New York has the Museum of Modern Art, London has the Tate Modern, Paris has the Centre Georges Pompidou. Starting on 25 October 2024, Warsaw also has its Museum of Modern Art. It took the capital city nearly a quarter of a century to get there.
More than 100 events – from concerts of stars to performances, from the presentation of works from the museum’s collection to works commissioned from esteemed artists especially for the opening of the building, from the special edition of the Warsaw Under Construction festival to the publication of books and albums – the programme of the opening of the Museum of Modern Art (Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej, MSN) building in Warsaw is full of diverse attractions. It can be said in all probability that some of the young participants in these events were not yet born when the history of this institution and its premises began.
The Museum of Modern Art was born officially and on paper almost a quarter of a century ago. On 15 March 2005, on Parade Square (Plac Defilad), on the site where the white edifice of the Museum of Modern Art stands today, the minister of culture, Waldemar Dąbrowski, and Warsaw mayor Lech Kaczyński signed an agreement on the construction of the Museum of Modern Art at the foot of the Palace of Culture and Science. The programme council and the board of trustees of the new institution were established shortly thereafter. On 15 December of the same year, an international architectural competition was announced for the design of a building in this exceptionally prestigious and exposed location. Its lifespan, however, was short. It soon became apparent that Polish regulations were not keeping up with ambitions: foreign architectural celebrities who wanted to take part in the competition were unable to meet the formal conditions. Ewa Porębska, the then editor-in-chief of Architektura-murator magazine recalled:
An anecdote still circulates among architects to this day that the world-famous designer Zaha Hadid was not admitted to the first competition for the Museum of Contemporary Art, announced on 15 December 2005, because she did not submit a certificate of no criminal record…
The competition was quickly cancelled. However, this false start and scandal also had its advantages: it accelerated the process of changing the regulations and taught the Polish authorities and institutions how to organise international architectural competitions, thanks to which Poland today functions excellently in the world architectural circuit, and many buildings drawn by foreigners have been constructed in our country.
The second competition was announced in the summer of 2006. Although many architects decided to boycott after the failure of the first competition, the jury received as many as 109 projects for evaluation. The jury (which, apart from the Polish experts, also included Daniel Libeskind; Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Gallery; and Deyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum in London) announced the results on 18 February: the first prize went to a project by the Swiss architect Christian Kerez, who was unknown in Poland.
Rendering of Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw designed by AIA Architects & Jarosław Kozakiewicz, photo: organiser’s press materials
Three days later, the then director of the MSN, Tadeusz Zielniewicz, resigned from his post. The reason for this was his disagreement with the verdict of the jury (on which he himself sat); Zielniewicz called for a boycott of the competition results and for the work recognised by the jury – namely, the design of the Polish-Finnish team AIA Architects, Grupa 5 Architekci and Jarosław Kozakiewicz – to be implemented. However, the architectural community considered it inappropriate to negate the results of a properly conducted competition. An open letter signed by more than two hundred people said:
It is astonishing that a person who sat on the jury and for a few days had been endorsing its democratic choice is now discrediting this choice, arbitrarily naming a winner and calling for a mass movement against the awarded project.
Picture display
standardowy (864px desktop)
Rendering of Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw designed by AIA Architects & Jarosław Kozakiewicz, photo: organiser’s press materials
Picture image
175_muzeum_sztuki_nowoczesnej_w_warszawie_zajawka_copy.jpg
However, it was not the departure of the director that caused the nationwide discussion but the form and shape of the chosen design. Christian Kerez proposed an austere, minimalist structure of concrete, orthodoxically simple and devoid of the architectural ‘effects’ that were expected, as it turned out, by the public. Indeed, the competition’s guidelines stated that the MSN building was to become ‘a counterpoint to the Palace of Culture, and its structure a globally recognisable new symbol of Warsaw’. The Swiss architect, meanwhile, designed an anti-icon or, as the project was quickly hailed, a ‘grey box’. Kerez admitted that there was no point in competing with the silhouette of the Palace of Culture and Science, which was far too expressive to try to ‘drown it out’. So he proposed an austere concrete structure, like so many buildings in Switzerland today. It turned out, however, that while this kind of minimalism might work on Alpine pastures, it would not work in the centre of a European capital hungering for its own architectural icon.
Picture display
standardowy (864px desktop)
Rendering of Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw designed by Christian Kerez, photo: MSN press materials
Picture image
wizualizacja_christian_kerez_msn.jpeg
The controversies throughout Poland caused by this project were bluntly commented on by Dorota Jarecka in Gazeta Wyborcza in 2007:
No building could heal all these wounds, but I think Kerez’s cool, neutral, ‘null’ architecture may have further embittered wounded Polish souls. Kerez has designed a building that does not emphasise anyone’s uniqueness: the place, the country, the nation or the group of people who make up this museum. It does not emphasise the messianic idea of bringing about great change in the lives of Poles through art. It says the opposite – there is nothing special about the fact that a modern country is putting up a modern art museum in a modern city. Could we have been more offended?
