing and pollarding to enhance habitat diversity and ecological resilience. A living willow tunnel provides a low-disturbance structure for visitors to experience sensitive pond habitats, allowing closer engagement with wildlife while minimising impacts on amphibians, odonata, and other species associated with these habitats.

The Birch Route follows areas of the quarry basin where Betula species have established through natural succession. Strengthening these existing woodland conditions, the route supports the continued development of pioneer woodland communities while responding to periodically wet ground influenced by nearby pond habitats. Movement through the birch landscape reveals the evolving relationship between woodland succession, water, and ecological change within the basin.

The Conifer Route introduces structured evergreen planting within selected areas of the basin, complementing existing successional habitats while adding a distinct woodland character. Providing year-round structure, shelter, and seasonal continuity, the route supports habitat diversity and strengthens the spatial identity of the living basin.

Instead of prescribing a fixed ecological end state, the three routes work with existing processes of succession and natural regeneration. Each offers a distinct encounter with the quarry landscape while contributing to its long-term ecological development and environmental learning.

Design Through Making: Walking the Quarry — An Embodied Exploration of Quarry Geometries through 1:50 Physical Models

Fragile quarry remnants within the former extraction zone remain unsafe and largely inaccessible. Through detailed site measurement, digital modelling, and 1:50 physical model making, key structures and industrial traces were documented, analysed, and reinterpreted as part of the design process.

The 1:50 models bring together two complementary design approaches. The walking dry stone wall expresses the movement and transformation of limestone within the quarry landscape, while timber play features, park furniture, and climate-responsive fountain elements reinterpret the geometries of inaccessible quarry structures at a human scale. These interventions transform industrial legacies into spaces for movement, pause, exploration, and social encounter.

Note: Limestone gravel representing the walking wall is intentionally exaggerated in scale to emphasise material movement and texture. Quarry structures and proposed interventions are shown as 1:50 3D-printed models. A commercially available child scale figure is included solely to illustrate spatial scale and embodied experience.