Dom Machin (Scena Miniatura), Kraków

Dom Machin is the former eighteen ninety-three theatre power station behind Kraków’s Juliusz Słowacki Theatre, designed by Jan Zawiejski. Its villa-like exterior once concealed an engine room. Since nineteen seventy-six, the adapted protected building has housed Scena Miniatura, the theatre’s small stage, and forms part of Kraków’s Technical Trail.

Dom Machin, the former power house behind the Juliusz Słowacki Theatre, now contains Scena Miniatura, the theatre’s small performance space. Its story begins in eighteen ninety-three, when this was among Kraków’s earliest electricity plants. Jan Zawiejski, who also designed the main theatre building, designed this one.

The exterior was deliberately made to resemble a modest villa rather than an industrial shed. Inside were the engine room, motors and generators; the machinery came from Germany through the Czech firm of František Křižík. At the time, bringing art and machinery together was considered showy and improper, so the building’s polished outer form concealed a technical novelty.

A small chimney belonged to that carefully managed appearance. This power station fell silent in nineteen oh six, after the new municipal plant in Kazimierz could supply electricity across Kraków. The building was later converted, and on the twenty-seventh of March nineteen seventy-six it began a second career alongside the theatre’s main stage. Today it is a protected historic building and a stop on Kraków’s Technical Trail, created in two thousand six.