Museum under construction
Picture display
standardowy (864px desktop)
Rendering of Museum of Modern Art building in Warsaw designed by Christian Kerez, photo: MSN press materials
Picture image
christian_kerez_msn_wizualizacja.jpeg
Did these extreme opinions and the great emotions generated by the Swiss project determine its future? From today’s perspective, the events of the following years can be interpreted in this way. Despite the controversy, work got underway and for almost five years it seemed that the edifice would be built, although the road towards this end was extremely bumpy. The city had great trouble acquiring land for the construction (Parade Square was the site of innumerable claims, and those times were exceptionally full of re-privatisation processes), Kerez also had to design additional space for a theatre in the building (which was not part of the competition requirements), and there were difficulties in preparing the technical documentation (the museum was to be built over a subway excavation)… In the spring of 2012, the Warsaw authorities finally announced that they were terminating the contract with the Swiss architect and that his project would not be realised. The decision was made by the capital’s city hall because, although until 2022 the Museum of Modern Art was co-managed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and the City of Warsaw (as of 2023 the Museum of Modern Art is now only under the custody of the local government), it was the capital city authorities that were responsible for the construction of the institution’s headquarters.
It is worth mentioning that, during the perturbations concerning the building, the Museum of Modern Art existed and functioned as an institution creating a collection, organising exhibitions and events, publishing books, and so on.
Emilia Furniture Store, photo: Bartosz Stawiarski / Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw
It was initially housed in a tiny temporary building on Pańska Street until 2012, when it was given a striking 1960s modernist glass pavilion formerly belonging to Emilia Furniture Store. This, however, having been sold to a developer, was designated for demolition. Thus, in March 2017, the Museum of Modern Art inaugurated the activities of its next temporary headquarters – in an exhibition pavilion designed by Austrian architect Adolf Krischanitz and erected on the banks of the Vistula River in the vicinity of the Copernicus Science Centre, near the Vistula boulevards which were in the process of being rebuilt. The museum operated there until 2024. And although the MSN is moving to its final location, the pavilion on the Vistula will not disappear – it will be a branch of the museum dealing with dance and the performing arts.
The next stage of construction of the building on Parade Square began in 2013. Another, third architectural competition for the design of the museum and theatre building was abandoned (because it was already clear that the MSN would be joined by the headquarters of TR Warszawa [Warsaw Variety Theatre], then managed by Grzegorz Jarzyna).
Picture display
standardowy (864px desktop)
Rendering of designs for MSN & TR Warszawa buildings on Parade Square in Warsaw designed by Thomas Phifer, photo: MSN press materials
Picture image
msn_i_tr_warszawa_01.jpg
The investor resorted to the less frequently practised negotiated procedure with publication. As representatives of the Museum of Modern Art explained at the time:
Learning from […] experience and taking special circumstances into account, the museum together with the theatre, in agreement with the City of Warsaw and the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, decided to carry out selecting the architect according to the procedure defined in the Public Procurement Law as negotiated procedure with publication. This is a two-stage procedure. All those interested in participating in the procedure must meet precisely defined admission conditions, scored according to a grading scale. The scale of the investment, involving the design of a building complex for two cultural institutions with complex functional programmes, as well as the extremely difficult location, are factors that increase the risk of the project’s failing. Only architectural teams with a proven track record of designing significant cultural facilities and supervising significant investments would be admitted to the second stage of the procedure. In this stage, a commission would evaluate the design solutions proposed by the architects. The conceptual aspect of the future ensemble of the museum and theatre buildings would be only one of the evaluated elements of the architects’ offer, and this was the difference between the selected procedure and traditional architectural competitions.
Picture display
standardowy (864px desktop)
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, photo: Marta Ejsmont
Picture image
mns_budynek_123.jpg
A new design was selected through this process. Its author was the American architect Thomas Phifer, who has designed several cultural centres, academic buildings and public buildings in the United States. The American also designed a complex austere in its simplicity, consisting of two buildings. On the side of Marszałkowska Street, he proposed the construction of a white, horizontal cuboid for the museum, while on the side of the Palace of Culture he drew a black cube similar in form to a cuboid for the theatre. Between the buildings he stretched a canopy to create a walkway, a public space also suitable for outdoor events. Work began on 3 June 2019. The white MSN building was to be built first, while the construction of the theatre’s headquarters was postponed.
Picture display
standardowy (864px desktop)
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, photo: Marta Ejsmont
Picture image
msn_2322.jpg
The MSN edifice designed by Phifer has two floors underground and four above ground level. It stands on 131 concrete piles and rests in part on the vaulted tunnel of the first metro line. It was punctuated with irregularly spaced windows, which not only illuminate the interiors and dynamize the austere structure but also frame views of the centre of Warsaw for the museum’s visitors. The museum’s exhibition spaces are located on the first and second floors around a centrally located, open (and very photogenic) staircase illuminated by a skylight in the roof.
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, photo: Marta Ejsmont
The glassed-in ground floor of the building, accessible from several sides, was conceived as a public space open to the city, attracting not only visitors (there will be a bookshop, café, auditorium, etc.). The building’s horizontal silhouette is counterbalanced by a slender tower at its northern corner, which houses the entrance to the cinema on an underground level. A new street (named after Wojciech Fangor) has been laid out along the building’s northern façade, and a spiral ramp has been located there, which will be used to access the basement by vehicles – for example, to deliver works of art.
Picture display
standardowy (864px desktop)
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, photo: Marta Ejsmont
The building is entirely white. The architectural concrete used for its façade stands out distinctly in colour from the surroundings of the predominantly greyish buildings of the centre of Warsaw. As can be read on the museum’s website:
The building’s characteristic white concrete façade, the execution of which was overseen by highly skilled local professionals, expresses the ethos of the institution itself, as well as enduringly and timelessly integrating the mass of the building into the surrounding space.
We have also heard more than once that the austere, cuboidal structure is meant to be like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle that complements the city centre rather than dominating it. So there are many similarities here to the vision of Christian Kerez, who also drew a concrete ‘box’ on Parade Square. However, thanks to its colour, the resulting building, unlike Kerez’s design, is visible from many places and attracts attention.
During the design work on the museum’s building in the summer of 2017, Warsaw’s authorities announced another competition: for the design of the public space of the Central Square, a fragment separated from Parade Square located between the main entrance to the Palace of Culture and Science and Marszałkowska Street. The competition requirements stated:
The competition design must take into account the national, regional and local dimensions of the future square as an attractive place for a variety of activities: from simply passing through the square, to spending time by individuals, to mass events. An important element of the competition’s task is to find the right relationship between providing convenient conditions for future use and taking into account the heritage of the history of the place. In the opinion of many residents, Central Square, planned at the beginning of the 21st century as a large open space, should not be deprived of greenery.
Picture display
standardowy (864px desktop)
Central Square in Warsaw, rendering, photo: Office of the Capital City of Warsaw
Picture image
plac_centralny_.jpg
The competition was won by the proposal from the A-A Collective team, and Central Square, according to their design, is expected to be ready by the end of 2024. The green area – where lawns and flooring are to be composed in the pattern of the grid of the pre-war streets that ran through the site – will complete the public space next to the white museum building. The square is to merge the surroundings of the Palace of Culture, the museum and Marszałkowska Street – an environment so far still dominated by car traffic and a wide transit artery dissecting the city, inappropriate for the character of a city centre, which makes it difficult to create a real user-friendly centre here.
Picture display
standardowy (864px desktop)
View of Palace of Culture & Science & headquarters of Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, photo: Rafał Guz / PAP
Picture image
_plac_defilad_z_lotu_pap_20240421_1bt.jpg
Will the creation of the MSN building break the curse that has clearly been hanging over the surroundings of the Palace of Culture and Science for over 70 years? After all, many attempts have been made to develop this vast area, designs were drawn up for townhouses and skyscrapers, there was an amusement park, a bazaar, tin-roofed market halls and papal masses – but nothing has made it possible to create an inner-city space worthy of a European capital. The Museum of Modern Art building itself cannot achieve this either. On the contrary, since it was built, the space between the Palace of Culture and Science and the buildings of the Eastern Wall (Ściana Wschodnia: a row of stores along Marszałkowska Street built in the 1960s and considered at the time to be the height of modernity, ed) has become an even more dramatic breach in the fabric of the city. After all, the MSN has only taken up part of the square. The rest is still a combination of concrete bays, wild car parks, bus stops for long-distance transportation and food-truck depots located on an absurdly wide street. And there are no signs that the situation is about to change because, although the MSN will be pompously opened, photographed and described in the media, no one has any idea what to do with the rest of the former Parade Square. There is no coherent vision for the development or a concept for continuing the frontage of Marszałkowska Street initiated by the MSN. We have been given an interesting jigsaw puzzle, albeit one that evokes extreme opinions, but there are still many pieces missing from the whole.
Translated by Patryk Grabowski
